Dungeon Hunter HD [$6.99 - iTunes Link] brings Gameloft’s popular iPhone game to the iPad in beautifully rendered, HD splendor.

The story unfolds as our hero uses the dark arts to resurrect his beloved wife only to have her turn against him and plunge a dagger into his heart (women!). You play the hero and get to choose between three classes, wizard, rogue and warrior. The inventory menu and manner of choosing skills is intuitive and enjoyable to navigate.

For more on Dungeon Hunter HD and screen shots continue with us after the break!

The main difference between the iPad and iPhone version is the crisp HD graphics and the absence of long load times between zones, which afflicted my iPhone 3G. Thanks Apple A4! The iPad version also allows you a choice between using the circle pad to control your characters movement or to place your finger where you want it to go.

If you enjoy real-time RPG games than this is a must-have for your collection.

Video and screenshots after the break!

YouTube link

Quick Review: Dungeon Hunter HD for iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

iBooks on the iPad is the best ebook reading experience I’ve ever had (though to be fair I only have compared it to the Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle on iPad, Kindle on iPhone, and various ebook readers on webOS and PalmOS).

Although initially I was a little concerned that reading on an LCD for extended periods of time would cause eye strain, reading for a couple of hours last night wasn’t a problem at all. I will have to wait and see if even longer sessions cause problems, but my hunch is that won’t be the case. You can adjust the brightness of the screen, the font size, and even the font type right from inside the app as you’re reading to ensure that you’re not squinting into some insanely bright screen.

You can search an entire book, look up words in the dictionary, jump to chapters, and so on. Bookmarking seems to only work on specific words, not on pages, but once you figure that out you’re set to go. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to enter notes, only to highlight text in one of five colors. In other words, academics can add the inability to add margin notes to the other reasons to shy away from ebooks for now (the others including the fact that you can’t trade or sell ebooks and, of course, DRM).

The iBooks Store is in-app and ties into your iTunes account, so you won’t need to remember a different password to use it. Book selection seems to be slightly worse than what you can find in Amazon’s Kindle store – but this early it’s not completely fair to judge on selection. As with iTunes, there are plenty of top-charts like the NYT bestseller list, categories, and the ability to download samples of books to see if it’s something you’d really like to read. One nice bit – iBooks uses the ePub standard, so it has the entire Gutenberg Project library

If you were thinking of buying a Kindle, don’t.

Video and gallery after the break!

Quick Review: iBooks on iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Kindle on iPad is, well, not as good as Kindle on a Kindle or iBooks. That’s going to be the bottom line for a lot of people. It works in both portrait and landscape – though curiously I can’t find a way to get a two-column book view in landscape. You can do most of the traditional ebook things: change the font size, adjust brightness, jump to any point in the book, have your place saved, etc. On Kindle you can also bookmark pages and add your own notes – all of which get synced up to Amazon’s cloud so you can see them on other Kindle devices like your iPhone, a Kindle, etc.

Instead of an in-app store, Amazon sends you to Safari to browse and search for Kindle book – which I don’t find especially annoying because the iPad’s web browser is so good. Amazon has a slightly better selection of books than Apple does too, though in both cases I often find myself stymied when trying to find a particular book.

With both Kindle and iBooks my basic feeling is that they’re good for light reading, but the difficulty of entering and exporting notes means that while I’ll use them for entertainment, I won’t use them for ’serious’ work.

Hopefully Amazon will update this app to support two-column landscape mode soon.

Video and gallery after the break!

Quick Review: Kindle on iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

One of BGR’s connects dug around in the iPad file system and once again found confirmation of what we all pretty much take for granted now — 4th generation iPhone, 4th generation iPod touch, and even 2nd generation iPad models are coming our way!

As a reminder, Apple users a major,minor version number system. So iPhone 2G was 1,1, iPhone 3G was 1,2, and iPhone 3GS was 2,1. Big jumps equal big hardware (i.e. non-cosmetic) changes, and that looks like what we’re getting:

• iPhone 3,1
• iPhone 3,2
• iPhone 3,3

Why three new models for the 4th generation iPhone (not iPhone 4G)? We have no idea, but we’ll guess GSM this summer, and could the others be Chinese CDMA, and maybe US CDMA (no Verizon rumors. Stop it!)

• iPod 4,1

4th generation iPod touch, likely this September.

• iProd 2,1

iPad was originally iProd 1,1 so it looks like Apple’s already got the 2nd generation iPad in the labs for March 2011.

(What IFPGA is we still have no idea).

More signs of next-generation iPhone, iPod touch, iPad! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

We’re getting a lot of reports from people who say they aren’t getting push notifications for their iPad apps, and we’re having similar problems ourselves. From productivity to games, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern yet other than “not-working”.

Are you having problems with push notifications on your iPad? If so, tell us which apps aren’t working for you. And if you are getting notifications, tell us about that as well.

Having trouble with push notifications on iPad? Tell us which app! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

We know where TiPb was for iPad launch day, we knew where you were, and now we know where Steve Jobs was — his local Palo Alto Apple Store!

In Palo Alto, Apple CEO Steve Jobs sauntered unannounced into the University Avenue store shortly before noon to drink in the scene. Many in the crowd pulled out cameras and iPhones to capture the most magic of Silicon Valley moments. Jobs chatted with a handful of other shoppers, but even his 30-minute invasion did not get in the way of their serious business — the buying of and playing with new iPads.

And why not, analysts like Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster already predicting up to 700,000 thousand iPad Wi-Fi were sold on opening day. If those numbers hold up, that’s certainly worth a little celebratory jaunt from Apple’s CEO.

[TUAW and the Loop via 9to5Mac, image credit]

Steve Jobs at Palo Alto Apple Store for iPad launch, mentally tallying up profits from up to 700,000 sold? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

How do native iPad apps compare with “pixel doubling” iPhone/iPod touch apps on the iPad? When Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall first introduced their magical new device, one of the bullet points hardest hit was that most of the (then) 150,000 iPhone apps would “just work” on the iPad — either letter-and-pillar boxed, 1:1 in the center of the iPad screen, or with 2X “pixel doubling” that made both horizontal and vertical sizes twice as big (480×320 iPhone apps would show up as 960×640 on the iPad’s 1024×768 screen).

It looked fine on the videos but people on the scene said there was a little (or more than a little) jagged edged, aliases, blurred chunk going on in there.

So we put some games and other apps to the test to see for ourselves and the verdict…

Eh, they’re alright. The looks faired from okay to pretty good, but when compared to native iPad apps you really notice the lack of iPad-ness — like watching an SD movie blown up to HD, you start to miss the details. It’s almost claustrophobic at times because you know a real iPad app could just blow out of those lower-res constraints. And while the sliding screens work really well on the iPhone, once you get used to popovers and sidebars on the iPad, you miss those as well when they’re not present.

• For Universal Binaries (apps with both iPhone and iPad interfaces included), this is a moot point of course. You get the best of both and a consistent experience between devices.
• For free iPad apps, just download the higher res version. It can be a pain to double-up on your apps but it’s worth it.
• For paid apps, try the iPhone version first but check out the iPad versions and if the extra usability or functionality is worth it to you, get it.

I ended up getting almost all native iPad apps, but I’m a sucker for UI. If you’ve found any iPad versions you couldn’t live without, or any you wish you hadn’t spent the cash on, let us know in the comments!

Videos and screenshots after the break!

YouTube link

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Native iPad apps vs. “pixel doubling” iPhone apps is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

TweetDeck on the iPad is a mixed bag – most of the contents of that bag are utterly awesome for the power-twitter user. If you need to follow a lot of Twitter streams then there’s simply no better way to track them all than TweetDeck. If you use TweetDeck on the desktop, you can set up a TweetDeck account and have your chosen columns synchronized between your desktop and iPad. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can send from multiple accounts too.

The not-so-awesome part of the bag comes when you want to view a link from a tweet. In landscape mode you simply can’t. In portrait mode what happens is the tweet appears in a at the top of the screen. You can also view profiles, recent tweets, and more. For displaying a single tweet, that area is simply giant. For displaying a web page linked from a tweet, it’s maddeningly small.

I said in the video that TweetDeck might my favorite iPad Twitter client, but I’m finding more and more that the portrait mode isn’t quite working out for me.

Video and gallery after the break!

Quick Review: TweetDeck on iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Marvel Comics for iPad [Free - iTunes link] and iPhone [Free - iTunes link] finally brings one of the big two old media giants to the mobile age — albeit kicking and screaming. And… this is the future of comic books. They look gorgeous on that big 1024×768 screen. There’s a ton more functionality shown off in the video below but they get the core experience right and that’s the most important thing.

There are other comic book stores and readers for iPad, and we’ll be looking at them, but Marvel deserves huge kudos for even entering this space — unlike DC which continues to sit on the sidelines, treating the digital revolution as confusingly as their cross-over events. (What?)

Now I’m a comic book geek from way, way back. Among my first comics were the now-Classic Dark Phoenix Saga from the X-Men. I love Marvel and I want to love this app. In many ways I do, but it makes me as angry as it does happy.

So if you just wanted to know about the app itself, stop reading and go get it. It’s free. If you want to hear me rant because I care, read on after the break!

First and foremost you can use this app to finally, legitimately, read digital versions of some of Marvel’s vast library of titles. A pretty tiny amount, however, given the size of that library. It will build over time, no doubt, but I have a sneaky suspicion their faustian pact with comic book retail shops will keep it hamstrung for a long time.

Evidence of that exists in the “buy print version” and “find local retailer” options in the app. Will Time Magazine’s app direct you to the closest newsstand for a print copy? I don’t want to store 1000s of comics in plastic bags anymore, thank you very much, and while the option is nice, a simple order from Amazon is nicer. I feel for the retailers, of course, but the world is changing around them the same way it changed for floppy disk makers. Marvel should be leading the charge into the mobile age of comics, not tip toeing on eggshells or tripping over fear of the future. (Ironic for an industry that made its fortune giving us incredible views of the future…)

And this manifests for the casual user how? You can buy all 24 issues of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s brilliant Astonishing X-Men series right in the Marvel Comics for iPad app for $1.99 each. Two problems with that 1) the series was 25 issues and they don’t seem to offer the Giant Size final issue! (Imagine getting Matrix off iTunes without the last 10 minutes!) and 2) while you could have bought each printed issue separately, you also now have the option to buy collections, 4 softcovers of 6 issues each, 2 hardcovers of 12 and 13 issues, and an Omnibus of all 25(1) issues. Discounted bundles would be smart, but being able to buy collections (including the bonus material!) would be wonderful. (iTunes doesn’t sell TV like this either, but TV is longer form and the precedent for collected volumes isn’t there).

Another pet peeve that I’ll rant on is the need for a Marvel.com account to download or buy issues. I understand they do it because their scheme is to keep the content on the Marvel.com cloud, but in-app purchases via iTunes would have been so much better. I don’t want another account, thank you very much, let alone an account per-publisher. Imagine if you needed separate Warners and Disney accounts for movies, a separate Random House account for books. That kind of thing should be consolidating, not expanding.

YouTube link

Quick Review: Marvel Comics for iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

AnandTech has put the iPad’s new Apple A4 chip-to-chip against the Windows Phone- and Google Android Superphone-powering Snapdragon from Qualcomm in a clash of the 1Ghz titans. And the results?

To quote Steve Jobs – boom!

If we take the network out of the equation, the A4 in the iPad has a 37.6% performance advantage over the Qualcomm QSD8250. This actually supports some of the larger performance differences we saw earlier. If Apple can manage to deliver this sort of performance in its smartphone version of the A4, we’re in for a treat.

Indeed! They’re not sure why the difference is what it is, but possible reasons could include iPhone OS being better optimized than Android, or higher IPC based on better core architecture, larger caches, or faster memory bus.

They, like TiPb, want that bad boy in the 4th generation iPhone (which still won’t be called iPhone 4G!). Qualcomm and other chipsets like Tegra won’t sit still, however, so Apple has to keep pushing that bar as well — if they want the cachet that comes with spinning premiere, custom silicon.

[AnandTech via Engaget]

Apple A4 vs Snapdragon – Clash of the Chipsets! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog