Archive for the ‘Twitter Tools’ Category

You think the iPad will be the only tablet we’ll talk about in 2010? Not even close. According to Arm’s worldwide mobile computing ODM manager Roy Chen, we can expect as many as 50 tablets before the year’s end.

“The first tablet devices will launch in the second quarter by [mobile network] carriers. You’ll see a lot more in the third quarter,” said Chen. He declined to name specific companies that will launch the tablets, but he did say some of the top 10 telecoms will launch a tablet. Arm also displayed a taste of what’s to come at the Taipei news conference, showcasing two tablets running Android.

As a company that creates chips for many of these tablets, Arm must have a good idea about the number of devices we’re likely to see this year. Still, fifty sounds like a lot. iPad generated a lot of buzz, and it may have even created an entirely new market. If iPad is destined to fail, however, it’ll probably take most of these new tablets with it.

Tags: arm, Tablet

We’ve seen many, many iterations of the popular tower defense games over the years, but this one has a special meaning for all you Twitter fans out there.

Based on a tried and true concept, Tweet Defense is an iPhone game that lets you fight zombies with various tower defense units, but with a social twist: it grabs your various Twitter stats – number of followers, friends and tweets – and calculates bonuses to your defense based on them. It’s like an infinite time sink which connects two enormous time wasters – Twitter and tower defense. In other words, it’s beautiful.

Get Tweet Defense for $0.99 from the App Store.

Tags: iphone, tweet defense, twitter

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting story about the absence of certain iPhone apps – Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos – on the iPad.

It seems that these apps, when scaled up to iPad’s bigger screen, simply didn’t look good enough to Steve Jobs, so he decided to scrap them. Writes Gruber:

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps.”

If true, it would be a pity, because these are quite basic, no brainer apps that everyone uses, especially Clock, Calculator, and the Weather. On the other hand, if these simple apps don’t look good enough scaled up, how will all those thousands of third party apps look? As far as apps go, the iPad experience (at least in the beginning) might turn out to be something that Apple otherwise struggles to avoid: good enough, but far from perfect.

Tags: apple, ipad, iphone