Apple announces new 128GB versions of the iPad, new models available February 5

I find the goings on at Apple very odd, and more than a bit disquieting. Apple announces a brand new iPad model, a 128 GB iPad priced at $799, and its own website is silent on the matter. Very odd.

"With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs,” said Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Philip Schiller, in the announcement. "With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs."

The new iPad, which includes an LTE model priced at $929, will become available February 5.

January has been the traditional time when Apple would hold an iPad event. But Steve Jobs is gone, and apparently Apple has nothing really new to offer customers looking for a tablet. More storage is nice, but the new iPad adds to the line rather than bumps previous models. That means demand for the 128GB model will be minimal, and with new models, including the iPad mini, introduced last fall, it looks like Apple is really at a loss as to where to go with their tablets.

The announcement for the new model of the iPad talked mostly about business applications for the iPad which will demand more storage.

"Our AutoCAD WS app for iOS was designed to give customers seamless access to their designs anywhere, anytime," Amy Bunszel, vice president of AutoCAD products for Autodesk is quoted in the press release. "These files are often large and highly detailed so having the thin and light iPad with its Multitouch display, integrated camera and all-day battery life, is a real advantage for iPad users to view, edit and share their AutoCAD data."

Does this mean Apple will be on the new product sidelines until the fall, or at least until WWDC? Hard to say, but you can bet a lot of Apple shorters will see today's news as a sign of trouble ahead for Apple.

Morning Brief: All eyes on Egypt, again; WiFi on the tube

Thunderstorms and temperatures near 60 in the Chicago area in January. Something is just not right. Which is kind of what I was thinking about the situation over at The New York Times where last week the word was that if enough employees didn't come forward to accept voluntary separation packages there would be pretty massive layoffs. Last night we learned from NYT executive editor Jill Abramson that the paper would layoff "far fewer" people than anticipated. Fishy.

"I wanted to let you know quickly that we are through the process of offering voluntary buyouts and cutting staff," Abramson told staffers yesterday. "In the end, we had to layoff far fewer people than we anticipated, having achieved most of our savings through the voluntary process."

This is how the relationship between a newspaper and its staff turns sour.

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One year ago yesterday the headline on 'Morning Brief' was "All eyes on Egypt". Things have not change much, have they?

Today Gen. Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, head of the army in Egypt, said that the "continuation of the conflict between different political forces and their disagreement on running the affairs of the country may lead to the collapse of the state and threatens the future of the coming generations."

The latest crisis began when rioters were sentenced to death in Port Said, leading to protests, violence, and at least 45 more deaths. Those deaths have escalated the situation and now protests have reach Cairo as demonstrators have returned to Tahrir Square, the center of 2011 protests.

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If you're on the London Underground you are probably aware that Virgin Media WiFi's free service has come to an end – or maybe not.

Virgin Media, Vodafone, EE, T-Mobile and Orange customers get continued served thanks to a wholesale agreement, others get continued free access to the WiFi portal which provides travel information, news and entertainment.

For full access for other travelers, the price is £2 per day, £5 per week, or £15 for a month of WiFi access. If you sign up for the monthly service during February Virgin Media will actually give you three months for the price of just one – not a bad deal.

Digital magazines: new iPad editions expand the reach of existing print magazines or create new marketing tools for brands, institutions (part two of two)

Four new digital magazines released into the Apple Newsstand today each try and accomplish similar goals of expanding the reach of the publishers by either creating a new digital magazine or else creating a new digital edition of an existing print magazine.

Whereas equipment maker Again Faster may have wanted to create a new magazine to promote its brand (see last post), the next two new digital magazines to be found inside the Apple Newsstand are looking to create digital editions of existing print publications, but to make sure they are native in design and navigation.

Bulletin: Christchurch Art Gallery's Magazine is pretty self-explanatory: it is the quarterly magazine of the New Zealand art gallery.

The first issue inside this new Newsstand app weighs in at 249.5 MB, double the size of the magazines seen in part one of this post, but still fairly modest for a digital magazine. The layouts are simple, but very attractive – I'd love to be able to compare the print product with this new digital edition.

The app and its content is free of charge.

Estonian Film publishes only twice a year, but now the digital edition will allow the product to reach a much larger audience through the Newsstand.

The first issue found inside the app weighs in at 222 MB, again pretty modest, especially since there is a bit of video here (as you'd expect with a film magazine). Again, because the tablet edition was designed specifically for the iPad, the digital edition is easy to read, navigate and is an enjoyable reading experience. The designer has used a fair amount of native elements (text boxes, etc.) but has not gone crazy with digital magazine production tricks.

One thing that confused me, though, was the use of an icon that reads "Watch Trailers & Other Info" – it generally did not point to a trailer but simply to more information. In a film magazine the reader expects to see trailers but will be disappointed to only find a few here.

The take away from these four new digital editions is that more and more designers are seeing that producing a native designed digital edition is the way to go if you are going to grab the reader's attention inside the Newsstand. Three of the four new digital magazines here do a good job of giving the readers a nice digital magazine, and none went over the top with 500+ MB downloads.

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Here is a brief walk-through of the first issue inside the Estonian Film for iPad app:

Digital magazines: new iPad editions expand the reach of existing print magazines or create new marketing tools for brands, institutions (part one of two)

Four new digital magazines released into the Apple Newsstand today each try and accomplish similar goals of expanding the reach of the publishers by either creating a new digital magazine or else creating a new digital edition of an existing print magazine.

The simplest of the four new launches comes from John Hopkins Digital. JHU Politik is a simple replica of an existing publication. Sihau Li is credited inside the app with being the developer.

The goal here is simply to expand the reach of the publication and the free app with its free content does that. But because it is a replica, the app must depend on pinch-to-zoom to make the text large enough for comfortable reading (though a retina display iPad helps a bit).

A completely different tactic is used by the fitness equipment maker Again Faster with their new app Evolve Magazine.

The app says that the cost to subscribe will be $14.99 per year, though the first issue inside the app is available for free.

While JHU Politik was a tiny download due to the size of the issue (only 16 pages) and the fact that it was a replica, here the file size of the first issue is 109.1 MB – still not very large.

The first issue does some interesting things with audio files and also contains some video. But the use of landscape layouts are limited to the photo gallery and the video content, so the file size remains modest.

The goal of Evolve Magazine is the same as that of Red Bulletin, the digital magazine from Red Bull: promote the brand by providing interesting content in the way of a digital magazine for the iPad. Evolve Magazine is somewhat more of a modest effort compared to the digital magazine from the international beverage company, but it does the job of promoting the brand quite well.

Here is a brief walk-through the first issue found inside the new app Evolve Magazine:

Media app updates: Blue Note by Groovebug; Twitter's Vine app has 'em talking; the two Weather Channels apps; The Guardian for iPhone adds commenting

Quite a number of media app got updated this morning, though most updates were minor compared to the big relaunch of The New Republic for iPad.

For those who have been following the growth the Blue Note by Groovebug app, today's update is nice (see original post from October): today's update fixes an Airplay bug and adds song sharing recommendations to the app.

The folks behind this interesting app did not like my assessment that the app was "crippled" because the offerings were incomplete, often saying that the songs missing from Blue Note LPs were "coming soon". Well, its been five months and those missing songs are still "coming soon" – telling me, at least, that EMI is less than supportive of the idea behind the app (subscription based listening).

The app getting the most attention this morning remains Vine, the video sharing app from Twitter. Officially called Vine - Make a scene, the app is now on version 1.0.3 as the developer tries to work out bugs in the app.

But the tech websites are all a twitter over the fact that some users are apparently creating six second porn videos. Apparently AOL and other new media companies employ easily excitable boys to do their writing – they seem genuinely startled by the prospect of seeing mini porn classics appearing on their iPhones. Hey guys, get over it.

Recently The Weather Channel issued a couple app updates to its iPad app – one to introduce a new look, another to fix the icon introduced in the first update (It contained the word "TEST" in it).

One thing I noticed in the app reviews, though, was complaints by users that they were seeing off forecasts inside their apps. On their iPhone app The Weather Channel would be saying the temperature was one thing and on their iPad app it said something else.

Sunday, here in Chicago, an ice storm was forecast (it turned out less brutal than predicted). So I began to frequently check both apps and found the same sort of issues: the iPad forecast was very much different than the iPhone app forecast. How is this happening? How can two different forecasts be made by the same outlet on two different apps?

It looks like it is time to dump these apps for something else.

NHL GameCenter was updated this morning, the most recent of several updates for the app since the hockey season has begun. The latest update finally brings iOS 6 compliance and iPhone 5 support to the app, something that should have occurred in the previous app updates (better late than never, I suppose).

The Guardian has just issued an update to its iPhone app. The Guardian for iPhone is free for U.S. readers and now allows commenting by mobile app users, as well as other comment related improvements, and the usual bug fixes.

The New Republic for iPad Version 2.0: 'Way to evolve'

Quite a number of media apps got major updates today, though most were trying to fix bugs. One app, the iPad edition of The New Republic, is labeled as Version 2.0 and is a major redesign of both the magazine and the app itself.

The New Republic’s beautiful, completely redesigned iPad app brings the magazine to life with its fun and modern design. Far beyond just a digital replica of the magazine, the app takes all of the issue’s rich content and combines it with a host of engaging features and additional content: interactive photo essays, intuitive navigation and sharing functionality, and exclusive audio and video.

The New Republic for iPad may look very much new to loyal readers, but for those who have been following the evolution of the tablet edition it will feel very familiar. The app edition is a hybrid in that print ads are as seen in print, though it is possible that some of these ads were swapped out for tablet version as some contain links, and all are very readable. The editorial pages are then reformatted for the tablet reading experience, though many of them look like they were ported over with only a minimal amount of changes.

Nonetheless, the result is a good digital magazine and as one reader says in commending the staff: "to echo others, way to evolve."

The new app is offering the latest issue of the magazine free of charge: it weighs in at around 128 MB due to its portrait-only design and a minimum of multimedia content.

The magazine was purchased last year by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and the redesign of reinvigoration of the title is getting quite a bit of attention. The New York Times, as an example, is running a feature on the new owner and the magazine's changes today on the front of the B section this morning.

Here is a brief walk-through the free issue being offered inside the newly updated app (the next post will cover some of the other updates of media apps released this morning):