Anime News Network did an in-depth comparison of reading manga on an iPad vs. a Nook Color today, after Viz Media sent them both devices so they could do a hands-on look at making the digital jump. After taking a hit from the closing of Borders, Viz decided to turn its popular Shonen Jump publication into a digital-only product. Launched in January, Weekly Shonen Jump Alpha is $25.99 for an annual subscription, with three of its flagship series -- One Piece, Bleach and Naruto -- now running almost concurrent with the Japanese release. Individual issues can be rented for 99 cents for a 4-week period.

The results aren't surprising. By holding up a volume of manga next to an iPad, it shows that the iPad is right about the same size as a manga volume and the experience is just as good as reading a print book. What the article does highlight is the problems that the Nook Color has with Viz's products, especially when it comes to things such as double-page spreads. It doesn't touch on the Kindle Fire, however, since Viz hasn't ported its app out to it yet. As expected, the big drawback to the iPad is the price. While manga sold via Viz's iPad app is cheaper than the print volumes, the price of an iPad would be the barrier preventing teens from completely making that digital jump Viz wants them to make.

We originally looked at the Viz app in 2010, and we were pretty pleased with its offerings then. If you haven't considered a digital transition of your manga and comics yet, the ANN article is a good way to see if you'd want to do so. While I still prefer buying print graphic novels, my comic-buying habits are a mix of supporting my favorite local comic shop and buying digital manga through Comixology and Viz -- the latter being excellent for long series that take up a ton of shelf space.

The pros and cons of making a digital jump with comics originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Stick with us on this one -- it seems unlikely, but this case could have some wider consequences. Last year, Apple filed a lawsuit against a company named Proview Technology Shenzen in China. It was pretty common by Apple's standards: The company was using the name iPad, and Apple was trying to keep them from doing so.

While this was all going on, Proview Taiwan (only loosely affiliated with the Shenzen division) sold the trademark to "iPad" in China to a UK-based company named Application Development, which then sold it right back to Apple. All of this would normally be fine and dandy except for one thing: Apple lost the original lawsuit that was supposed to prevent Proview Shenzen from using the name.

As a result, Proview Shenzen is arguing that it still retains the rights to the "iPad" name on the Chinese mainland, and Apple may be fined as much as 2.4 billion yuan ($380 million US). Obviously, this is a tangled legal issue, and I'm sure Apple still has options in the fight before they need to cough up the fine. But there's obviously something here that needs to be worked out, and if it isn't in time, Apple could be prohibited from selling or marketing its tablet under the name "iPad" in China.

[via Gizmodo]

Apple could be forced to stop selling "iPads" in China originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I've talked quite a bit before about the growing "second screen" phenomenon, where iPads and other mobile devices are used as a second screen while either working on another computer or watching television. And with the biggest event on television yesterday, there was likely a lot of "second screen" viewing going around. ZDNet's James Kendrick says his was one of three iPads around the coffee table at his Super Bowl party, and with tens of thousands of tweets per second going out during the most interesting parts of the game, Kendrick's experience was undoubtedly not unique.

Car maker Chevrolet actually participated in the event with the Chevy Game Time app, which not only posted ads available on the iPad the second they went live on the TV, but also offered up contests and more interactivity during the show. And the NFL and NBC famously streamed the whole event live on the Internet for the first time this year -- while I didn't get a chance to pull the game up myself yesterday, I heard a few people say that it was in fact available to stream on the iPad. The commercials weren't available on the stream, though, so it'll probably be a few years before people learn the stream is out there, and before it becomes a better substitute for the TV experience.

Still, the Super Bowl certainly showed off a few major trends that we're seeing in entertainment consumption lately. Apple's devices especially are providing ways for both consumers and brands to interact and extend the "watching" experience, even outside of a standard TV broadcast.

iPads invade Super Bowl parties originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

RIM's star just sank a bit closer to the horizon. Halliburton, a household name in the energy industry and once a BlackBerry bastion, is dumping RIM's platform and switching to iOS. The company once relied heavily on RIM's platform, but after evaluating RIM, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, Halliburton has settled on switching to Apple's platform.

"Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone," the company said. Halliburton representatives confirmed to AppleInsider that only 4500 of the company's 70,000 employees still use BlackBerry devices, so the transition probably won't take as long as it might have a few years ago.

According to AppleInsider's sources, Halliburton actively engaged with Apple in its transition. Halliburton is far from the first company to do so; Clorox ditched the BlackBerry last year, and 92 percent of its employees replaced it with an iPhone.

RIM's platform was once synonymous with business communications, but that status has slowly eroded since the iPhone's introduction. While corporate IT spent the first few years after the iPhone's introduction scoffing at the device, quarterly reports from analysis firms like Good Technology show that iOS has penetrated enterprise markets in a way that even the stodgiest of companies can no longer afford to ignore.

Halliburton dumping BlackBerry, switching to iOS originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Siri has been in widespread use for four months, but so far Apple's "personal assistant" is still only available on one device, the iPhone 4S. We speculated that there weren't any technical reasons Siri couldn't work on some of Apple's other devices, and the jailbreak community later proved us right by porting Siri to the iPhone 4.

AppleInsider did some digging and discovered there may be a technological reason Apple's kept Siri an iPhone 4S-only feature: noise reduction. The iPhone 4 incorporates noise reduction circuitry from a third-party vendor called Audience, and that circuitry lies separate from the A4 chip on the iPhone's logic board. The newer processor in the iPhone 4S (and possibly the iPad 2) incorporates a newer version of this noise-reduction circuitry within the A5 chip itself, reducing overall cost.

Audience's noise reduction chip works similarly to how the human brain processes audio. By sampling audio from multiple sources (the iPhone's main microphone and the noise-cancelling mic), the Audience chip is able to filter out background noise and deliver only the user's voice, just like how your brain filters out noise in a crowded room to focus on a person talking to you.

The newer noise reduction circuitry in the A5 chip is better at "far-field" noise reduction than the circuits in the iPhone 4. Essentially, the iPhone 4S can achieve the same or better noise reduction when held at arm's length that the iPhone 4 gets when held directly in front of a user's mouth.

The implications for Siri use are obvious -- because of its less advanced noise reduction circuitry, Siri wouldn't function nearly as well on an iPhone 4 in an even moderately noisy environment unless you held it up to your ear and talked directly into the microphone. Despite having an A5 processor (and possibly including the newer noise reduction circuitry), Siri might not function well on an iPad 2 either, since the iPad 2 doesn't have a noise-cancelling microphone.

Apple's product perfectionism often leads to scenarios where features that might technically work on a product wind up excluded because they don't work perfectly. I've run into this a few times with older gear; my old PowerBook G3 had no technical barriers to running OS X Panther or Tiger, for instance, but because it didn't run anything newer than OS X Jaguar well, Apple artificially restricted the device to Jaguar. Similarly, jailbreakers discovered ways to get video capture working on the iPhone 3G, but the results were rather lackluster compared to the officially-supported video recording on the iPhone 3GS and above.

Even if Siri technically works on Apple's older iOS devices, if its performance doesn't work to Apple's satisfaction, we may never see Siri ported to the iPhone 4 or current iPads after all.

Siri may be iPhone 4S-only because of noise reduction tech originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When it comes to forecasting the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is the iPad 3.

It's been a long, cold winter for TUAW. As days lengthen and Spring becomes less of a dream and more imminent, our thoughts turn to new technology. What do we expect to see in the next generation iPad and when do we expect to see it? Preorders in March, pickup in April?

You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your predictions.

View Poll

You're the Pundit: iPad 3 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I love Siri. I'm surprised at how much I actually use it beyond the gimmicky stuff. Texting while driving (through my car's Uconnect system) is so handy.

One thing I've noticed is that when I dictate a message, add a smiley face and have her read it back to me, she says, "Have a nice day colon comma." The odd part is that she has written :-), which is colon hyphen right bracket. Is this a glitch or does a hyphen and right bracket together equal a comma? I was never good at grammatical math.

Your doting nephew,

Damien

Dear Damien,

Ah, bless Siri. She's such a changeable creature. Auntie used to love when Siri would read out "Brr, it's cold" as "Bee. Arr. Arr. It's Cold". Thanks to Apple's live data center updates, Siri now responds "Burr" instead of "Bee. Arr. Arr."

The smiley-face being read back as a colon is similar. It's simply a text-to-speech glitch that Apple may eventually improve. You can report any bugs to Apple directly using their Bug Reporter online website.

Hugs,

Auntie T.

Dear Aunt TUAW: Why does Siri read smilies as colons? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Daily Update for February 6, 2012 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When you think Microsoft, you think "big." Especially from the perspective of Apple's long-time customers and loyalists -- those who remember the rough times in the 1990s, when Microsoft's US$150 million investment helped keep the company from fiscal ruin -- the idea of corporate behemoth-ness is paired irrevocably with Redmond's mastery of the Windows ecosystem.

It was Microsoft's dominance of the computer industry that led a federal judge to declare that the company had "monopoly power" in 1999. Correspondingly, the revenues and profits generated by the Windows juggernaut equate to the biggest of big money. At least, pretty big money.

In responding to Ed Bott's ZDnet article about the relative distribution of profits among the various business lines at three tech leaders (Google, Microsoft and Apple; Bott's point was that Google's cash comes almost exclusively from advertising, while Apple and Microsoft have more balance), MG Siegler noted that the pretty pie charts were missing a key piece of context. Apple's revenues and profits may weigh heavily on the iPhone, it's true, but what's not apparent from the side-by-side comparison is the scale.

It's not just that Apple is doing better than Microsoft in revenues, profits and market cap. It's not just that Apple earned and kept more than twice as much as Microsoft did in the holiday quarter. It's that the most successful Apple product, considered as a standalone business, is larger than Microsoft all on its own.

No, that's not a typo. In the quarter ending December 31, the iPhone rang up sales of more than $24 billion. All of Microsoft's businesses -- Windows, Office, Xbox, enterprise, consumers, the whole shebang -- chalked up almost $21 billion in revenues. Yes, Microsoft's strongest quarter for business sales may not be the one where IT purchasers are more focused on Christmas vacation than server upgrades. But it's still a breathtaking fact, and a striking transition from a decade ago.

[Hat tip to Business Insider]

Microsoft's $21B in quarterly revenue is nice, but it's no iPhone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Samsung USA has been on the warpath against Apple fans lately with a series of ads that show bored, desperate people standing in line for Apple's next product while happy hipsters show off their Android-powered Sammy devices. During yesterday's Super Bowl, the company took the gloves off with a regionally-focused ad touting the new Samsung Galaxy Note.

The ad, estimated to cost Samsung a whopping US$10.5 million in air time alone, follows the same theme as the others in the campaign. As in the previous ads, what appear to be Apple customers are standing in line waiting for a new device when a happy Galaxy Note user wanders up and the crowd drops everything as the scales fall from their eyes and they see the error of their ways.

According to the book of Samsung, what iPhone users really want is a huge phone that uses a stylus. Yes, you read that correctly. The 5.3" Galaxy Note, in homage to the Palm Treo and a handful of Pocket PC Phones from the early 2000s, comes with a stylus that you can lose after you get Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher's autograph. Your chances of losing the stylus are probably pretty good, since most people lack pockets that are large enough to hold the Galaxy Note comfortably.

I'll leave you with this final quote from Steve Jobs: "If you see a stylus, they blew it."

Samsung insults iPhone owners with Super Bowl ad touting oversized stylus phone originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.