iOS Devices

Geek Sugar today profiles using the iPad as a Point of Sale system at Sightglass Coffee Shop in San Francisco.  They use the Square headphone jack credit card reader (white, top left) and also have built a pretty awesome rotating enclosure for the device.

I think this type of use for the iPad will be pretty popular.  The bigger-than iPhone size makes it easy to operate like a traditional cash register and its price at $500 is competitive with other POS systems.  Square is demonstrated in the YouTube video below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSzsFAJAKHI&w=700&h=420]

It looks like Piper’s Gene Munster was off by more than half.  Apple today announced first day sales of 300,000 iPads, which did not include the 3G models.  Apple counts shipments (not sales) to retail partners (Best Buy, Apple Specialists) as well.  In addition, Apple said that users downloaded an average of more than three apps and one book within hours of plugging their iPads in.  That brought totals to 250,000 ebooks and over a million apps.

Press Release follows:

Apple

AnandTech benchmarked the iPhone 3GS, iPad and Google Nexus One device and found that the iPad is usually faster than the Nexus One, but the Nexus One also routinely beats the iPhone 3GS by significant margins. Why?

read more

You’d think the guy who designed the thing would be hooked up with a few freebies. Maybe he’s just doing recon like Jobs.

Update: Someone took the opportunity to grab a picture with the reclusive Ive below.  Via

Image:Flickr via CoM

After 24 hours of using the iPad, I’m starting to notice some trends.   Firstly, iPhone applications just don’t cut it.  I’ve deleted just about every iPhone application I have on my iPad.  Exceptions include Skype, Remote and FaceBook (though Facebook on Safari is far better).  I imagine at some point, I’ll only use iPad apps unless there is something I’ve purchased on iPhone that I don’t want to purchase again on iPad.  Having the microscopic application in the center or blown up at half res is not a very Apple-y experience.

Also, besides making a fantastic couch/table/bed computer, the iPad sits next to my keyboard while I am working and does tasks that I needn’t bother my Mac with. A great example of a secondary task for the iPad is as a calculator.  I’ve downloaded the Digits Calculator ($.99 – Video below) and have been using it to help do my taxes.   I also listen to Pandora (Apple, please let this app operate in the background!) and sometimes I embarrassingly check my Facebook account.   These are things I would have previously used my iPhone for, but the iPad does much, much better.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10666119&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Getting a little work done at Easter brunch:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgHNayVtHkQ&w=700&h=505]

That didn’t take long (<24 hours!). The first video showing a jailbroken iPad being manipulated from the command line has been posted by Musclenerd.  This is the “Spirit” jailbreak by @comex.

Other Jailbreakers like Geohot have also said that they can also jailbreak Apple’s new device but are waiting for Apple to update their firmware to release it.  

The iPad cat and mouse game has begun.

Image:Engadget

Gene Munster was at the 5th Avenue Apple Store today counting customers, which he used to extrapolate an extremely high figure of iPad sales, according to the Loop.  600,000 ? 700,000 to be precise.  In one day.

That would be the highest estimate so far and would put Apple well on its way to selling my first year prediction of: ‘As many as they can make’ units.

First things first: The iPad is fast.  Web browsing is fast, games are fast, app switching is also fast, especially compared to the iPhone.  

But if you think there are some crazy specs under the hood, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.  Doing a little coding, we’ve discovered that iPad apps only have access to 256MB of RAM and the processor thinks it is a single core (probably ARM Cortex A8) processor.

You can verify these results by building an app with the following code in Xcode: 

int getRamSize()
{
int     count ;
size_t  size=sizeof(count) ;

if (sysctlbyname(“hw.memsize”,&count,&size,NULL,0)) return 1;

return count;
}

The relatively small CPU requirements (first speculated by Ars’ Stokes) might also explain the iPad’s incredible battery life.  So how does Apple get applications to run so fast?  Thanks Thomas!

Updated: Clarification of physical RAM vs. accessible RAM.  Craig Hockenberry found similar RAM results.  (below)

When using sysctl() to query the amount of memory available to the iPhone OS, the following values are reported:

Again, it