Last week, we reported that Apple had filed a claim with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to gain control of the iPhone5.com domain.

The next Web reports that the status of the case, which was ‘Case Active’, has changed to “Terminated” on WIPO’s website, indicating that Apple has won the dispute.

The domain is now in control of brand protection firm Corporation Service Company on Apple’s behalf. iPhone5.com which used to host a discussion forum for iPhone 5, now shows a blank page.

iPhone 5 has been one of the popular monikers for Apple’s next generation iPhone. So the news that Apple had filed a claim with WIPO to gain control of the iPhone5.com domain had sparked off speculations that Apple may be pursuing it in preparation for the next generation iPhone launch later this year.

It remains to be seen if Apple will call the next generation iPhone – iPhone 5, iPhone 6 (as its the sixth generation iPhone) or the new iPhone (like the new iPad).

Apple Wins WIPO Dispute; Gains Control of iPhone5.com Domain

LOS ANGELES, CA — (Marketwire) — 05/15/12 — FindHire surprised many of the major players in the recruiting software and talent management game last week, when they released the first ever recruiting application for iPad on the iTunes store. Downloads soared the first night since the launch, purchased by both International companies and top global recruiting firms.

The launch of the iPad application was a significant step for the small company of three based in the heart of Los Angeles. it marked a milestone for them after seven months spent piecing together version 1 and getting it approved by Apple. it was even more significant as it is the only real recruiting tool on the iTunes store that allows the user to contact, interview, and hire a new employee all through the iPad interface.

“I basically wanted to be the first to develop a recruiting iPad app for businesses that made hiring as easy as making a restaurant reservation. Once I realized how valuable this could be to small businesses I jumped right in!” CTO Ryan Herman said in an interview. Ryan designed and programmed the entire app with a little verbal guidance of long-time friend and CEO Michael Dennis, who came from the recruiting world, where he was an executive headhunter. “Ryan is a genius, he has always been a programmer since he was young kid, but now he has a real trophy to show for it by being the first to create a real game-changer in my industry,” Michael noted.

FindHire’s iPad application for recruiting has a very clean user interface (UI) and is extremely simple to use. The dashboard has a wood grain background similar to Wunderlist, only instead of list items, the user has a candidate gallery to flip through. The candidate’s pictures are all high resolution, and it makes it a nice experience when sifting through an abundance of resumes. below the ‘Candidate Flow’ are two columns to show the user’s daily and weekly interview schedule, and progress of open positions. The hiring progress bar is a great feature, but only available to the enterprise users and not available for the .99 cent download.

The toolbar at the bottom of every page is very helpful in navigating the different features of the recruiting application. The icons below let the user quickly select an option to search, schedule, or change their settings. even the settings are easy to figure out, and let the user link to their social accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The social function is helpful to make sure that anyone in the user’s network can see open positions.

The full web-based version of FindHire is also available, but fetches a slightly higher price than the .99 cent price tag of the iPad app. The added features are definitely a huge plus for anyone looking to hire more than one person.

To learn more about our application, go to: www.findhire.com or send all related inquiries to press@findhire.com.

About FindHire, Inc.Founded in 2011 in Los Angeles, CA by top recruiter Michael Dennis and tech guru Ryan Herman, with the mission to alter the recruiting business for the better by making the process streamlined through a simple user friendly interface. FindHire takes an outdated recruiting service business model and brings it into the next generation of technology; attracting both global media companies to use the software, and gaining thousands of prospective employees in their database within the first few months after their launch in early 2012.

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FindHire Launches Recruiting App on Apple Store — First Stand-Alone Recruiting Application Ever on the iTunes Store

Apple

Published on May 10, 2012

Apple, according to reports, is lining up something of a double whammy. Sources inside Asia are claiming that Apple will launch both an iPad Mini slate device and its hugely anticipated iPhone 5 during August and September.

As with most Apple rumours this report comes via supply chain rumourmonger DigiTimes, so, as usual, please take this report with a pinch of salt – okay, a handful.

According to the report Pegatron Technology has already received orders for the iPhone 5, which will come in September. Foxconn is tasked with building the iPad Mini, apparently, and that will be coming in August.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard reports of a smaller iPad. Rumours of a mythical mini iPad have been doing the rounds ever since Apple launched its first-generation iPad way back in 2010. but we’ve yet to see one, despite a whole myriad of reasons why ‘Apple needs to make a smaller, cheaper, iPad.’

There is logic in the idea of a smaller iPad, however. For one, consumers, according to some research, prefer smaller tablet devices. then there’s the fact that it would likely be a lot cheaper, which would do wonders for Apple’s market share – especially now Google and Microsoft are finally getting their acts together.

Still though, is Apple going to update its iPad range after just five months? It doesn’t seem likely to us – surely this would just eat into the sales of its new iPad 3?

The iPhone 5 rumour sounds a lot more likely. Apple’s iPhone 4S launched in October 2011, so a launch for its iPhone 5 in September, just under a year later, does make sense. having said that, we’ve also heard lots of speculation about a June launch, which complicates DT’s claims further. then there’s the website’s hit-and-miss track record with Apple rumours.

Basically no one knows, as usual. Still, the idea of a mini iPad, in light of current market conditions, is certainly food for thought.

iPhone 5 and iPad Mini double whammy scheduled for August/September

Apple's photo sync through iCloud using Photo Stream

(Credit:Apple)

iCloud and video are two words that have not gone together since the service launched last year. But a video synchronization feature rumored to arrive on iCloud next month could change all that.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal earlier today (subscription required), Apple is at work on a feature that lets users sync up videos they’ve taken with their iOS devices through iCloud. What’s unclear is whether that’s simply an addition to the existing Photo Stream feature, or something separate.

As it stands, Apple’s Photo Stream feature, which was introduced alongside iOS 5 last June, only syncs photos. If you want to see a video you’ve taken from youriPhone on youriPad, or vice versa, you’ve got to either sync it to that device with a computer using iTunes, or upload it to a Web sharing service like YouTube or Vimeo. the Journal’s report suggests videos would now be ferried over too.

This brings up a question about storage though. Videos are big, especially if you’ve captured them on either of Apple’s most recent iOS devices, the third-generation iPad andiPhone 4S. Both of these shoot in 1080p, and the files that are saved are bigger than ever. If Apple treats videos the same as photos, will that mean you get to keep videos as part of your Photo Stream, with no size limits? That would be generous given how Apple treats other types of files on the service.

Apple’s iCloud gives users 5GB for free, though only some files eat into that amount. things like digital content (be it apps, books, videos, or music) purchased from one of Apple’s stores and the Photo Stream don’t count against the limit. However, e-mail, stored documents, settings, app data, and iOS device backups (which can include the camera roll’s photos and videos) are all counted. when this gets short, users can add on 10GB, 20GB, or 50GB of iCloud storage, for $20, $40, or $100 per year respectively.

But the way users store their media with the service could be changing, according to the Journal. in the same report the outlet says Apple execs have been considering “expanding the number of photos and albums users can store via iCloud to make the service resemble its iPhoto downloadable software,” but that cost (presumably in its server infrastructure) has been a consideration. in other words, a move like that would likely increase how much Apple needs to spend on its server infrastructure and upkeep.

One thing that’s unclear is how many people are paying for add-on storage through Apple already. during its fiscal second-quarter conference call last month, Apple was asked by Goldman Sachs whether there had been “a big uptick in iTunes Match and paid storage additions,” since those features were introduced (iTunes Match is Apple’s other paid add-on service that scans and matches a user’s music library with tracks in the iTunes catalog to make them available on other iOS devices). Apple’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, responded by saying that question was missing the point (emphasis mine):

We’ve now got over 125 million users that have come on to the service since then and they’re building up documents and music and other things that they want to store. And so I think storage growth will come more over time. our real desire here was not about selling more storage. We think Match is a great product, and we recommend that everybody use it. But it’s a ‘pay for a service.’ We just really want to increase the customer delight from the entire ecosystem and platform of our iOS devices and the Mac, and that’s why we’ve done iCloud.

That’s a pretty strong indication that Apple won’t charge extra if it were to add videos to the Photo Stream feature. the real question is what happens if iOS users actually get to store more of their media on iCloud as opposed to relying on computers and hard drives, or on iCloud’s backup feature, which only stores snapshots of a device.

Apple very clearly wants to distance itself from using iCloud as a virtual hard drive, as we can see with the closure of MobileMe’s iDisk next month. User-made video hasn’t been too far removed from that product.

Looking back, Apple has kept close tabs on how much space user videos take up in its cloud. with MobileMe, and .Mac before it, Apple kept track of not just how much storage a video took up, but also how much bandwidth got slurped up when you shared it with someone else. MobileMe closes up its doors next month, and perhaps that megabyte-counting behavior will go with it.

Apple may ‘think different’ on iCloud’s video sync feature

FORTUNE — I might feel differently about Apple’s D.C. Lobbying Effort Has Yet to Ripen, the 1,450-word piece posted on Politico Wednesday, if I hadn’t just listened to Take the Money and Run for Office, This America Life’s brilliant hour-long expose of how Washington, D.C., influence peddling really works.

By the end of the radio piece (available as a podcast), it’s clear to listeners that companies like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) — which together spent $8.4 million lobbying in just the first three months of 2012 — don’t chase lawmakers down the halls of power trying to buy their influence.

It’s the other way around. The senators and congressmen chase after the lobbyists. sent to Washington to make laws (or prevent them from being made) our elected officials have been reduced to full-time money-grubbers, alternatively begging and strong-arming political action committees (PACs) to meet fundraising quotas that get steeper every year.

So I take with a grain of salt Politico’s contention that Apple’s (AAPL) “hostility” to the process “may have brought extra attention.”

For example, the piece describes as a “stinging preliminary finding” the ruling two weeks ago by a judge at the International Trade Commission that Apple may have violated one of four Motorola (MOT) patents related to Wi-Fi in the iPad and iPhone. anyone following the iPhone patent wars knows that there are dozens of issues like that one before the ITC, and that Apple has won more than its share.

And while I have no doubt that both parties eye with lust Apple’s $110 billion war chest of cash and marketable securities, the fact that it’s not being spent on them is not the reason the company has become, in Politico’s terms, “a punching bag for lawmakers who understand the power of using a marquee name to reinforce their arguments about American companies dodging taxes, hiring overseas and mistreating foreign workers.”

Case in point: The shot Sen. Tom Coburn took at Apple on NBC’s Morning Joe last week, declaring himself “livid” about the New York Times’ report about the lengths to which Apple (like every other major American high-tech firm) goes to avoid paying taxes.

Coburn talks big about “closing loopholes,” but he’s all in favor of the so-called “repatriation holiday” that would allow Apple to bring home billions of dollars of overseas profits without paying the current 35% federal tax on foreign earnings. (See “Livid” about tax loopholes.)

If he thinks some of those iPhone profits are going to end up in his reelection fund, he’s sadly mistaken.

As one source familiar with Apple’s D.C. operations told Politico, “They don’t have a massive table of consultants and law firms. it is more low key, but it is also respectful.” The piece details several instances in which Apple quietly dropped apps or changed developer policies after they drew Washington’s attention.

And as GigaOm‘s Erica Ogg points out, Steve Jobs was plenty savvy about how to wield influence in the nation’s capital:

“He just went straight to the top. Sending the president [an iPad 2]  before it was available to the public is a pretty decent way of making friends.”

For every $1 Google spends lobbying, Apple spends 10¢

May 12th, 2012, 11:05 P.M. — so, HP will re-sell tablet computers, but not with Android! The tech company is reportedly re-entering the tablet computer business by using Microsoft’s Windows 8, the next-gen desktop operating system that will also support tablet computers. Can this device compete with Apple and Google? 

Apparently, HP still wants to compete with Apple’s iPad 3 and other popular Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and the rumored Google tablet, but can the Windows 8 help them?

According to reports, HP, after its failed tablet PC attempt courtesy of WebOS, will re-enter the lucrative world of tablet computers this year, and Microsoft’s new Windows 8 will help them. Windows 8 is scheduled to hit the market this year, so it is safe to say that HP is one of the company’s partners that will sell Windows 8 devices before the holiday months.

VentureBeat reports on Friday that HP’s tablet PC is reportedly called “Slate 8,” a device thinner than the new iPad 3, and features a 10.1-inch display, have battery life between 8 and 10 hours, and pre-loaded with Windows 8 operating system with its own application store. for starters, Apple’s App Store is the most robust app store available to any mobile customer, while Google is trying to catch up with its own “Play Store.”

HP’s decision to use Windows 8 is a very risky one, in my opinion, largely because customers do not buy tablet computers the way they buy desktop or laptop computers. Consumers arguably treat tablet computers as “side-computers” or a device that will not replace their main computer, similar to how they treat smartphones, and based on smartphone operating system market share data presented by multiple research firms, Microsoft is not the best smartphone partner yet.

Applications hold the power of tablet computers, the more applications a platform supports, the more attractive it is, like the Windows Phone for example, Microsoft is still lagging behind other platforms, like Google and Apple’s, because Microsoft’s application store is very limited, and lags behind Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store when it comes to the so-called “developer’s priority.”

Another problem worth mentioning is the very big competition, including the elephant in the room, the iPad. Android tablet computers are expected to flood the market later this year, like the rumored Google tablet, a new Kindle Fire (rumored), and other devices from Samsung, ASUS, Motorola and even Acer and Sony.

Still, HP can harness the power of Windows 8 to sell more laptops and desktop PCs because Windows is still, so far, the widely used desktop operating system in the world, and developers still support the platform.

HP and Windows 8 VS the new iPad 3 and Android?

I’ve said it a million times: software keyboards are alienating and clunky. They’re not exactly comfortable to use and making mistakes is much easier to do on a virtual keyboard than it is on a physical one. What’s worse is correcting said mistakes. Placing the cursor accurately can be a cumbersome and frustrating task. And neither the magnifying bubble in iOS or the drag-and-drop method in Android and Windows Phone make things any easier.

While the added display real estate of a tablet makes it great for many things, like viewing Web pages, watching movies from virtually anywhere and providing hours of non-stop entertainment, it only improves text entry and editing so much.

Nonetheless, I do it day in and day out. Most of you know by now I’m a tablet fiend and that I do a lot of my Web browsing and writing from the keyboard-less slabs. In fact, every article I have written in the past several weeks has been written almost entirely on either the Transformer Prime or a (new) iPad. (I usually only switch to my MacBook to publish.) In short, they keep me focused on a single task at a time versus trying to do everything at once from a PC.

But there are few who would argue that soft keyboards couldn’t be better.

On an iPad, you are at the mercy of Apple’s software engineers. And currently, there are only three different keyboard modes on the iPad: portrait, landscape and split. the landscape keyboard isn’t all that bad. (It’s what I’m using to write this.) the letters are nice and big, and all the essential keys are easily accessible. but make a single mistake and might find yourself stumbling all over the place, trying to fix a single typo.

On Android tablets, you have the luxury of downloading and trying out various keyboards. Finding a keyboard that suits your needs is as simple as a Google search or perusing soft keyboards in the Play Store. I typically use the stock Android keyboard for the majority of my Android tablet writing, and I use SwiftKey 3 when holding the tablet instead of propping it on a table or docking it in the keyboard attachment. the soft arrow keys in SwiftKey work wonders, but are still no match for a physical keyboard. (Oh, how I love the keyboard dock!)

Mobile software companies have yet to overcome the hurdles associated with editing text (copying, pasting, selecting, etc.) via touchscreen. Auto-correction and personalization software helps avoid typos, but does not snuff them out completely. Essentially, there is no great way to edit text on a tablet.

On Wednesday, however, a video was uploaded to YouTube by one Daniel Hooper, demoing a way that iPad text editing could be much better. the video begins with Hooper typing, ”Editing on iPad is slow. but it could be better.” He went on to show an altered version of the iPad keyboard that he made. rather than tapping different parts of the text to move the cursor, he simply slid his finger across the keyboard laterally. to move the cursor faster (what looked to be an entire word at a time), he used two fingers. And to selected text, Hooper simply held the shift key while sliding another finger.

I want this, and I want it now. It’s simple, effective, quick and (somewhat) intuitive. just judging by how fast Hooper was typing, selecting, deleting and editing words, his mod seems to be quite effective and relatively easy to pick up on. (I would have to get over my learned habit of swiping right-to-left to delete the last word typed when using SwiftKey, that’s for sure.) the only thing I would suggest, however, are hotkeys for copy and paste.

Lucky for us, something great will come of this one way or another.

Apple has been known to pick up developers, hackers and various software companies with great ideas in the past. just last year, they hired 19-year-old iOS hacker, Nicholas Allegra, as an intern. Many speculated that Apple hired Allegra to beef up iOS security. And, as many of you may recall, Apple acquired Siri, a virtual assistant app, in April 2010 for use with iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S. hopefully, something similar will happen here as Daniel Hooper certainly has some pretty impressive ideas. (The modest developer doesn’t seem to be aiming for a job from the Cupertino-based tech company, and instead just asks YouTube viewers to submit a feature request directly to Apple.)

If Apple doesn’t hire Hooper (or steal his idea), however, all hope will not be lost, as it is very likely either Hooper or another developer will create a similar jailbreak mod for the iPad. the only problem with that is it would only be available to those who are willing to sacrifice their warranty. Hey, you win some and lose some.

Either way, I can’t wait for this feature to be on my iPad, officially or unofficially. what say you?

If Apple wants to improve the iPad keyboard, they need to hire Daniel Hooper

The next iPhone will likely be longer and thinner than its predecessor, with a metal backside, according to a new report.

iLounge editor Jeremy Horwitz claims the sixth-generation iPhone will launch this fall with a larger, 4-inch screen (current models have 3.5-inch screens), a metal panel on the back of the phone, and a smaller dock connector. The new device will also be approximately 20 percent thinner than the iPhone 4S.

“Approximate measurements are 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm — a 10mm jump in height, nearly 2mm reduction in thickness, and virtually identical width,” Horwitz wrote.

Because the phone is going to get taller but not any wider, Apple will need to change the new phone’s aspect ratio for the firm time since the first iPhone was introduced back in 2007, Horwitz said. Cupertino will need to add additional pixels to the top and bottom of the screen, a change that will likely impact third-party software.

The phone will also come with a new dock connector, which will be pill-shaped and only slightly larger than the bottom speaker hole on the existing iPhone 4S, Horwitz said. The new dock connector, which will be used on all upcoming devices, including the next-generation iPod touch, will have fewer pins than the existing 30-pin dock connector, possibly only 16.

Horwitz has accurately predicted features of Apple products in the past. Before Apple unveiled the new iPad, Horwitz predicted several features that ultimately proved correct when the third-gen tablet launched in March.

Horwitz’s predictions mirror several other rumors about the next iPhone. In particular, rumors of a 4-inch iPhone have been making the rounds for months.

Back in January, 9to5Mac claimed to have “reliable sources” at Foxconn who said several possible models of the next iPhone have been floating around, all of which included screens of at least 4 inches. Meanwhile, a recent report out of Korea claimed Apple will swap out the glass back on its next iPhone for a super-tough alloy called Liquidmetal.

For more, see PCMag’s full review of the iPhone 4S and the slideshow below.

For more from Angela, follow her on Twitter @amoscaritolo.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

Report Tips Thinner, Longer iPhone With Metal Back

In fact, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview works well, even on hardware designed for Windows 7. but the acid test may rest with the hardware companies

Windows 8 is Janus’s own operating system – a “legacy” mode for running any Windows app products in the past 20 years, and a “post-PC”, iPad-like mode called Metro-style. at the beginning of March I wrote a piece about how this arrangement did not work well on the desktop.

Towards the end of this year it’s expected that proper iPad-competing Windows 8 tablets will hit the market. I wanted to know how these devices might fare in the market, so I gave my iPad to my kids for the week and headed out into world, Windows tablet in hand. How did I get on?

tl;dr

The “tl;dr” version? It’s fine. It’s better than fine actually – it’s really good. Metro-style on a tablet makes sense in exactly the same way as Metro-style on a desktop does not.

OK, so a bit more detail?

I took a Windows 7 tablet – specifically a Acer Iconia Tab W500 – and installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it. the W500 has a dual-core 1GHz AMD C-Series processor, 2GB of RAM, a 32GB SSD and a 10.1″ 1280×800 screen.

Over the course of the week, I asked ten individuals – a mix of clients, friends, and acquaintances to try out some simple tasks on the device as well as using it instead of my iPad.

What I wasn’t interested in was the hardware. Normal Windows tablets are rubbish compared to what’s expected of proper, Windows on ARM (WOA) tablets that are expected to arrive by the end of the year. the Acer unit in particular is no iPad – it’s a plasticky lump of a thing, as opposed to the sleek glass-and-metal iPad. but, I was only after a “good enough” analogue of an iPad, and the Acer fitted the bill.

I also wasn’t that fussed about the quality of the supplied apps. Windows 8 is still a beta and, to be honest, the built-in People and Mail apps (the largest and most novel of the apps built into Windows 8) are very ropey.

So what works well? the keyboard is the first standout good element to consider. Typing on a touchscreen is never the most gloriously satisfying experience, but the Windows 8 implementation is solid. It’s excellent at seamlessly correctly typing mistakes in the same way the iPad keyboard does.

One thing you can’t do with an iPad is use “handwriting mode”. This works really well with Windows 8 – able to ably transform the most illegible rubbish into actual words.

Here’s where a conductive spider crawled across the screen, mimicking how a handwritingly-challenged individual might write “handwriting”. (This image has been edited, mainly because I was too slow to capture the whole area over LogMeIn but it is the same scrawl that was transformed as per the next image.)

Can your iPad do this? Could your Newton?

Web browsing also works well. in one session, my son and I were sitting on the sofa browsing Amazon for Gruffalo paraphernalia and we were both happily sharing the screen in exactly the same way as we might with the iPad. Scrolling performance wasn’t quite on par with the iPad, but that could well have been the hardware.

Generally, then, good marks so far.

How did the others find it?

It was quite fun to see how people got on with this device. For those of a technical persuasion, the first thing I asked them to do was to get it to join wireless network. They all failed.

All of them instinctively knew how to drive the start screen and found swiping left and right obvious. They could start apps, and they could find their way to the start screen by using the sole hardware button on the front of the device.

What they all failed to work out was how to access the Charms and menus that you can command into view by swiping from the bezel onto the screen. (Swiping from the right-hand side brings up the Charms bar. From there, you can access Settings, and from there Wireless.) some of them worked out that you could swipe in from the left, or the top, but failed to experiment from swiping from the bottom or right, even though they’d seen these other two gestures work.

Charms. Charming charms. Charms that charm. Hated the name at first. Quite like it now.

I’m intensely relaxed about this, though. If you were from another planet and I told you that in order to access a list of running apps on our current market-leading post-PC tablet [IPAD DOESN'T OUTSELL IPHONE] you put four fingers on the screen and pushed up, you’d look at me with whatever passed for “quizzically” on your home planet, and I’d feel faintly embarrassed for myself and humankind. How about on the iPhone, where double-pressing the Home button on the lock screen lets you access the music player controls? some of these actions aren’t obviously discoverable, nor self-evident; what’s important is whether they make sense once you’ve learnt them. once I explained the gestures to the people trying out the device, they generally got on OK.

One niggle about the off-screen gestures relates to speed: you have swipe in from the side sloooowly – a fast swipe won’t register. my best guess on why relates to how Microsoft has implemented off-screen gestures. rather than insisting OEMs install touch-sensitivity on the bezel, the single pixel around the edge of screen is preserved by the OS to detect “offscreen-to-onscreen” gestures. thus on my screen, if no touch has been detected and you get a touch on pixel 1199 on a 1200 pixel wide display, the systems deduces you’ve come in from the right, and the OS will show the Charms bar.

(Oddly, the lock screen isn’t like this – power up the display and you can zip up and access the password/PIN field in milliseconds. in fact, that’s a key feature of the otherwise laughable Smoked by Windows Phone campaign.)

The one gesture that no one discovered was the slightly batty “task switcher” gesture. This displays a list of the running apps, and requires you to pull in from the left hand side (which typically lets you “Alt+Tab” between apps), wait until it registers and then reverse and go back. I knew such a view existed, but I didn’t suss out how to access it – I had to ask Microsoft-watcher Tom Warren how to do it.

The task switcher. This year’s award for most obscure gesture goes to the Windows 8 Metro Shell team.

In summary, the feedback I got was good. People seemed to like it. some basic training was required, but I didn’t feel the mental workout required in learning the gestures was any more or less onerous than Apple demands of iPad users.

Apps

Having left my kids with the iPad knowing that it was going to spend the week letting them play Princess Fairy Sticker Album HD 2000 Special Unicorn Edition and endless repetitions of the Gruffalo, I was left wondering what I actually use my iPad for.

I do some gaming, I watch quite a lot of iTunes content, I use Twitter a lot, I use Evernote, web browsing, and I suspect that’s what most people use it for. most of the installed apps on my iPad are games for the kids where the iPad market is just unbelievably strong in terms of games for the under 5s.

To misquote bill Clinton, is it a case of “it’s the apps, stupid”? not to ruin the end of this story, but when the week was up I’d forgotten I was supposed to be using the Windows tablet and had gone back to using the iPad without thinking about it. I’d actually left the Windows tablet in the car boot (graveyard of many an Android tablet or PlayBook I suspect); as soon as I clocked the iPad I forgot all about the Windows tablet. That’s because one of the things I’d really missed on the Windows tablet was a good Twitter client. a combination of the Twitter web client and the work-in-progress implementation of IE10, together with a slightly underpowered device, results in an implementation which is cute and clever but features a please-god-stab-with-me-a-knife-to-end-the-pain style of user experience. Blergh. I needed a proper Twitter client. I tried using MetroTwit on the legacy desktop (which some people rave about), but I found the reverse of my Windows 7.1 desktop experience, in that I couldn’t handle switching between Metro and the legacy desktop.

What WOA is going to need is apps. Lots of apps. but with Android tablets having gone nowhere despite a fair wind, are Metro-style apps facing the same fate?

In this interesting article piece about “Why Android tablet apps suck”, the author says:

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here for developers and users. Apple solved it, in a way, by making the iPhone app experience on iPads so bad that developers had no choice but to code for the iPad. the iPad runs iPhone apps, but not in a way in which anyone would be proud.

Apple’s lousy toolset for iOS forces developers into creating each app through a process that is really, incredibly involved. with Android, you can waltz into the office at 9am, start working on “tabletifying” your app at about 10, take a long leisurely lunch, spent half the afternoon gassing about football and still have the job finished and signed off by 5pm. You’re not going to get away with that with iPad. You’re going to need to craft that sucker using things called “hard work” and “time”.

If you run a normal iPhone app on an iPad, all the OS does is scale the iPhone display, showing the content at either 1x or 2x zoom. that unmistakably doesn’t make the most of the device, and looks rubbish. For example, if you bring up the keyboard you get a big iPhone keyboard, not the proper iPad keyboard. On Android, the graphical layout subsystem works on a dynamic layout system that doesn’t really care about the device’s screen resolution. as a result, it can properly scale portrait-style layout on a phone to a landscape-style layout on a tablet and everything looks … well, OK. It’s better than the iPhone=on-iPad kludge, but it’s rarely beautiful.

The problem though is that it is good enough to pass as a “tablet” app. Do a couple of bits of tablet optimisation and you’ve – arguably – finished. Apple makes you go the extra mile, and the user benefits.

Windows 8′s graphical layout subsystem (Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF) is roughly analogous to Android’s, so it may be that porting apps will yield the same “meh” result as on Android.

The result is what I call a “balance of the universe” problem – you don’t get something for nothing. the iPad implementation has had more energy put into it. the amount of love and tradecraft is going to show in the finished product. it typically does with an Android app.

Windows Phone to Windows 8 Metro-style ports lie on this same “risk vector”. Windows 8 devs will be able to happy slap a Windows Phone app over to Windows 8 with little effort, just like the Android guys and gals. This opens up the platform to the same “it’s just a bunch of ported phone apps” criticisms. that said, a wrinkle for Windows 8 lies in the fact that a lot of developers haven’t got to the new platform yet, and the Windows Phone and Windows 8 toolsets are not harmonised. the trick would therefore be to get the ecosystem booted from new, non-phone developers, and non-phone apps. in trying to create an iPad competitor, I personally feel that avoiding the pull towards “start with a phone and scale up” can only help. Post-PC devices are not big phones. All of us involved in software engineering needs to understand this.

One thing that I am confident about is that the volume of apps will get there on Windows 8. go back five years and most professional developers would greet any developer who used Cocoa, Objective-C, and Xcode with equal measures of condescension and patronisation. a lot of developers out there are now waiting for Windows 8 to happen, although admittedly a lot of them may not know it yet. plus there’s all the Android developers who may be falling out of love with the platform.

OEMs need to up their game

It wasn’t my intention to look into the hardware, but it’s worth having a look at the Acer tablet I bought. There are some warning indicators to OEMs building WOA tablets.

My (Intel-based) Acer cost £365 including VAT and shipping. the (ARM-based) iPad 2 costs £329 including VAT and shipping.

Ignoring the size and weight difference – the x86 processor architecture makes demands of the Acer’s cooling and battery that the iPad doesn’t have to – the Acer is cheap and plasticky. it flexes and creaks on the axis. After a week and a bit of light use, the back is scratched to bits, as is the front screen, which is plastic as opposed to Corning’s Gorilla Glass. (The screen’s robustness so below par that I’m planning on sending this unit back.) the iPad is oleophobic; the Acer definitely is not. It’s a dreary lump of a thing – the worst possible example of bottom-line driven, box shifting laziness that OEMs can achieve. a tick in the box with no love or craft whatsoever.

If OEMs put out WOA units like this, just forget it. Dump your MSFT stock and move on because it’ll be game over.

It doesn’t have to be like this though. the new Ultrabook-specification laptops are really rather good. (Ultrabooks are an Intel-driven scheme to brand OEM laptops with a spec that happens to compete with the MacBook Air.) Ultrabooks are built with a metal chassis, and typically (should) have a capacitive, multitouch screen. some are properly gorgeous. They are an example of what OEMs can do when sufficiently motivated.

So all the OEMs need to do is not create the dross like my current Windows tablet and instead build something like an Ultrabook, but in iPad form, for less money than an iPad. And with better battery life. And lighter. And with a retina screen. And make sure the retina screen doesn’t adversely affect battery life. or make it heavy.

Shutting down

Just because this came up, let’s deal with this: Windows 8 is dead easy to shut down. Swipe from the right to bring up the charms, select Settings, Power, Shut down. I’m all for curmudgeonlyness and being a stick-in-the-mud, but there was been some ridiculous content written about this “problem” for weeks, including this slightly barking piece. (By the way, that approach outlined in that article certainly won’t work on WOA devices.) Windows 8 shutdown mechanism is the pinnacle of ease of use when it comes to restarting Windows. Can we just learn it and move on? please?

Conclusion

After using a Windows 8 tablet for a week, the takeaway message is: it works. it does what an iPad does, essentially as well as an iPad does. It’s actually hard to get hold of what that actually means, or what it feels like – but then that’s rather than point. The idea of these devices is to get out of the way and let you connect to people who are important to you, and my limited experiment has shown that even on crappy hardware you can run today, Windows 8 lets you do this in a way that’s more than just “acceptable”.

What you can do today with Windows 8 on a tablet is actually kinda fun to use and – assuming the marketing and app support isn’t a total balls-up – should give us the competitor to the iPad that we need in the industry.

Matthew Baxter-Reynolds is an independent software development consultant, trainer and author based in the UK. his favourite way to communicate with like-minded technical people is Twitter: @mbrit.

• Windows 8
• Tablet computers
• iPad
• Microsoft
• Windows
• Computing
• Apple
• Programming

Matthew Baxter-Reynoldsguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

I survived a week on Windows8 on a tablet (instead of an iPad)

There is no iPhone 5.

Hold on, don’t sell your Apple shares yet.

There will be a new iPhone to follow the iPhone 4 and it will be released in June, or in October, depending on which rumour is true.

But one thing is almost certain – it will not be called the iPhone 5.

Click here to read: Why iPhone 5 is just around the corner

Although most news articles and blogs are calling it the iPhone 5, in tune with the numbering series Apple has followed so far, it could break the pattern this time.

The precedent has been set with the launch of the new iPad, not the iPad 3, just the ‘new iPad’. Just before the March launch of the new iPad it was widely expected that Apple call it the iPad 3.

Some even termed it the iPad HD, but Apple has officially called it ‘the New iPad’.

The first iPhone had the EDGE technology and a 2 megapixel camera.

With the second model came the 3G wireless technology. the third model with its 3 MP camera and a faster processor was called the iPhone 3S.

The iPhone 4 was the fourth model that the company released and came with an impressive 5MP camera along with an additional front facing camera and the retina display.

The fifth model although widely expected to be called iPhone 5 was named as iPhone 4S and had an impressive 8 MP camera along with SIRI.

So what will Apple call its next phone?

The obvious choice would be iPhone 5 as a continuation of the numbering system.

Apple could also simply decide to bypass the number 5 and call it iPhone 6 since the next model will be the sixth version of the iPhone.

The next model would include the 4G technology and why not call it the iPhone 4G, or, as with the iPad, Apple is likely to completely do away with the numbering system and simply call it ‘the New iPhone’.

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Will Apple Inc launch iPhone 5 or… what?