Remember that method of forcing iPhone apps to run full-screen on jailbroken iPads without pixel-doubling we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that required manually editing a configuration file on the iPad? Gizmodo reports that someone has now come out with a Cydia application (actually an OS extension) called FullForce that will automate the process for jailbroken iPads.

Gizmodo mentions the iPhone New York Times app and Facebook app as prime candidates for FullForce use—and Nate the Great confirms that it does work with Stanza. It’s suddenly become a lot more tempting to jailbreak my iPad.


Siobhan O’Leary reports in Publishing Perspectives that only three weeks away from the German launch of the iPad, Apple still has not signed any of the largest German book publishers onto iBookstore publishing deals. Some magazine and newspaper companies, as well as smaller publishers working through iPhone bookstore textunes will be in iBooks, however.

O’Leary also reports that almost 25% of surveyed German consumers expressed an interest in purchasing the iPad. (Oddly, the survey article says it’s one week before the iPad’s German launch, not three, despite being posted on the same day.)


On The Literary Platform, Jonathan Higham talks about the collaboration process between himself and an app author to self-publish his children’s books as iPad apps. As of May 6th, his three books were ranked at numbers 30, 56, and 58 in the iPad books category sales chart.

Of course I marketed the book too – sending promo codes to just about every app review site I could find and was rewarded by a couple of reviews on theiphonemom and crazymikes. My friends too started blogging about it especially my friend and colleague, illustrator Peter Richardson, who has watched the whole process unfold from close by.

It seems that children’s books are becoming something of a “killer app” for the iPad, and there is even talk of Apple creating a separate category.


E-book readers and publishers are far from the only ones adopting the iPad. The Hollywood Reporter has a fairly long story about how media executives see a bright future in the device for all media. Some of the predictions (such as those for newspapers and magazines) are fairly well-grounded, but others take on qualities of pie-in-the-sky:

"The iPad will be your server, serving up any content you bring to it; why do you need cable TV?" [Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter] asks. "Cable companies are where landline telephones were last decade. Cable will be the losers, and the guys with the content will capture the lion’s share of the profit — as it should be."


The iPad has only been out for a month or so, but the prognosticators are already out in force trying to decide what people are buying the iPad instead of. An analyst from Piper Jaffrey, looking at NPD Group market research data, thinks that iPad sales are eating into not sales of larger Macintoshes, but rather sales of smaller iPods. However, an analyst from NPD Group itself thinks it is much too early to be able to make such a claim.

They are limiting their speculation to other Apple products, presumably because those are what they have sales data for. I wonder how many would-be Kindle sales the iPad has displaced?


And here’s an interesting fact: if you want an iPad, it turns out you’d better have a credit or debit card, because Apple won’t take cash or gift cards. Apparently this policy is to prevent people buying a huge number of iPads and turning around and selling them at a premium overseas. Customers are limited to purchasing two iPads each.

Of course, if Apple is tying iPad purchases to individual credit card numbers in its database, there is nothing to prevent people from buying those gift cards that work like credit cards (I’m assuming that the kind of “gift cards” the article referred to not working are Apple gift cards) and using a new one for every two purchases.


And finally, Bill Amend’s Foxtrot weighs in on the Gizmodo iPhone 4G prototype debacle.

1 COMMENT

  1. The iPad launch in Germany is on the 28th, so 10 days, almost a week as stated in the article. The “three weeks” comes from another article from a German newspaper which was posted on the 12th of May (almost three weeks prior to the launch 😉 ).

    BTW, I won’t buy an iPad, will keep my Sony Reader.

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