It turns out that Playboy is not coming to the iPad in app form after all. Instead, it is going to be a web service that will be available to anything capable of browsing the web, including the iPad, and “will utilize iPad functions”. There will still be a censored app version, since Apple has control over what goes into its store but not what’s available on the web. Of course, it will only be available when connected to the Internet, not at all times as an app would. Not really a surprise, in retrospect. In fact, I should...

Back in August, I mentioned the censored iPad version of Playboy, which was selling for the same price as the print version but not including any of the risqué pictures. I posited that it might be meant for those people who “only read Playboy for the articles.” However, it appears Hugh has made a breakthrough. Hugh Hefner posted to his Twitter feed that the complete 53-year archive of Playboy (already available collected on a USB hard drive) from its launch to the present day will be coming to the iPad in March—uncensored. So for those who prefer to...

I was watching the Steve Jobs Apple event yesterday afternoon, but had to go to work too soon afterward to put down my thoughts at the time. It didn’t seem terribly urgent since there wasn’t a whole lot relevant to e-books anyway. It was interesting to note that they said the Mac accounted for 33% of their revenue over the past year. What this means, taken another way, is that iPods, iPhones, and iPads—products that didn’t even exist ten years ago—made up just over 2/3 of their revenue. That’s twice as much as Macs, formerly their core product...

Steve Jobs doesn’t just make presentations. Sometimes he dials into Apple earnings calls, as he did yesterday to put paid to the rumors of a 7” iPad that have been floating around. Jobs pointed out that a 7” tablet is too small for good tablet apps scaled to human fingers. "Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff," he said. "There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inch is the minimum screen size to create great...

Steve Jobs had some interesting things to reveal today. In the iPod line, the Shuffle, Nano, and Touch get refreshes. No mention at all of the Classic line; I suppose they’ve had their day. The Shuffle moves forward by taking a step back—the new one resembles a smaller version of the second in form factor, bringing back the buttons everybody missed from the third, but with the Voiceover and other nifty features that people did like from the third. The Nano loses the physical controls and goes multitouch, looking like a smaller version of the iPod Touch...

Well, this is a first. Rather than waiting to post the video until several hours after the event, Apple will be livestreaming its presentation this morning…at least, to those with Macs, iPod Touches, iPhones, or iPads. Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT...

Sports Illustrated is the latest big-name magazine publisher to offer an iPad edition. It's a nice looking product, btw. The app itself is free and it includes a sample of what's to come. It joins the likes of Time, Wired and Newsweek...but they all currently have the same limitation: You can only buy individual issues, not sign up for a one-year subscription. Worse, most of them seem to think they can charge the full print cover price for each iPad edition. I bought the initial Wired edition for $4.99 but I'm not buying the second one. ...

I am probably an anomaly in the digital age. I do not own any Apple products (except the free version of QuickTime that has been forced on me) and have no plans to acquire any Apple products. I am not particularly impressed by the iPad or the iPod, and see the iPhone as just a money sinkhole. I used to think how great it would be to be able to build a computer to my own specifications and use the MacOS, but that never occurred because Apple doesn’t permit it. Of course, that was also in the days when I believed...

The new iPhone 4 has been introduced at WWDC, and it offers a spate of improvements over the older models. Many of these—front and rear cameras, wifi videoconferencing app, LED flash, improved wifi antenna system—don’t have a lot to do with e-books, but something that does is the iPhone’s new 960x640 (326 pixels per inch, on a par with print quality) high-resolution high-contrast display. The contrast ratio of the new display is 800:1, a 4x improvement over the 3GS’s screen. Battery life has been improved, too, offering an iPad-like ten hours of video or wifi web browsing,...

Steve Jobs has been talking about the future of journalism at All Things Digital’s D8 conference. Saying that he does not want “to see us descend into a nation of bloggers,” he has some opinions on what can be done to “save” journalism. "One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press," he said.  "Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford...

Prior to its launch, the iPad was sometimes called “the Jesus pad” for how it was expected to “save” the publishing industry. Peter Cox at FuturEbook has an editorial in which he states that it might better be called “the Judas pad.” Cox cites the way that it is not legal to lend digital books to friends—previously the industry’s “no. 1 source of book sales” according to Cox—“without committing a serious criminal act.” He also suggests that the publishing industry was suckered by “agency pricing”—that despite the promise of greater control over prices allowing publishers freedom to...

Gawker’s “Valleywag” section reports on an intriguing development in the world of iPad newspaper applications. When the iPad launched, one of the first applications to be spotlighted was an early version of the New York Times iPad app. Jobs had a Times executive come up on stage and demonstrate it. But almost nobody is happy about the final version of the app that the New York Times ended up producing—“NYT Editors’ Choice”, which leaves out much of the paper’s content, including content available free on-line. One of those unhappy people, Gawker says, has been Steve Jobs, “and...