Interestingly enough, the release refers to the Apple _______ as the iPad, so they’ve either settled on what they think it will be called or they’ve gotten advance developer units and have just incurred the wrath of Jobs and are simply waiting to be magically disemboweled by the will and might of the Impossible Steve. I believe the latter to be untrue, however, as Apple generally only gives a very small and elite number early access to their unannounced products, and while I think Stand Alone is a collection of cool folk, I don’t think they rate, much in the same way that I don’t rate.

Read more to see more…

Crosswords iPhone App Coming to the upcoming iPad device

Chicago, Illinois — January 26th, 2010 — Stand Alone, Inc. today announced that they are in the process of designing a larger version of their Crosswords iPhone App. The company has been refining the digital Crossword solving experience on the iPhone since the App launched at the opening of the App Store. In keeping with this aggressive innovation, Stand Alone has been fervently preparing to be among the first to modify their Crosswords App for the new form factor. With the influx of traditionally print media coming to the tablet, it’s only fitting that Crosswords also be at the forefront!

Crosswords currently lets iPhone and iPod touch users download and solve daily puzzles from over 30 of the top newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, the Onion and many more! With a custom keyboard, intuitive interface, and ease of downloading new puzzles, the Crosswords App has seen great success. The game touts a 4.5 star iTunes rating, compiled from over 1700 reviews, and players recently completed over half a million puzzles.

Ben Gottlieb, President of Stand Alone, says, “we’re dedicated to innovating the most efficient, fun, and intuitive Crosswords App, and that certainly extends beyond the iPhone.” Crosswords was just released for the Palm Pre and Pixi, and extending compatibility to new, App friendly hardware is at the forefront of their development road map.

“The main constraint in developing a Crossword app for mobile devices has been the distinct lack of screen real estate,” Says Gottlieb. The success of Crosswords is certainly due to Stand Alone’s dedication to building clever workarounds, including creating a smaller, custom keyboard and an intuitive, yet extremely low profile interface. “We have been anticipating the Apple tablet as the greatest piece of hardware for App developers since iPhone itself, and Crosswords will be even better on the new device.”

The Tablet version of Crosswords should keep the core functionality of the original, but optimize the user interface to be more reminiscent of its newspaper roots.  Users will still be able to use the integrated hint and look up systems, import or download new daily puzzles, enjoy the expanding catalogue of free puzzles, and enjoy in-app support for premium subscriptions to puzzles such as the New York Times. “The goal,” says Gottlieb, “is to utilize the larger screen, but keep both the functionality and the sleek, intuitive, custom design that our users love.”

Current Features:

·      New puzzles every day from over 30 publications

·      Intuitive, one tap downloads for all of today’s puzzles

·      Quick puzzle sorting by recently played, date or provider

·      Nearly unlimited puzzles from tons of different sites

·      Support for puzzle importing

·      US, UK, French and Australian puzzles

·      Puzzle completion tracker and timer

·      Leader boards compare solving speeds

·      Facebook and Twitter support for auto posting your times

·      Hints let you peek at clue letters (or the entire puzzle!)

·      Access to Wikipedia definitions, Wiktionary, Answers.com and Reference.com once a clue is solved

·      Detailed puzzle meta data

·      A massive catalogue of classic puzzles at the tap of a finger

Now, I’m sure you can well imagine what this kind of storage could be used to improve. I’m thinking that 8 of the component units on a micro backplane could yield 512GBs of storage in, and I’ll be generous, the space of 12 SD cards. I think we’re going to be seeing some amazing things this year in mobile devices, mass storage, digital media, and who knows what else! I’m driven mad just by the thought of one of these 64GB cards.

ADDENDUM: You know, I just realized how much this sucks. Everything cool has a really compact, very functional, pretty sizable (for now) microSD card slot in it. This is going to be for all those camera wonks, isn’t it?

130 grams. $529 unlocked. $179 from T-Mobile with a 2-year. Wow.

UPDATE: There’s a section in the Terms of Sale which is interesting. Its called Maintaining Carrier Service. If you purchase a Nexus One with T-Mobile plan you’re still buying it from Google, but at a discounted rate. If you don’t maintain your service plan for at least 120 days, you owe Google the difference in cost for the unlocked version, about $350. They even state that its not a penalty, but an Equipment Recovery Fee.

I will not claim that the upcoming Nokia N900 is an iPhone killer. I will, however, state that it might just be an Android killer. After all, Maemo, the version of Linux which powers Nokia’s line of Internet Tablets, has been around and in constant development for quite a few years now. It would be important to note, though, that the N900 is the first Maemo device which is actually a phone.

In fact, I’m pretty sure about what Nokia has been planning all along. The IT770, N800, and N810 models have been development beds. Think of the previous models as N900’s with training wheels, or even better, publically available design studies. Since Nokia was going to use Linux as an OS, what better way to fully develop a mature and capable OS with loads of supporting software than to take it to the rabid Linux developer community.

I can tell you from personal experience that community responded, in spades. Maemo OS2008 “Diablo” is one powerful mobile OS. It has its rough edges, but its quite stable, and there are a ton of software packages. It can, in fact, even update its own software, and not just the OS software, but all of your 3rd party software, as well. In fact, the only thing about the N810 that I miss… is a phone! So, if you’re interested, and I can’t begin to imagine how you wouldn’t be (it has a 800×480 display, kids), head on over to take a gander at the specifications and some nice photos.

In case you don’t notice, the N900 has a 3.5” display where the N810 and its predecessors all had 4.13” displays. That means that the device is smaller overall. Too bad. Maybe it will work. We’ll just have to see when I get mine in for review.

Next up is a discussion about what Snow Leopard will bring. There are lots of refinements to Leopard and very few new features. This is a good thing, too, as continually adding new features, like Microsoft does as a standard operating procedure, continually adds new problems. Apple has decided to refine all of the components of Leopard. The three big elements for developers are GCD, OpenCL, and 64-bit support throughout. OpenCL, a new open standard from Apple which is being supported by everyone who is anyone, allows unused processing time from the graphics GPU to be used for other stuff. GCD allows developers to take advantage of multiple CPU cores without effort. Nice. Snow Leopard is out later this year for upgrade pricing of US$29 per license and US$49 for the family pack. 

Finally comes the iPhone OS 3.0 chatter. Honestly, if this thing works like they say it will, the iPhone OS 3.0 on an iPhone 3Gs will be more like a laptop in your pocket than just a phone, and everyone else STILL has a long way to go to catch up (except maybe Palm, but that’s another article). Thirteen years ago when I was still banging away on a PowerMac 7300/200 and an Apple Newton MessagePad MP130 and had a PowerBook 145b and PowerMac 7100/60 in active use I would not have been able to tell you that Apple was going to pull it out again around now. For nearly ten years now, though, I’ve been watching Apple deal Aces off the top of the deck in the form of Mac OS X, the iPod, the new MacBook Pros, the Intel switch, and now the iPhone. 

Here’s to another 30 years of wicked Apple gear.

Ships with iPhone OS 3.0 for US$199. That’s the 16GB model! US$299 for the 32GB! Wow. iPhone 3G now can be had new for US$99. DAMN!

Now they’ve gone on to talk about Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, but there will very likely be more product announcements later on in the keynote. For now, however, that leaves a large hole in expectations for this WWDC. Will Apple be releasing the 3rd hardware revision of the iPhone today and what will it offer? Now that we know about the reshuffling of the MacBook line does that indicate that Apple is about to intro a tablet type device, a netbook, or something else? Its no like the prices have really changed all that much, so for Apple there are no holes, but we’ll just have to see. More later!