Infotainment

The new iPad is nearly two months old and it’s still not available for immediate shipping from Apple. However, the wait time just improved to less than a week. Apple.com now lists all the new iPad variations with just a 3-5 wait time. Happy days.

“[We're] selling as fast as we can make them,” said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said on last week’s earnings call. The iPad is clearly a hit and up until now, buyers had to wait more one or two weeks when purchasing from Apple’s online store. Unfortunately buyers in overseas markets will still have to wait more than a week.

US buyers have other options besides Apple.com, though. Best Buy, Target and Walmart stock and sell the new iPad within their brick and mortar stores but a quick online search reveals that the stores have a limited amount of stock as well. The Apple Store is also a good bet.

This is par for the course. It generally takes several months for the iPad and iPhone demand to dip down to realistic supply levels. Until that happens, buying one often requires patience and blinders. Yeah, Best Buy might have a whole warehouse full of Android tabs available to take home immediately, but trust me, the iPad is worth the wait.

You'll Also Like:

Today, Spotify is releasing its long-awaited iPad app — finally giving Apple tablet users, who also have a Spotify Premium (paid) subscription, a native route to accessing its 17-million song catalog.

It will be worth seeing whether pent-up demand for the app will translate into a rush of downloads and usage, in the same way that Spotify saw around its (also long-awaited) U.S. launch last year. On the back of that, the U.S. has become Spotify’s fastest-growing market, with the company projected to make $889 million in revenues this year on a global user base of 13 million people and counting.

In an interview last month, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek noted that the company’s entire focus is on growth. “That is priority one, two, three, four and five,” he said. The company currently has 3 million users of its premium services, and the launching of this iPad app is a natural progression in the strategy to grow that number.

But while Spotify, with its emphasis on unlimited streaming rather than downloading, has been a game changer in digital music, this tablet app may not totally live up to that description.

On the positive side, the app benefits from the predictive search that Spotify’s iPhone app sorely lacks. And the iPad app is an improvement in other ways over Spotify’s the iPhone app, largely because of the tablet form factor. For example, in full-screen mode you get big buttons to control music playing. And you can search for playlists, users and music all from the same page view. AirPlay integration lets users link up the app with compatible stereo equipment to extend the experience beyond the app.

But there are some negatives, too. Perhaps most importantly, the overlaid interface looks confusing, and retina cover art can’t be shown entirely full screen. Spotify’s tablet edition, in that sense, feels more like a translation from the desktop version. And in one key way, the iPad app lacks in comparison: it does not feature Spotify’s app platform.

So while there have been some apps created to help with a perennial problem of Spotify’s — discovery — you don’t get them here. Not today, at least. Also, there is no automatic way of seeing what you’ve been listening to most lately.

You'll Also Like:

And 1 in 33 men would dump their girlfriend for a free iPad

In China some people are willing to literally give up an organ to get their hands on the coveted gadgets of Apple, Inc. (AAPL), the world’s most valuable tech company. But in America, Apple’s top market would people really go that far?

The answer is apparently “yes”. A new poll by RoxyPalace.com, an online casino surveyed 600 people and found that 11 percent of single men would prefer a free iPad to a relationship. The poll also found that of men who said they were in a relationship 3 percent said they would ditch their partner for an iPad.

A Roxy Palace spokesperson commented on the surprising figure, “There has been a huge amount of hype surrounding the iPad 3 and for many it’s the ultimate gadget. But instead of simply giving up their hard-earned cash it seems some men would be happy to remain on the shelf if it meant taking one home with them. The Apple product has a wide variety of functions but even the latest version can’t offer some of the things that a new romance can, but it seems many males are happy to forego this.”

Granted there’s a few things fishy about this poll.

Its sample size is super-small
While official (it’s on the site’s blog, here) details are lacking (how many men, how many women, citizenship status) and it could be a publicity stunt.
It is the internet, so people can lie.

That said, Apple’s fans tend to be very enthusiastic, so this number might not be that far off. Podcast of various radio stations covering the store including callers claiming that their girlfriends (or boyfriends) had dumped them for either buying a non-Apple phone/tablet or for refusing to grant their significant other access to their Apple device, so there is some circumstantial evidence supporting the online casino’s internet poll.

You'll Also Like:

A month after Apple delivered its new iPad, rumors are heating up about a new iteration of the tablet designed to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The latest rumor to make the rounds is that Apple is planning to produce 6 million smaller iPads for sale some time in the third quarter. The report, from Chinese portal NetEase, was translated by Kotaku.

The NetEase report is based on “Taiwan media reports” and is said to be based on orders that Apple is placing to factories in the region, notably Honhai Precision (Foxconn) and Pegatron.

The report comes after The Korea Times wrote last month that Samsung was supplying Apple with “new PLS-based LCD technology for smaller iPads.” An unnamed Samsung official also told the publication that Apple was “planning to release a smaller iPad, probably with a 7.86-inch screen,” later this year. The current iPad has a 9.7-inch screen.

Despite the latest reports, though, there are reasons for skepticism. First, rumors of a smaller version of the iPad have circulated since Apple’s initial introduction of the product in early 2010 and have not come to pass. Second, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was famously skeptical of 7-inch tablets, calling such devices “tweeners” that are too big to compete with smartphones and too small to vie with the iPad. Finally, Apple would likely cannibalize sales of its pricier iPads if it released a smaller, cheaper model.

Since Windows 8-based tablets set to hit the market later this year will be more in the price range of the current iPads, the real competition for Apple on the low end will be from Amazon’s Kindle Fire. However, Apple’s first-quarter results revealed that Amazon’s entry had a minimal impact on iPad sales.

You'll Also Like: