Techs Mag

Apple lays down the gauntlet for future tablets with a stunning effort


The original iPad Air showed us all what we needed to know about Apple's changed approach to tablets - with a 43% thinner bezel and a 28% lighter body than the iPads that came before it, the iPad Air champions the 'easier to live with' ideal.

Although the iPad Air's successor, the iPad Air 2, has now been out a while it doesn't mean that the original iPad Air isn't worth considering if you're after a tablet, especially since that the price has dropped now that there's a new iPad Air on the block.

The original iPad Air took many of its design cues from the iPad mini 2. It's got the same smooth back design, thinner bezel and more attractive speakers at the bottom of the slate to make it look like more of a family with the cut down tablet from Apple's stables.

While it's a clear copy of that smaller device, I'm not going to get upset as the mini already had a stunning design, and the Air takes that message and brings it to the big leagues.

It also has machined buttons that don't feel loose when shaking, bringing up the premium feel to the device.

On top of the improved design the Air also got Apple's A7 chip, bringing with it 64-bit processing power and reams of battery saving techniques to keep your tablet going even longer in day to day use. Again, that's been superseded by the A8X chip in the Air 2, but you still get a decent slug of power here.

And the greatest thing about the iPad range in my eyes is the price - Apple is starting the 16GB Wi-Fi-only model at the same cost as its rivals, and while that outlay does spiral up as capacity and connectivity increase, for an Apple device to not charge an (unnecessary) premium is something I'm really happy to see.

Even better, since the arrival of the iPad Air 2, prices for the original iPad Air have fallen.

You're looking at a price range of £319 - £459 ($399 - $579 or AU$499 - AU$709), starting from the 16GB version (Wi-Fi only) to the 32GB cellular option.

Apple has discontinued the 64GB version of the iPad Air, so if you're after a larger capacity then you'll want to invest in the iPad Air 2.

You could also scour the internet for a second hand iPad Air 64GB model. With the launch of the iPad Air 2 many people have put their perfectly good original iPad Airs up for sale, so with a bit of careful shopping you could net yourself a bargain.


Apple has lobbed in a lot of useful free software, as well as bringing a more refined experience with iOS 8, and you can see that it's put a lot of effort into making the iPad Air the tablet that shows it's not losing its relevancy in the market, even if it's nearly been two years since its launch.

If you're coming here thinking about buying the iPad Air right now - remember that the iPad Air 2 is now out with a number of enhancements over this model.

The keynote for the launch of the iPad Air talked a lot about Apple's dominance in terms of tablet usage, but since then a large number of users are starting to warm to the idea of an Android model as their main device - Samsung is currently the big name in Android, with its Galaxy Tab S line offering an improved screen and better ergonomics for those preferring the Android experience in a tablet.


 It's worth noting that the 16GB option of the iPad Air is nigh-on useless as a purchase if you're thinking of pulling in all the free apps Apple is slinging your way - this was an issue when the Retina display landed on the iPad 3, and has only got worse as more HD apps from developers have been slipped onto the App Store.

The fact that the original iPad Air now only comes in 16GB and 32GB configurations may make you reconsider your purchase if you're looking on storing a large number of photos, music, videos and apps.

Even so, the iPad Air remains a tempting purchase on paper - but how does it actually perform in the hand when subjected to rigorous daily use?

Design

The iPad Air is an odd device when you pick it up for the first time. When you hear all the numbers being bandied about you'd rightly assume that you'd feel something that was almost ghost-like in the hand, a tablet that could almost get blown away.

And I'm utterly not disputing that - the iPad Air is the most balanced tablet on the market, with great precision going into the engineering throughout.

However, if you've touched an iPad mini or just haven't held an older iPad for a while (and with some people we tested with, even those that had) you won't feel as much of a step up as you'd be expecting.



The design of the iPad Air is, as I've mentioned, very impressive. Yes, it's totally based on the iPad mini, and the smooth aluminium back is really great to feel in the hand. It's a shame that most people feel the need to slap a cover on an iPad as soon as it's bought - while I get the notion of protection, it hides away some cracking design.

That said, at least it keeps the fingers away from the chassis, and the iPad Air is a real magnet for prints. The back cover isn't too bad, but the mirrored Apple logo sucks down finger oil and is loathe to give it back even with hard scrubbing with a cloth.

It might not sound like a big deal, but it makes your premium new tablet look a bit unkempt right from the start.

But in actual operation, the design of the iPad Air complements the impressive innards superbly. It's unsurprisingly not possible to hold your hand the entire way around the edge of the Air, but then again it's so light (and comes with the ability to disregard erroneous thumbs entering the screen, again like the iPad mini) that it doesn't really make a big difference.

The rest of the buttonry - the top-mounted power key and the silencing rocker switch and volume buttons at the side - haven't moved far, but protrude nicely to make them very easy to hit no matter where you're holding the device - being able to find such things without looking is often sacrificed in the quest to make tablets look sleeker, so I'm happy Apple has gone the other way here.

There is one note of criticism in terms of design for such a decent (and still expensive, despite costing the same as many of its peers) piece of kit: the screen has a plastic thud to it when tapping, thanks to the smaller and lighter innards.

It's most noticeable when grazed with a fingernail, although in a case the effect is lessened. I'm surprised Apple let this feature go unchallenged, but it seems in making the design thinner and removing part of the inner cage the overall strength of the chassis is somewhat reduced.

It's not a major issue by any means, and certainly one that you'll only pick up on sporadically, but it's still enough to irk at times when you're expecting a truly premium experience.

Many of you will also be wondering why there's no Touch ID onboard the iPad Air when it's such a large selling point for the iPhone 5S.  
We're in the same boat. The architecture is there. It surely can't be an issue of space seeing as the technology fitted into the iPhone 5S.


Turns out Apple held it back as one of the 'big upgrades' for the iPad Air 2 - which certainly raised a few eyebrows.

A new superconducting chip made by IBM demonstrates a technique crucial to the development of quantum computers.


A superconducting chip developed at IBM demonstrates an important step needed for the creation of computer processors that crunch numbers by exploiting the weirdness of quantum physics. If successfully developed, quantum computers could effectively take shortcuts through many calculations that are difficult for today’s computers.

IBM’s new chip is the first to integrate the basic devices needed to build a quantum computer, known as qubits, into a 2-D grid. Researchers think one of the best routes to making a practical quantum computer would involve creating grids of hundreds or thousands of qubits working together. The circuits of IBM’s chip are made from metals that become superconducting when cooled to extremely low temperatures. The chip operates at only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

IBM’s chip contains only the simplest grid possible, four qubits in a two-by-two array. But previously researchers had only shown they could operate qubits together when arranged in a line. Unlike conventional binary bits, a qubit can enter a “superposition state” where it is effectively both 0 and 1 at the same time. When qubits in this state work together, they can cut through complex calculations in ways impossible for conventional hardware. Google, NASA, Microsoft, IBM, and the U.S. government are all working on the technology.

There are different ways to make qubits, with superconducting circuits like those used by IBM and Google being one of the most promising. However, all qubits suffer from the fact that the quantum effects they use to represent data are very susceptible to interference. Much current work is focused on showing that small groups of qubits can detect when errors have occurred so they can be worked around or corrected.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Google announced that they had made a chip with nine superconducting qubits arranged in a line. Some of the qubits in that system could detect when their fellow devices suffered a type of error called a bit-flip, where a qubit representing a 0 changes to a 1 or vice versa.

However, qubits also suffer from a second kind of error known as a phase flip, where a qubit’s superposition state becomes distorted. Qubits can only detect that in other qubits if they are working together in a 2-D array, says Jay Gambetta, who leads IBM’s quantum computing research group at its T.J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

A paper published today details how IBM’s chip with four qubits arranged in a square can detect both bit and phase flips. One pair of qubits is checked for errors by the other pair of qubits. One of the pair doing the checking looks for bit flips and the other for phase flips.

 “This is a stepping stone toward demonstrating a larger square,” says Gambetta. “There will be other challenges that emerge as the square gets bigger, but it looks very optimistic for the next few steps.”

Gambetta says his team had to carefully design its new chip to overcome interference problems caused by putting the four qubits so close together. They are already experimenting with a chip that has a grid of eight qubits in a two-by-four rectangle, he says.

Raymond Laflamme, director of the institute for quantum computing at the University of Waterloo, Canada, describes IBM’s results as “an important milestone [toward] reliable quantum processors.” Tackling errors is one of the field’s most important problems. “Quantum computing promises to have many mind-boggling applications, but it is hindered by the fragility of quantum information.”

Truly solving that problem requires going one step further than IBM’s latest results, and correcting qubit errors as well as detecting them. That can only be demonstrated on a larger grid of qubits, says Laflamme. However, not all quantum computing researchers think that qubits like those being built at IBM, Google, and elsewhere will ever be workable in large collections. Researchers at Microsoft and Bell Labs are working to create a completely different design of qubit that should be less prone to errors in the first place.

The 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch show the device’s promise and pitfalls.


Nobody needs an Apple Watch, or any kind of smart watch, really; we haven’t quite figured out what to do with these things yet, beyond activity tracking and replicating the alerts you already get on your smartphone. But that isn’t stopping app makers from trying to figure out more things to do with wrist-worn gadgets. There are more than 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch, which started selling this month from Apple’s website (though if you order now, you probably won’t get one until June).

Lately I’ve been getting to know the Apple Watch that I have to review by playing around with a handful of these apps. I’m trying to determine which may make the Apple Watch truly useful and which could just make it irritating.

So far, I’ve found that the apps that make the most sense tend to be those that take advantage of the watch’s proximity to your body, don’t require much time and attention, and don’t crowd its tiny display with unnecessary information. Apps that are more annoying than awesome try to cram in too many features, share content that isn’t really suited to being viewed on your wrist, or simply don’t give you enough information.

 Apps That Make Sense

Apple Pay: I never understood why I’d want to pay for things with my smartphone, since it still requires pulling something out of my pocket and it’s really not hard to swipe a credit card. But paying with the gadget that’s already on my wrist? Sure, I can imagine that being useful, and Apple Pay on the Apple Watch is smartly done.

The idea behind it is pretty simple: to pay for things in stores that accept Apple Pay, you double-click the oblong button on the side of the Apple Watch, which you hold up to the store’s credit card reader.

Sure, you have to first approve your credit card for use through the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. And you have to be shopping at a store that accepts Apple Pay (such as Walgreens, Sephora, or Whole Foods).


You also have to be good at following directions—the first time I tried to use it, at a Walgreens near my office, I didn’t realize I had to press the physical button. Instead I fruitlessly double-tapped the display, over and over, until I somehow deleted my credit card information from the watch. Oops.

The second time, though, I got it right, buying coffees and snacks at a Panera Bread. Not only could I avoid taking out a credit card, but I was able to leave my bulky wallet back at the office.

Yelp: The review service works well on the Apple Watch because it’s simple on the surface but contains a lot of information down below that you can get to if you need it.

Opening it up, you’ll see icons for restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and places that are popular and new. Tap on one of the icons and you get a list of 10 places along with vital stats for each (its distance from your location, price range, star rating, cuisine). If one of the places—a nearby bar, for instance—is closed at the moment, you’ll also see how long it will be until it opens today.

Tap on a result and you’ll get more precise information, like the exact location, hours, and some review highlights. You can tap a tiny map to get turn-by-turn directions, and if you want even more information you can tap on a review and read it on the watch’s screen. Yes, there’s a lot here, but it’s cleverly hidden; you can get a lot out of the app with just two taps and a turn of the watch’s so-called digital crown.

Clear: I make lots of lists, especially of the to-do and grocery varieties. For a while, I used a pretty, simple iPhone app called Clear, but the awkwardness of trying to maneuver a shopping cart while swiping my smartphone screen to delete items from the list made me switch back to handwritten lists I could crumple in my hand.

No more, thanks to Clear for the Apple Watch, which I quickly became enamored of during a trip to my local Safeway. It made it easy to see what I had to buy for dinner that night and then quickly tick it off my list.

The Clear app for the watch is pretty simple. Assuming you already have the app on your iPhone, you’ll see all the lists you’ve made, and while you can’t make new lists (a good limit, I think), you can add new items to any list by pressing a finger firmly on the name of the list, or any item within the list, and then dictating what you want.

You mark tasks as completed by tapping a little circle next to each item, and once they’re all completed the list will disappear from the Apple Watch. It will still exist on the iPhone, with a strike through each item, which is useful for things like recurring grocery lists.

Apps That Miss the Mark

Amazon: The Amazon app for the Apple Watch makes sense in theory. I’m a big comparison shopper, and I frequently pull out my smartphone in stores to see prices on Amazon. Simply talking to the Apple Watch to search for, say, a bottle of blue Essie nail polish and then buying it with a click on its tiny product page, all on my wrist, sounded like something that could be useful at times.

In reality, though, the Apple Watch isn’t yet good enough at understanding the strange words and brand names that often identify specific products. I’m not sure if it’s a voice recognition issue, a microphone issue, or both, but when I asked the Amazon app to find things like “Mr. Beams closet light” or “Essie nail polish ‘In the Cab-Ana,’” I ended up nearly shouting at my wrist in the corner of Walgreens, repeating these product names like strange incantations.

The few times it did understand me like when I searched for “Stanley 16-foot tape measure”—the app showed me five different products in its search results, each accompanied by some basic information. Tapping a result yielded the full item name, its Amazon rating, and buttons to buy it or save it to a wish list with a tap (I had previously set up one-click ordering on my iPhone). But with so little information in the description, I was afraid of getting the wrong one, so I turned to my laptop to actually make the purchase.

Instagram: Instagram images often seem too small on my iPhone’s screen, so looking at the nine latest updates to my Instagram feed on a much smaller display strapped to my wrist was even less appealing.

In that sense, then, the Instagram app for the Apple Watch didn’t disappoint: it was about as annoying as I thought it would be.

It looks simple enough on the surface, presenting you with icons to see the feed of your friends’ photos, or likes and comments people have made on yours.

Images looked crisp on the Apple Watch’s display, but so minuscule I couldn’t always figure out what was going on at a glance. If you tap on a picture, you can see the caption and any likes and comments. Further tapping is required to see who liked the photo and who said what, and to reply to a photo by choosing from a series of 12 emoji (smiley faces, various hand gestures, and, thankfully, the smiling poop).

 It’s possible to see user profiles in the app, but they’re painful to look at: just a tiny, circular profile photo atop a square containing that user’s four most recent photos. Yep—they’re even smaller than what you see in the app’s photo feed.

Twitter: Twitter is meant for short interactions, so it seems like a natural fit for the Apple Watch’s small display. Unfortunately, its first iteration doesn’t show quite enough information to make it useful.

Some interactions are easy: you can retweet and mark favorite tweets with just a tap, and respond (by dictating to the watch or adding an emoji).

But the Apple Watch version of the Twitter timeline only shows you the five most recent tweets from people you follow. If you want to see more, you have to scroll down and tap “More,” over and over, until you are sated. And while you’ll get a notification when you’re mentioned on Twitter, there’s no way to view that activity by just looking in the app.

• Screen stops turning orientation, even in settings menu G-sensor no longer moves. - POSSIBLE FIX : Go to taskmanager and kill all tasks - All credit and thanks go to casca
• Calendar widget crashes if more then 20 appointments - TIP : Just remove the widget since it will keep crashing until you remove it...
• Other HTC widgets seem to be causing lag too.
• GPU Rendering can't be forced.
• Live wallpaper stops on switching between screens
• GPS issues - Possible fix : Download gps status on the market and clear the a-gps data - if this works all credit and thanks go to matmar
• Screen starts "jumping"
• When browsing/camera/other Sense 4.0 related tasks -> It looks like there is "noise" on the screen. Like this
• SIM card stops working/restarts/no connection
• The three dot menu button appears in some ICS native apps, like the YouTube app for example. - Fix for this in Dev section (requires unlock)
• Tegra 3 games (and some others) lag, this is probably connect to some video driver bug. (Hardware is fast enouf to play it without lag)
• Screen reactivating after using the lock-button (only 1 click ofc)
• When opening the Clock app (just by pressing the clock on your homescreen), and moving to the Timer-tab (the one on the far right) it always adds one hour, one minute and one second to whatever time you set it to.

• Lag in Multi-Tasking window and other elements - TIP : Go to Dev Settings - disable animations. This improved the speed a lot for me (even thou most animations keep on running, only the excessive ones get turned off) [This lag is clearly a software issue, other launchers are lag-free; should be fixed soon]
• A lot of people are reporting signal problems. (No clue what's causing it)
• Yellow spots on the screen 

1. Press and hold the VOLUME DOWN button, and then press and hold the POWER button.
2. Wait for the screen with the three Android images to appear, and then release the POWER and VOLUME DOWN buttons.
3. Press VOLUME DOWN to select FACTORY RESET, and then press the POWER button.