http://daveday.me

Dim UK Tabloids Report Ghost App Prank

7:36 am, March 5th, 2010, Giles Turnbull

Ahh, bless ‘em. The hacks at The Sun aren’t famous for hard-hitting investigative journalism, but at least you’d expect them to know an iPhone app when they see one.

A couple of weeks ago a builder fooled them (and the Daily Mail) into believing that he’d taken a photo of a ghostly boy on a building site in Hull.

But as the internet pointed out shortly afterwards, anyone can make the exact same ghostly figure appear pretty much anywhere they like, thanks to the Ghost Capture app for iPhone.

Even funnier are some of the comments posted under the stories. On the Daily Mail’s version, for example, Mel from Stroud says:

“i am mildly psychic and i snese this boy was evacualted from the war,his father died,his mother died of old age,he lives with an old couple and this used to be his school,hopes this helps everyone”

(To be honest, I don’t think for a minute that the journalists at either paper actually believed that the photo was real, and they probably did instantly work out where it came from. But The Sun’s purpose is to entertain as much as it is to inform – so they wrote it up in all innocent seriousness, knowing that readers with a clue would be in on the joke. And that some readers would fall for it.)

(Via Macenstein, Know Your Mobile, Tabloid Watch, and half the rest of the internet.)

Posted by Giles Turnbull in Humor, News, iPhone, iPhone Apps | Comment on this article

If you enjoyed this article:
Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter

The iPad . . . ideal for keeping your lap warm. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters

A star appears over San Francisco and a new gizmo is born. The iPad! At first glance it resembles an iPhone in unhandy, non-pocket-sized form. But look a little longer, and . . Nope. You were right first time.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it's taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren't really asking.

It's an iPhone for people who can't be arsed holding an iPhone up to their face. A slightly-further-away iPhone that keeps your lap warm. A weird combination of portable and cumbersome: too small to replace your desktop, too big to fit in your pocket, unless you're a clown. It can play video, but really – do you want to spend hours staring at a movie in your lap? Sit through Lord of the Rings and you'd need an osteopath to punch the crick out of your neck afterwards. It can also be used as an ebook, something newspapers are understandably keen to play up, but because it's got an illuminated display rather than a fancy non-backlight "digital ink" ebook screen, it'll probably leave your eyes feeling strained, as though your pupils are wearing tight shoes.

The iPad falls between two stools – not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world. Or rather it would be, were it not for one crucial factor: it looks ideal for idly browsing the web while watching telly. And I suspect that's what it'll largely be used for. Millions of people watch TV while checking their emails: it's a perfect match for them.

Absurdly, Apple keeps trying to pretend it'll make your life more efficient. Come off it. It's an oblong that lights up. I'm sick of being pitched to like I'm a one-man corporation undertaking a personal productivity audit anyway. I don't want to hear how the iPad is going to make my life simpler. I want to hear how it'll amuse and distract me; how it plans to anaesthetise me into a numb, trancelike state. Call it the iDawdler and aggressively market it as the world's first utterly dedicated timewasting device: an electronic sedative to rival diazepam, alcohol or television. If Apple can convince us of that, it's got itself a hit.

Some people are complaining because it doesn't have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn't mean it has to be done. It's technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they'd whine that it didn't have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

And don't bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it'd be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm's length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you'd end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another's others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It's like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.)

Personally, I'm not sure whether I'll buy an iPad, although I think – I think – I'm about to buy a MacBook. Yes, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mac sceptic for years. Yes, I've written screeds bemoaning the infuriating breed of smug Apple monks who treat all PC owners with condescending pity. But being chained to a Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I'd rather use a laptop that just works, rather than one that's so ponderous, stuttering and irritating I find myself perpetually on the verge of running outside and hurling it into traffic. (That's a moan about Sony laptops, not PCs in general, by the way. I'm keeping my desktop PC, thanks: that's lovely. Smooth as butter. Better than I deserve, in fact.)

I just hope buying a MacBook won't turn me into an iPrick. I want a machine that essentially makes itself invisible, not a rectangular bragging stone. If, 10 minutes after buying it, I start burbling on about how it's left me more fulfilled as a human being, or find myself perched at a tiny Starbucks table stroking its glowing Apple with one hand while demonstratively tapping away with the other in the hope that passersby will assume I'm working on a screenplay, it's going straight in the bin.

The iBin. Complete with built-in camera. $599.99.

• This article was amended on 1 February 2010. The original said that Apple distilled the iBook and the iPhone into a single device. The iBook reference has been corrected.

Mac sceptic Charlie Brooker switches to a MacBook saying "being chained to a Sony Vaio for the last few weeks has convinced me that I'd rather use a laptop that just works".

The Apple iPad is demonstrated after its unveiling in San Francisco. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

So, you're not going to buy an iPad, no way, not in a million years . . . Well, you've got company. A lot of people on the internet swear they aren't going to buy one either - at the end of every single iPad article going, in fact, often quite crossly (as in "WTF! what does it even do? What's the point!!"), Twitter, too, has been full of comments that are, very pointedly, being sent from iPhones that "fit in my pocket!"

But these, almost certainly, are people who like to write (tweets, emails, blogs, whatever). The voices we aren't hearing from are the readers - those (like you?) who like nothing better than settling down with a good book, or merrily browsing the internet, exploring content for hours on end.

Like it or not, the iPad is going to change, radically, expectations of how we read - that's its key selling point. And even if the Amazon Kindle is easier on the eyes with its "virtual ink", and its battery lasts longer, the fact it's also grey, doesn't play Doodle Jump and, well, just looks a bit rubbish in comparison, will make all the difference in the end.

Someone you know is bound to get one. They'll rave about it, and you'll roll your eyes. But then, not that reluctantly, you'll have a go - visit a few news sites, Amazon, Facebook, Flickr. You'll double-tap into columns of text, poke and swish your way through pin-sharp rich photos. And soon, a new benchmark will have been set.

In two years, devices that don't work as simply or elegantly will feel odd and clumsy. Unless your reading experience is bright and colourful, fast and easy, and nothing like holding an oversized TV remote with its wild assortment of buttons, what you're using will seem old fashioned and awkward - a bit like Betamax . . . or Nokia.

The iPad will become the way, if not the actual device, by which we'll want to consume content. You may not buy one, but it's a safe bet you'll buy something like it. In a couple of years' time, say.

Yeah I'd go along with that.

Superb :-)

Will Apple's Tablet Actually Be Called the iPad? New Trademarks Filed This Week

Tuesday January 19, 2010 12:57 PM EST
Written by Arnold Kim

A lot has been said about the rumored Apple tablet, and after evidence was discovered that Apple was interested in the name "iSlate", many have adopted that as the most likely name for Apple's new device.

New evidence however has revealed that Apple may, in fact, be positioning "iPad" as the name for the imminent tablet device. The name iPad has had its proponents amongst several MacRumors readers due to the similarities to Apple's iPod name, but little evidence had actually suggested it to be the case.

A search in the Canadian trademark database reveals that Apple's dummy corporation Slate Computing, LLC also applied for a trademark for "iPad" under the categories of handheld mobile digital electronic devices with a broad range of applications. This application was filed in July 2009 -- much more recently than the original iSlate trademarks which date back to 2006-2007. Slate Computing, LLC did not apply for a similar trademark in the U.S. due to the fact that Fujitsu appears to control the U.S. trademark as it relates to handheld computing. Of course, this didn't stop Apple from using the iPhone name despite it being owned by Cisco in the U.S. at the time of the iPhone's launch.

Very similar trademark applications for "iPad" were also filed in Europe and Hong Kong in July. The European filing listed a UK law firm while the Hong Kong application listed a company called IP Application Development, LLC which is located in Delaware.

Based on a source who claims to have knowledge of Apple's plans, we found that this unknown company has been active again in the past week with new iPad trademark applications in New Zealand and Australia. The filing dates for these latest trademark applications are from Friday, January 15th, 2010.

Of interest, the company's initials actually spell out "iPad". While we can't link IP Application Development, LLC directly to Apple, the associated timing of the applications alongside Slate Computing's Canadian application is very suggestive. While it appears Apple did have an Australian trademark application for iPad back in 2007, it was a much more limited scope than the current applications.

In the end, we believe that Apple is behind these trademark applications for iPad and that it may be the name for Apple's new tablet device to be revealed next week.

Rating (28 Positives; 49 Negatives)
[ 146 comments ]