If the iPad had existed in the 80s, maybe this is how Survivor would have recorded its hit song “Eye of the Tiger.” This techno trio recorded the classic song using only the iPad apps Real Drums, Pro Keys, Baby Scratch, and Guitar Mania.

Watch the video and observe the awesome.

I have a very strict morning routine. 6:00 am hits the clock and I pivot out of the bed to my right, put my feet on the floor, and grab my iPhone with my right hand. Once I disconnect it from the wall, I go through my ritual: e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. Then I get up, feed the dogs, and I go on about my day.

Since I got my iPhone 4, I’ve noticed that Twitter loads slower from my iPhone. I’m not sure if it’s the official Twitter app or the iPhone itself, but it’s irritating. When it comes time to load up a pic or two, it seems to take forever, which makes me frustrated. Not a good way to start your day.

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In college, we had to dissect a baby pig. The smell was so strong that to this day the scent of cold ham turns my stomach.

Too bad we didn’t have this. From the Media Lab of Emantras comes Virtual Frog, an iPad app that allows you to dissect a frog virtually but very realistically. It’s all of the anatomy lesson with none of the gross touching or smelling.

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The rumors were true.

Hulu has finally released an app for the iPad — but there’s a catch. Well, two catches, actually.

First, you have to have an invite to access the thing. You can download and “tour” the app without an invite, but you can’t watch anything, so what’s the point, right? Second, this ain’t your daddy’s Hulu. This is Hulu Plus (aka “Hulu+”), a new version that you pay to access. Read the rest of this entry »

During April Fools day ThinkGeek showed off a fake arcade system that incorporated the Apple iPad, while their accessory may have been a joke, the actual proof in concept now exists.

Created by Hideyoshi Moriya, the Apple iPad Arcade has a casing made out of cardboard (yeah, I know…not so appealing) and it works by plugging the iPad into an Arduino board that sits inside the cardboard dock. The Arduino is then connected to arcade controls which include a joystick and two buttons.

The iPad has been with us for over a month. How many great apps can developers create in a month’s time? How many of those apps are beautiful, taking full advantage of the iPad’s high-def touchscreen and lightning-fast responsiveness? And how many of those are available to download for free?

Turns out, quite a lot. Everyone already knows how great iBooks is, how nice the eBay app is, and how amazing the Marvel Comics app looks. But there are hidden gems among the free iPad apps, and here are ten of them.

Air Guitar
This deceptively simple app lets you pluck or strum virtual guitar strings. You can even alter the pitch of the chords by holding down the strings on the fretboard. My 2-year-old son loves this one, because it’s uncomplicated yet it creates very realistic results.

AccuWeather
There are quite a few free weather apps available, but none of them take advantage of what the iPad can do like the AccuWeather app. The coolest part is the “hourly” forecast view, which appears as a circular, 24 hour clock-like graphic. As you trace your fingers around the circle, an on-screen icon changes to show what the weather will be at that specific hour. The rest of the app uses big, beautiful graphics and simple text that makes checking the weather a snap. The one drawback: there are ads that occasionally appear at the bottom of the screen. But deal with it — AccuWeather’s worth it.

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For the old skool style gamers out there who own an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad there is a game to look forward to. Mimeo is a pixel based game being developed by Shaun Inman, expected release is late 2010.

Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and down-sampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.

I said it before I’m not a gamer, up until today I have owned one game console and that was the NES. The first Mario Bros. was and still is my favorite game. So needless to say I’m looking forward to Mimeo. I have no idea if I’ll be able to play it well on the iPhone as up until know the few games I have I’m no table to play them “fluently”.

Check out this demo on how the game is played.

Shaun keeps a development weblog detailing the progress of the game and the technical details that are involved in creating this game. Besides, designing, programming and creating the scenario, Shaun also composes and produces the music himself. If you browse the development blog you will find some sound bits.

For a non-gamer I have been keeping up to date with the development progress. Although less with iPad version. I just don’t see the iPad as a gaming device, it is so big, and with my small hands I wouldn’t manage to use the controls without dropping the iPad. In any case I’m looking forward to the release of Mimeo so I have more to do on the iPhone when underway or lying in bed in the morning then just reading email, feeds, tweets and news.

Game website: Mimeoverse: Mimeo and the Kleptopus King

We’ve seen it all already here. Or at least I have and really would love to add the Foxtrot part to the title but instead, this is one of those moments when you just think ‘Whiskey Ta… Yes, make it a double Lagavulin please. No rocks, don’t water my stuff down!‘

You think here at ForeverGeek we haven’t seen a thing yet? Really?

What about those BlingVaders? Or the shark tattoo stump? So… Yeah we’ve seen it all and be happy that we save you of all the yawnsers that land in our inbox day after day.

But sometimes there’s a true WTF moment we just have to share with you and this is one of these. We all love our iPads we don’t have or can’t afford yet, so of course we tell you how to win an iPad, just because we are that good to you, but even we have our doubts sometime. And after seeing this, I really have my second thoughts on whether I want an iPad or not.

I’ll leave the bashing to you guys, I just found a perfect reason to hit the Whiskey before 11:00 AM.

Johnathan Bonnell and John Kumahara have created/designed an infographic detailing recent data statistics about the iPad. Besides being beautiful designed the infographic contains interesting facts such as usage intention and amount iPad sold compared to the first iPhone.

The majority of users will use the iPad to browse the internet, email and read books. Surprisingly only 26% will download(purchase) an app. Although maybe not that surprisingly considering an iPad app is an average of three dollars more expensive then an iPhone app. I know I won’t buy apps as easy on the iPad as on the iPhone, it’s much easier to spend a max of one dollar and buy 5 apps a month then buying 5 apps of 4 dollars for example. It will be interesting to see Apple’s report later on on how much iPad apps where sold over three months.

I’m starting to really like infographics like these with clear interesting data displayed in a beautiful design. Four weeks ago I also posted an infographic with the facts and figures about Google, which was really clear and informative.

Imagine how great it would be if people made infographics about Macbooks, laptops, blackberry, iPhone, etc. It would be a great aide when researching which product to buy. You will get a clear statistics and spend less hours reading all available reviews and users comment. I hope Jonathan and John will enlighten us with more infographics as nice and informative as this one.

Unboxing the iPad by Jonathan Kumahara and Jonathan Bonnell.

The iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are about to get their very own version of Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. As part of the new features unveiled today for iPhone OS 4 (but no new hardware was announced, sorry), Apple is this summer launching a feature called Game Center, which adds friend invites, multiplayer matchmaking, achievements, and leader boards to iPhone and iPad games.

iPhone and iPod Touch users will get OS 4 around late June, while iPad users will have to wait until sometime this Fall.

This is such a no-brainer for Apple, it’s a wonder they haven’t done it before now. iTunes offers more than 50,000 game apps, so Apple would be insane not to take this next logical step. It’ll all be done via a user interface that looks the same despite what game you’re playing, and can be accessed in-game without disrupting your progress.

Game Center is just one of seven major new “tentpole” features announced for iPhone OS 4, at an event today helmed by Apple founder Steve Jobs. Other OS 4 tentpoles include long-awaited multitasking capabilities between 3rd-party apps, folders for organizing apps, email enhancements, a new interactive advertising system called “iAd,” and more.

Having watched the coverage of today’s press conference, I’m kind of surprised at how Jobs downplayed the Game Center feature, in light of his obvious enthusiasm for other new stuff; his excitement over iAd was downright palpable. iAd will be a tremendous revenue stream for Apple, but Game Center has the potential to completely revolutionize gaming on the iPhone, increasing the popularity of the platform’s games and improving the overall quality of games available in the App Store.

It’s summer in my part of the world, and man, is it HOT! I spent the weekend – an extended one – at the beach, and even there, the heat almost seemed unbearable at times. Even a soak in the cool ocean water was sometimes not enough to make me feel refreshed. Of course, I had countless smoothies to help me forget the heat. There’s this other kind of smoothie that just might help you forget about the heat outside – an iPad smoothie!

I am sure that you have heard of the Will It Blend guy – Tom Dickson. He’s gained worldwide renown for his stunts on the Blendtec power blender. My favorite is still the one where he blends bad guys and Chuck Norris. You can guess what the outcome was…

One of his most recent stunts is – you guessed it – blending the iPad. I tell you, this is not for the faint of heart. He just makes short work of this piece of genius that a lot of people – including yours truly – have been yearning for. Check out the video for yourself.

[For some reason, I cannot embed the video. Please watch Will It Blend iPad Edition on YouTube for now.]

Doesn’t that just make you go OUCH? It makes me wonder about the sanity of some people. Then again, this is a guy who makes countless money off of his business. What is one iPad to him?

There really is no point to the video – unless, of course, you are looking for a blender that can withstand practically anything. As for you iPad owners out there, here’s living proof that your baby is not indestructible. Again, OUCH!

This past week-end it seemed like everyone I follow on Twitter who lives in the U.S. got an iPad. For two days 80% of tweets appearing on my screen where about the iPad. Of course now I want one more then before but I have to resign waiting for release in The Netherlands which isn’t even scheduled yet.

But for us who don’t have an iPad for one reason or the other and do have a netbook(or any computer for the matter), we can enjoy a tiny bit of the iPad internet experience.

Google has already upgraded their websites for iPad support, with the Gmail iPad version being the most notorious one. It is worth mentioning that the Gmail iPad UI was made taking a touch screen in account and a browser with web kit engine.

Create a faux iPad browser

A netbook is ideal for this considering the 10 inch screen. Install Google Chrome if you don’t have it yet and from within Chrome(see the upper right icons)create an application shortcut. Go into the info details of the shortcut icon on the desktop and locate “Target”. Find the end of the string and do a space after “chrome.exe” and then paste the following line:

-user-agent="Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10"

This will change the user-agent of this specific Chrome window to pass as an iPad browser, surf to your Gmail account and it should look like this:

A much nicer and easier interface for a small screen and you can get an idea of what to expect when/if you buy an iPad. I browsed the web some and some website will give you their mobile version. But I assume it won’t be long before websites start optimizing for the iPad like Google has done with Gmail.

Apple has a special page listing websites that are optimized for the iPad, mostly by adding HTML5 video and audio instead of Flash. This is also great if you have a netbook or laptop with little CPU power, HTML5 requires less CPU power then Flash. Heck it happened a few times that Flash crashed my Firefox on my 2Ghz and 2GB RAM Mac Mini with only Firefox and Tweetie running.

Finally you can add an extra touch to your iPad-Chrome by adding a custom icon. Find an icon(.ico) of your liking via Google. Go back into the info details of the Chrome shortcut you created and find the icon details, browse and select your new icon. Rename the shortcut to “Faux iPad” or something else and you are done!

Now you can enjoy the internet with websites fitted for small screen efficiency and faster video and sound loading, courtesy of the iPad.

Well now that was quick.

MuscleNerd from the iPhone Dev-Team has officially jailbroken the iPad. How’d he do it? Turns out it’s a twist on the “Spirit” jailbreak that’s been used for the most recent version of the iPhone, 3.1.3. Now I don’t know much about the process of jailbreaking – I’m not a programmer, remember – but doing this to the iPad seems a little less important than it is for the iPhone.

With the iPhone, the jailbreak process frees you from the shackles of AT&T,and allows you to get out of Apple’s restricted system. With the iPad, well, it’s neat to do it because then you can claim firsties. But the only real tyrannical dictator that you’re avoiding here is Steve Jobs, in which case you have to wonder why you’d want an iPad in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for homebrew and hacking. And if it wasn’t for people like MuscleNerd, we wouldn’t have some of the advances in technology that we’ve got today. But this is one of those products that I just don’t see wanting broken. I just like enjoying it as is, and keeping that homegrown system as fresh as it was from the factory.

Then again, if you can put Super Mario 3 on it, I’ll be next in line to jailbreak one.

Via Macnn

Whenever I need to know how my Mac is put together, I go to the website where they take it apart – iFixit.com. As is to be expected with the release of any major new product, they got one and took it apart, all within a few hours of the iPad’s launch. So what can we glean from their tireless efforts?

First, this thing doesn’t seem too difficult to disassemble. The screen comes off with a spudger, although they do report that you might break a few tabs in the process. They also note how balanced the device is, with perfect 50-50 distribution between the front and back panels. Apple also uses the smallest screws that iFixit has ever seen on an Apple product – T4 Torx heads.

There’s really no revolutionary info here – other than the device itself, it seems – but it is a good look at the inside of a beautifully designed product, The fact is, Apple takes as much care on the details from the inside, as well as the outside. For example, check out the antenna. Hidden behind the Apple logo, it’s press fit into a carefully machined insert in the back of the aluminum case, yet sits flush with the surrounding metal. Little details like this are the reason why Apple has so many fans.

Like the iPad or hate it, you’ve got to respect some of the pretty parts contained inside of this new device. Now let’s see what the modding community does with that information.

It’s time to stop pretending, people.

Sure, we can try to talk about other stuff this week. But we all know that this is no ordinary week. The iPad goes on sale tomorrow, and with early reviews praising it as the revolutionary product we all hoped it would be, we might as well face it that this is an appliance we’re all going to have to have.

It’s online, it’s in print magazines, it’s everywhere you look. Even when you watch the news on TV, it’s there. Or when President Obama has one of his rallies to talk about health care reform or this offshore drilling thing… All I’m thinking is, I wonder if the President is going to buy an iPad.

So let’s drop the pretenses and get right to what we all want to talk about. Now that it’s upon us, the iTunes store has officially opened the “iPad Apps” section for business (you’ll find it mingled with the iPhone apps). Here are some of the best free apps iPad owners shouldn’t be without. (And even if you’re still on the fence, you can still download apps to your PC or Mac, and save them for when you finally take the plunge.)

Reading

Wanna read some ebooks or magazines? Be sure to snag Apple’s iBooks app, which is required for buying and reading books from the new iBooks Store. You may also want to grab The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today. Comic book lovers should be sure to download Marvel’s snazzy new app, and I also suggest Comixology’s great-looking app as well.

Watching

TV & film fans should download the ABC and Netflix apps, both of which let you stream video in style. (A Hulu app is on the way, and the YouTube app comes already loaded on the iPad.) For news and information, I recommend the iMBD and Yahoo Entertainment apps.

Listening

Music listeners: Shazam and Pandora are waiting for you.

Making Stuff

Don’t let anybody tell you there are no productivity apps. They may not be Word or Photoshop, but there’s tons of stuff — including free stuff — that you can do with your iPad. You can cook dinner with some of the recipes of Epicurious, record voice memos, sketch with Draw or Dudel, update your blog with WordPress, or use the terrific Evernote to organize tasks of all kinds. And this barely scratches the surface.

Web Apps

Both Craigsphone (Craigslist for iPad) and eBay for iPad make listing stuff you want to sell about 10x easier than they are to do on the Net. Check the forecast with Weather Channel Max HD or AccuWeather. Bloomberg, NASDAQ OMX, and E*trade let you keep track of your portfolio.

Social Media

Twitter users already have a few different options, such as Twitterific or Tweetdeck. Surprisingly, Facebook has yet to launch an official iPad app, though you can still use the iPhone Facebook app. StumbleUpon has a nice-looking app. AIM for iPad looks good, too.

Play

Fun-looking free games that caught my eye include iMahjong 2, Jigsaw Puzzle HD, Paper Football HD, 10 Pin Shuffle Bowling, Jirbo Says (a new version of Simon), and Tunes Attack, which turns your iTunes playlist into a Rock Band-style rhythmic game.

As you can see, there are already hundreds of iPad apps available, and more are being added by the minute.

Normally I’d write this over at Apple Gazette – your source for excellent Apple news, reviews and commentary – but let’s face it; there’s nothing geekier right now than the iPad. I originally thought that it wasn’t worth my time. There was no reason for me to get an iPad when my laptop and iPhone do everything I need them to do. I just didn’t see a fit for it in my life, frankly, and I didn’t want to spend the money.

I did this same thing with the iPhone. God, did I want the iPhone badly, but it just didn’t fit all of the qualifications that I wanted in a device. I figured that if it was an iPod and a phone in the same package, then I wanted it to replace my 40GB iPod Photo entirely. Plus there was no MMS and no other compelling reason to buy the thing – at least in my case. But I spent the next year trying it out, playing with it at the Apple store and slowly falling in love. When the 3G came out, I figured it was mostly all the way up to my requirements, so I jumped on it. I loved the thing so much that I bought a 3GS when they came out, too.

Now it’s iPad time, and I’m in a familiar situation. This time though, I know what I’m getting into. It’s a new device with limited usage. It wouldn’t replace my laptop in travel situations, nor would it be my device of choice for hammering out blog posts. But it would be nice to use instead of my iPhone when it came time to surfing the web or playing a game. For me, I figured that two things would sway my opinion: the apps and touching the thing for the first time.

Well, the apps are here. Do a search for “iPad” in iTunes and you get the screen pictured above. Take a look at WeatherBug Elite for iPad and tell me that’s not one of the most gorgeous things you’ve ever seen. Twitteriffic for iPad? C’mon. Done deal. The final nail in the coffin for me was At Bat 2010 for iPad. Seriously, I could watch the Red Sox from my desktop and have all the stats I want on hand. Brilliant.

Alright, so the Apps are a done deal. What about touching it? Well I, like everyone else out there, won’t get a chance to touch it until this weekend. But when I get the chance, I’m gonna touch it so much that it’ll have to get a restraining order. I think that it’s going to quickly become a situation where, like petting a puppy for the first time, I touch it and want it.

There’s just one last hurdle here, and that’s the price. I’ve already decided on a 3G model, so I’m instantly in the upper price range. Then there’s the memory. I said 64GB, but truth be told, 32GB might fit just fine depending on how I use it. I doubt it’ll be for playing my iTunes playlist, but it’s definitely made for movies so that will suck up some storage. Then there’s all the books and apps I’ll be getting, mostly for reading to my son and playing games. It’s between 32 and 64 for me, so now I just have to decide if the price is worth it.

But now, unlike with the iPhone, I know I want it. Now I just have to decide on the when part.