The Bob Clark

Who doesn’t like free? And who doesn’t like great iPad apps? When the two come together it’s good stuff. With that in mind, we’d like to share our Best Free iPad App of the Week here every weekend.

This week’s pick is Frequency. Frequency is described on its App Store page as ‘your personal video service’. It’s another excellent, social and highly customizable video app for the iPad. This is rapidly becoming a category where iPad users are spoiled for choice – and that’s a very good thing given how crummy the selection is on TV these days.

Frequency claims to offer ‘more video from more places than anywhere else on the internet’ – I imagine some rival apps might have something to say on that, but the range and amount of content in the app definitely looks impressive.

Here are some of the app’s key features:

- Follow any of your favorite online video channels
- Stay up to the minute on all the topics that are trending right now
- Get every video your friends post on Facebook and Twitter
- Quickly access anything you are following in your personalized TUNER.
- Get highlights from all your channels in My Feed
- Go full screen or use AirPlay to watch on your TV

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Read the rest of Best Free iPad App of the Week: Frequency (512 words)

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iPad Insight

Another fun contest. Thanks to all of you who took part. It sure is clear that you guys and gals are very impressed with the Flowfold iPad Sleeves – judging by all the great comments we had.

Here are our two lucky winners:

Rebekah and Robin

Winners – please keep an eye on your Inboxes and spam folders, as I’ll be emailing you very soon to ask for your shipping details.

Now for some great news for everybody who didn’t win and for all of our readers: thanks to the very kind folks at Flowfold all of you (and all our readers) have got a chance to grab one of these excellent cases at 15% off.

Just head over to http://www.flowfold.com/products and enter discount code: ipadinsight during checkout for 15% off your order. If you have any issues with the discount please e-mail info@flowfold.com. The offer is valid through Tuesday February 8.

Great stuff. Huge thanks to Flowfold for all of their generosity.

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iPad Insight

A set of recent Changewave surveys show that the iPad is still the clear leader when it comes to customer satisfaction. Their latest survey focuses quite a bit on the Kindle Fire and Fire owners’ intentions of buying on Amazon – but it includes some details on customer satisfaction levels found in recent surveys as well.

These show that no less than 74% of iPad owners are very satisfied with the device. Only 54% of Kindle Fire owners say they are very satisfied, and for owners of other tablet devices (a catch-all category for all the sad sack would-be rival tablets so far) the score is 49%.

I tried out a Kindle Fire for a few weeks back in November of last year, and based on that experience I’m really not surprised that its customer satisfaction levels are not that great, and well below those of the iPad. It’s hard to see how the Fire can maintain its sales momentum if these ratings stay at these sort of levels.

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iPad Insight

When I first saw the video demo of the Gorillamobile Ori for iPad 2 case, I was impressed with how slick and versatile this case looked. I ordered one that same day and it arrived this morning.

As first impressions go, color me very impressed indeed with Ori for iPad 2. When I’ve spent more time with the case I’ll do a full review, but in the meantime here are a few reasons it is making a very favorable first impression:

– It’s sleek and unique looking – all lightweight aluminum goodness.

– It’s extremely versatile. You can quickly swivel the iPad between landscape and portrait orientation.

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Read the rest of Quick First Impressions – The Incredibly Versatile Ori iPad 2 Case (101 words)

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Post tags: iPad 2 accessories, iPad 2 cases, iPad accessories, iPd 2 case + stand

iPad Insight

Avid Studio, a new iPad app released yesterday on the App Store, promises to bring big-screen moviemaking capabilities to the iPad.

This looks like a serious iMovie competitor on the iPad. It’s priced at the same .99 level as iMovie as well, though iMovie is a universal app and Avid Studio is iPad only right now.

Here’s a bit of the App Store intro for Avid Studio:

We’ve distilled the world’s leading film-editing technology into an easy-to-use app that enables you to edit video, audio, and photos at the speed of your creativity.

Swiftly arrange your clips in the Storyboard, make precision edits using the Timeline, and add high-quality transitions, effects, and a soundtrack. Then share your movie directly to YouTube, Facebook, and more—or export your project to Avid Studio for the PC and continue editing with even more advanced tools.

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Read the rest of Avid Studio App Promises Big-screen Moviemaking on the iPad (352 words)

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iPad Insight

The Daily, the first iPad-only newspaper, is celebrating its first anniversary today. It’s published by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp and has had backing to the tune of over million before it even hit the App Store.

I did a review of The Daily last March (a month after its launch) – and though I found it a promising concept it was disappointing in many ways as well. Here’s a slice of my sum-up in that early review:

The Daily is a promising title, purely on the basis that it is the first of its kind and News Corp is obviously committed to making it a top-notch title for the iPad and possibly other tablets as well.

It has a long way to go to deliver on its promise though. Right now its speed and performance issues are severe, and they are killing the user experience in the app. They’re bad enough that it is tough to stick with the title.

Sadly, a number of those really basic performance issues stayed with The Daily throughout much of its first year. Millions might have been spent in many areas, but it sure didn’t look like many pennies were being put towards making the app work well.

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Read the rest of The Daily, the First iPad-only Newspaper, Is One Year Old Today (207 words)

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iPad Insight

Now that we’re into the ‘iPad season’ portion of the year, I’ve started thinking about what to do with the current iPads in my household in the lead-up to launch of the iPad 3 (or whatever the next-gen iPad ends up being called).

Right now I use an iPad 2 64GB WiFi + 3G model, and my wife and daughter share an original iPad that’s also 64GB and WiFi + 3G (handed down when I bought the iPad 2 on launch day last year).

Unless Apple decide to announce that the iPad 3 will be made of Play-Doh and powered by Android, I’ll be getting one on launch day again. And I’m sure my wife and daughter will be more than happy to take the iPad 2 as another hand-me-down at that point. My daughter is getting more and more use out of the iPad and some great educational apps as well as fun games on it – so the substantial upgrade from the original iPad will get put to good use.

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Read the rest of Starting to Think on What to Do with Old iPads Leading up to iPad 3 Launch (272 words)

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iPad Insight

Football Manager Handheld 2012 – the iPad and iOS version of the venerable football management app – has had a big price drop today and is now on sale at 50% off. It’s listed at .99 today, down from its standard .99.

I’ve been a huge fan of football management games for years and years now, starting with Championship Manager back in the day and through several generations of Football Manager. I spent lots of hours with last year’s Football Manager Handheld 2011 on the iPad, and I’m happy to say this year’s version, Football Manager Handheld 2012, is even better. I’ve already achieved a crazy addictiveness rating in this year’s version and I’ll do a review of it soon – in the meantime, I’ll just say it’s a great game if you like this genre.

I don’t know what the price drop is in aid of, or how long it will last – I do know this is a great price for this quality game. If you’ve been thinking on this one at all, today is a good day to grab it.

Here’s an App Store link for Football Manager Handheld 2012.

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iPad Insight

NewsFlash is a relatively new breaking news and headlines RSS reader app for the iPad and iPhone. It uses quite a simple interface and offers breaking news and top stories from around the world and in a number of languages.

I have a clear favorite RSS reader app for the iPad, River of News, and use Twitter and notifications from a handful of news apps to attempt to keep up with breaking news – but I’m always on the lookout for more good news and RSS sources, so I’ve been giving NewsFlash a try over the last several days. The short story here is that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like this app. Hit the break for the reasons why …

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Read the rest of NewsFlash – a Very Clean, Fast News & RSS Reader for iPad (557 words)

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iPad Insight

Those clever guys at BGR have heard from a source who claims to be in possession of an iPad 3 prototype. That source has run a debugging tool called iBoot that is said to have uncovered a couple of key details about the specs for the iPad 3:

– It’s got an A6 quad-core processor

– The WiFi + model will have support for GSM, CDMA, and LTE – for 4G data capability.

Needless to say the the photo could be a fake and the information could be inaccurate – but the possibility of a prototype being out ‘in the wild’ seems just about plausible as we’ve seen numerous reports of late on how iPad 3 production has already begun.

The quad-core processor is hardly a stretch to believe, while the LTE support is a little less of an oddsmaker’s favorite I’d say. And I still hope that LTE is not coming to this year’s model – unless Apple have worked some sort of magic that doesn’t allow it to be a massive battery killer.

Hopefully we are getting very close to an Apple iPad 3 launch event that will put an end to all the waiting and speculating.

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iPad Insight