Unbelievably vivid images: At more than 200 pixels per inch, the retina display will give photographs a life-like level of detail. And the rumored 8 megapixel camera will be a ready source for such images.

Electronic paper: Ink on paper is generally at 300 dots per inch, but given the physical properties of printing (i.e., schemer) the super crisp 264 ppi display (not quite as high as the iPhone 4GS’s 326 ppi) will have print quality resolution. Digital magazine publishers (and their advertisers) will love this.

The Rise of Responsive: The higher damands of a subset of mobile devices will quicken the development of responsive web design, particularly in terms of the variable delivery of images based on device pixel dimensions.

Your (No Longer Unlimited) Data Plan: Since providers have been phasing out unlimited data plans it is likely that you will be feeding all those pixels from a metered dataplan. Ouch!

The Rising Cost of Media: If content producers heed Neil Young’s seemingly contradictory defense and assault on piracy—high resolution media, whether music or movies or images—will cost more—and people will buy it, selectively. Like font designers who are finally getting paid because of the increased use of web fonts, hopefully photographers will find a resurgence in the demand for high-quality photography once everyone is walking around with high-resolution displays. (This is a pro within the con, at least for pros.)

That Giant Sucking Sound: Where, exactly is all this bandwidth going to come from? How much of the earth’s energy will be devoted to the additional server farms required to deliver all of this glorious resolution? Who’s going to pay for it? Ultimately we all are, I’m afraid.

Copyright Concerns: Take Pinterest, for example. If third party websites make high-resolution copies of all of the image that their users post (as Pinterest does) the possibilites of copyright infringement go up exponentially. Relative to the rising cost of media (above) one can imagine content producers giving away low-resolution proxies of their work for free but charging for the high-resolution experience. But what happens as those high-resolution files fall out of their owners control?

There are many opportunities that will be created by heightening consumer’s desire and demand for higher-resolution content experiences, but as in space, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so tighten your seat belts and hang on!

Several great new games were released this week for iOS that are perfect for keeping you busy during downtime over the long Labor Day weekend.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Spy Mouse, Firemint's latest game that has you play as Agent Squeak, the mouse who stealthily steals cheese across tons of cleverly made levels. I highly recommend that you grab that game in addition to this collection, but I found three more that will satisfy just about every gamer's personal taste.

This week's collection of iOS apps are all hot new games from different genres. The first lets you draw your path around a racetrack; the second lets you use a jetpack to go for distance; and the third is a beautifully made hack-and-slash RPG.
DrawRace2

During the race, you can see the faint line you drew as your car navigates the track.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

DrawRace2 (99 cents) is the sequel to DrawRace, an unconventional but very fun take on racing games for the iPhone. In DrawRace games, you don't actually drive a car around a track. Instead, you draw the path you will take around the track before the race even begins. When you're done drawing, you watch the race to see how you did.

While it sounds easy, you have to be very precise in the way you draw your line. As you come to sharp turns, for example, you'll need to draw more slowly, then speed up again as you hit straights. When the actual race begins, you only have one control: a turbo button you can use sparingly for a temporary boost out of turns. But often it will be the line you drew that determines whether you win the race.

What's particularly neat about this game is the number of tracks, cars, and racing styles you can play. Winning races gets you new cars and unlocks tracks. As you progress, you'll need to draw racing lines around street ovals, curvy dirt tracks, and even Nascar and formula speedways. Each type of track, car, and surface must be accounted for as you draw your lines and racing game fans will appreciate designing the perfect line to navigate the track at hand.

Along with the unique style of play, DrawRace2 has excellent graphics with realistic physics, and several environments that are all a joy to play through. Once you think you've mastered the game, you can play online against others, play a head-to-head game on one device (with each player drawing a racing line before the race), or challenge a friend over Bluetooth.

Overall, we were surprised by how much fun it was to plan a race before it happens, and the attention to detail in this well-made, graphically beautiful racing game. If you like racing games and want to try something different, DrawRace2 is an excellent option.
Jetpack Joyride

Use your machine-gun jetpack to maneuver past obstacles while you rain bullets down below.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Jetpack Joyride (99 cents) is a new distance game from the makers of Monster Dash and Fruit Ninja, but in this game you use a machine-gun jetpack to maneuver past obstacles and use discovered vehicles to try to survive as long as possible. The control system is incredibly simple: touch the screen to propel your jetpack.

As in Monster Dash, you play hero Barry Steakfries, but in this game you'll break into a secret laboratory to steal and use experimental jetpacks. As you propel yourself through this side-scroller, you'll need to gather coins you can use between runs to buy new jetpacks, different outfits, upgrades for vehicles, and extra utilities that help you last longer. Some of the upgrades can be fairly expensive, but you can take your chances with a slot machine at the end of a game (if you gather Spin tokens floating through the level) that will add to your cash or give you bonuses usually found in the store.

Part of what makes Jetpack Joyride fun are the strange vehicles you'll discover and use along the way. Along with the already interesting machine-gun jetpack that fires downward, you'll also find a Profit Bird that eats coins and requires that you flap its wings; ride a motorcycle that speeds along the ground but can jump up to grab bonuses; or use a strange machine that lets you teleport out of the way of obstacles. There are several vehicles to discover and each adds to your frantic run as you try to survive as long as possible.

To keep the game interesting, you also can gain achievements by doing various things in the game. Once you earn enough, you'll level up, which gives you even more coins to use towards new jetpacks and items.

Overall, Jetpack Joyride is a fun and addictive distance/running game that offers plenty of replay value with the countless upgrades and strange vehicles you find in each game. If you like distance games, this is a must-have for only a buck.
Pocket RPG

The Blade Master wields dual swords and is the most effective for up-close combat.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Pocket RPG (99 cents) was already available for iPad, but now brings the fun and mindless dual-stick hack-and-slash adventure to the smaller Retina Display on the iPhone.

You start by choosing from three character classes: Dark Ranger, Blade Master, and Battle Mage, each with a different fighting style and special moves. When you're done choosing according to your playing style, you'll be dropped into the first dungeon and will need to talk to the NPCs scattered about to learn the basics. From there, Pocket RPG is all about mindless hack-and-slash goodness, battling against swarms of enemies, and finding chests full of treasure, weapons, and items. As in many casual RPG games, at the end of each level you'll battle a boss and test all the skills you've learned up to that point.

Along with the fantastic hack-and-slash gameplay in beautiful randomly generated dungeons, what makes Pocket RPG great is the simple way it handles found items and weapons. There is no potion button to hit while battling--you simply drink healing and mana potions as you find them. You also don't need to struggle with your loadout very much--simply drag and drop weapons in, and you only need to worry about one ring and one necklace for extra skills and attribute boosts. Selling items only requires that you drag a weapon from your inventory to a sell-item button--no need to find a town or store in order to free up space. All of these game design elements make it easy to focus on what's important: hacking and slashing through hordes of bad guys.

Overall, Pocket RPG is an extremely fun and addictive game featuring great-looking graphics, tons of weapons to experiment with, and special moves gained simply by fighting. Whether you are new to RPGs or an old hand at the genre, you will appreciate the way Pocket RPG makes hack-and-slash both easy and fun.

Welcome to this week’s edition of iPhone + iPad Gems! Today, we’re looking at three budget games from the App Store, including one universal iPad/iPhone/iPod touch title with high-resolution graphic support on all three devices, an iPad-specific game, and an iPhone/iPod touch-specific title that runs in upscaled mode on the iPad.

Our top pick of the bunch is Infinity Field, but all three games are worthy of at least our general-level recommendation. Read on for all the details.

Can Knockdown 2

Forgettable ideas can be transformed into impressive games by impressive execution. Infinite Dreams’ Can Knockdown 2 ($1, version 1.01) demonstrates exactly how this works: it is literally nothing more than Angry Birds on a different angle—first-person rather than side-scrolling—and without the funny animals. You use swipe gestures to toss balls at cans and other targets, moving from level to level by clearing everything from the screen. The primary mode involves knocking down sets of increasingly challenging but stationary cans, while others have pop-up wooden bullseyes and/or moving cans of various sizes instead. Each mode gives you a limitation, either in balls or time, that can be extended through proper play; otherwise, your game ends after a minute or two. That there’s nothing deeper here, such as a save game feature with a hundred levels, or different ball physics a la Angry Birds’ projectiles, is the biggest knock against this game.

But what Can Knockdown 2 offers as a reward to players is a graphics engine that makes outstanding use of the Retina Displays on new iPhones and iPod touches, as well as the full 9.7” screens of iPads. The 3-D balls, 3-D cans, and 2-D but animated backdrops are so impressively detailed and plausible that they could be mistaken for photorealistic; Infinite Dreams includes smoke plumes, shadows, and other little effects to spice up the scenes, too. Music is left out in favor of ambient sound effects that work with the art to provide urban grit; there could obviously be more and better audio, but what’s here suffices for a $1 game.

Can Knockdown 2 reaches its apex of challenge during the moving can levels, which force you to consider not just where the target is, but where it will be when your ball arrives. Learning to control the speed of your ball tosses isn’t easy—a practice mode would be great—but you effectively practice as you replay the levels. Unlike Angry Birds, the fact that you can alter the speed and/or power of a shot isn’t obvious from any sort of dotted line indicator; it’s just something you come to discover on your own. Can Knockdown 2 initially rewards this knowledge merely by letting you continue to play, then introduces bonus items; the moving can mode for instance brings up a wider variety of targets that can explode in different ways, slowing down or speeding up time, adding bonus points, and more.

In as much as the App Store now offers “full” games and bite-sized “casual” ones that aren’t going to set the world on fire but provide ample entertainment for their low prices, Can Knockdown 2 is clearly in the latter category—just an Angry Birds appeared to be prior to its post-release updates that added levels and improved its value. Thanks as much to its graphics engine and art as its familiar but fun gameplay, Infinite Dreams has the makings of a similar phenomenon on its hands here. With a little extra content and charm, Can Knockdown 2 could become as big of a deal as Rovio’s title. iLounge Rating: B+.

Infinity Field

While it would be fair to call Chillingo’s Infinity Field ($2, version 1.0.1) a clone of Activision’s Geometry Wars: Touch, there’s no doubt that what developer ForzeField Studios has accomplished with this title is thrilling enough to justify downloading on its own merits. As with Geometry Wars and earlier, similar iOS titles, Infinity Field gives you two virtual joysticks to separately control the movement and shooting of a spaceship trapped in a box with hordes of single-colored enemies. Survival mode lets you play for as long as you can survive with three lives, with six separate initially selectable scenarios, and Campaign mode offers roughly 50 levels to play through in sequence, generally requiring you to remain alive for 90 seconds per level as more and more enemies drop into the play area.

While this will all sound pretty familiar to Geometry Wars fans, and the glowing vector/line-based graphics with a pulsating background grid has plenty in common visually with Activision’s game, Infinity Field offers a lot of individual fun for the $2 asking price. The intensity of the line and particle artwork is increased by four different camera views, two of them with 3-D tilting and camera panning, guaranteeing that the screen will be filled with explosions and glow effects almost all the time. Floating power-ups offer temporary force fields, slow motion action, and occasionally even screen-clearing bombs, though the latter weapon is far less common here than in Geometry Wars. Chillingo instead uses other interesting gameplay tricks, such as levels that remove your gun in favor of Tilt to Live-style limited-area explosions, to keep the stages challenging. Boss encounters come every dozen levels, and are worth seeing. The virtual controls are responsive throughout, aided by the iPad’s extra screen real estate.

Infinity Field’s only major issues are generally forgivable for the low price. The in-game song is close to great, but doesn’t change—it just keeps playing level after level, without any sort of voice or other special audio effects to elevate the game’s sounds above “good.” An in-game ship upgrade system is at best confusingly implemented, using a system to acquire currency that isn’t anywhere near as obvious as it should be, though the occasional opportunity to boost your guns is entirely welcome. And multiplayer features are presently half-baked; there’s a split-screen way to play the Survival levels, with a wi-fi mode that’s listed as “Coming Soon.” While what’s here is better than nothing, it’s obvious that the game is unfinished, though many companies would have considered it complete enough for $2.

Despite the flaws, Infinity Field is a great game for the price—a better value for $2 than Geometry Wars: Touch was when it originally debuted for $10, if not quite as original. It’s currently an iPad-only release and very acceptably priced as such; hopefully iPhone and iPod touch support will be added alongside the multiplayer mode in the near future. iLounge Rating: A-.

Tiny Wings

While it would be unfair to write off the shocking success of Andreas Illiger’s recently-released iPhone and iPod touch title Tiny Wings ($1) as traceable merely to the combination of a happy bird theme, simple “casual” gameplay, and a low price point, we’re convinced that these elements have a lot to do with its rapid ascent to the top of the App Store’s charts. Tiny Wings has a lot in common with 2009’s Canabalt and 2010’s Solipskier, both one-trick-pony casual action games that rely upon the perpetual motion of a jumping main character to keep you focused on the screen. Appropriately, Canabalt was black-and-white, Solipskier added splashes of color to a largely black and white world, and Tiny Wings brings full-colored pastels and softer edges to the table, effectively gender-neutralizing or feminizing previously popular guys’ game concepts to appeal to a larger potential audience.

The gameplay in Tiny Wings is almost as simple as can be. You proceed from “island” to “island,” using a single button—almost anywhere on the screen—to exert the force of gravity on a bird whose wings are only capable of the most limited flight. Holding the button down brings the bird towards the ground like a rock, while not holding it down enables the bird to alternate between riding soft hills and catching air in little skips. Your major challenge is to figure out how to properly time button presses to build up the bird’s speed on the ground so that the jumps become larger. Simply continuing to make progress earns you points, while coins can be gathered by riding certain hills, and huge “cloudtouch” jumps are available when you figure out how to catch the maximum air through momentum.

Tiny Wings is most impressive in aesthetics. Both the soft visuals and the gentle music feel breezy and confident, mixing an upbeat single song and “keep moving” pacing of an early Sonic the Hedgehog game with the dreamy, almost storybook cutout looks of Nintendo’s 1990’s Super Mario/Yoshi’s Island games. Everything moves at a smooth frame rate—60 frames per second—and there are no rough edges to be seen in any of the art; everything’s curved and soft, though sadly without high-resolution iPad support. That aside, this is a thoroughly happy game that kids and parents alike can play, contrasting heavily with the gritty pixels and deliberately high-contrast colors in titles such as Canabalt and Solipskier.

Our major issue with Tiny Wings is one that seemingly hasn’t stopped similar games from being successful in the App Store: the gameplay is a one-trick pony, and relies upon the now well-worn “beat your high score” challenge to keep you playing. This isn’t to say that the levels aren’t challenging, or that the experience isn’t fun for a while, but it’s not very deep—there’s not a huge amount of variation in the hills or the action. You have one life per game, and need to restart from the beginning whenever day turns to night, which happens faster if you slow down on an island. The developer keeps the levels interesting by changing the artwork procedurally—through a limited collection of patterns, colors, and hillside graphic elements—each day, but that’s no substitute for greater depth.

Thanks far more to execution than to gameplay concept, Tiny Wings delivers just enough fun and charm to be worthy of the $1 asking price, but not much more than that. As compared with the other games in Gems today, it delivers a considerably more shallow experience, but one that’s more likely to leave you with a warm heart after your first or second play. Whether you continue to come back to it for more depends on how much you’re incentivized by high scores and simple artwork changes. iLounge Rating: B+.

16GB, 32GB, or 64GB.

How heavy is the iPad 2
1.3 pounds (1.34/1.35 pounds for the 3G version from Verizon and AT&T respectively). This is 0.2 pounds lighter than the first-generation model.

What are the iPad 2's dimensions
9.5 inches tall x 7.31 wide x 0.34 thick.

What is the screen size?
9.7 inches

What is the screen's resolution?
1024 x 768 pixels.

Does the iPad 2 support Bluetooth accessories?
Some, yes. See the full scope of the iOS's Bluetooth support.

What does the iPad 2 cost?
With six models, this is a complicated question. Check out this article for a breakdown.

When does it come out?
March 11 in the U.S. March 25 in 26 other countries.

Where can I buy an iPad?
The iPad 2 is for sale at many stores. Read this article for all the details.


iPad OS and Apps

Will my old iPhone apps work on the iPad? Will old iPad apps work?
Yes. Just as with the first-generation iPad, the iPad 2 is compatible with nearly all iPhone apps. Existing iPad apps should pose a problem either.

Does it run Flash?
Nope. Just like all iOS devices, still no Flash.

Can the iPad 2 run more than one app at the same time?

Wireless Features

Does the iPad 2 have GPS?
It depends on which model you have. The WiFi/3G models offer full assisted GPS (AGPS) like the iPhone 3GS. The WiFi-only models uses WiFi and like the original iPhone for their location services.

Do all iPad 2 models have 3G cellular connections?
No. There are three models - one in each capacity size - with 3G.

Who is the 3G carrier?
AT&T and Verizon in the U.S.

Can the iPad 2 work with other carriers?
Maybe. Apple touts the device as unlocked, but it doesn't work with T-Mobile in the U.S. due to differences in the networks and the chips used in the iPad 2.

Do I have to buy 3G service when I buy an iPad 2?
No. The 3G service is optional. If you don't want it, you can buy a WiFi-only model.

If I buy the 3G service, do I sign a two-year contract?
No. The iPhone requires a two-year contract, but the iPad 2 does not. With iPad 2, you pay month to month and can cancel at any time without penalty.

What is the cost of the service?
View all iPad 3G data plans in the U.S.


iPad Battery

What is the iPad 2's battery life?
Apple claims 10 hours of use on a full charge.

Can I squeeze even more life out of the iPad 2's battery?
Sure. Check out these 10 tips for conserving iPad battery life.

iPad 2 Compared

How does the iPad 2 stack up to other Apple products, as well as competing tablets and e-readers?

Apple has taken the technology trends and made them successful as if only Apple could do! Apple’s first tablet computer was launched in 1993 creating further innovative series continuously. Apple took a U turn and entered mobile computing industry in 2007.After so much of research and innovation, iPad accessories was announced again for the launch and ready to take market by a clean sweep! iPad’s touch screen display is just 25cm that 9.7 inch. This screen has a scratch resistant glass as it has to be controlled by fingers.

Though the app is so powerful and stylish enough to be loved by its users, the developers have given good care to make it easy to understand and flexible to handle. SketchPad: A filmmaker’s storyboard is as simple and mobile as sketching on a paper pad, SketchPad for iPad adds sophisticated tools up until now available only with complicated or heavy systems, cumbersome laptops.

However, one of the many attractive features is its uncluttered interface and intuitive controls mean users can be productive shortly after they download the app. One more attractive feature is, it has a switch to lock out screen rotation system. The iPad accessories may use Wi-Fi network. Tiny iPad has got two speakers. Volume switch is on the right side of the unit. This iPad ahs got a microphone which can be used for voice recording.

The world is watching to see where the iPad accessories into the market a year or two down the road and what plans Apple has to further current hold on the mobile pc market. Apple has launched one more unique piece of style and user friendliness that never disappoints! I f you want to learn more: please click:

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