iPad Live, the best damn iPad podcast on the ‘net, triumphantly returns tonight, so ditch what you’re doing and show up to chat because we want to talk with you!

(Yeah, those miserable… guys pre-empted our show on Sunday, so tonight we strike back. iPad lovers of the world unite! We’ll be silent no longer! iOS 5 is ours as well, and tonight — it’s our turn!!)

Time: 9pm ET, 6pm PT, 2am BST.

Place: http://www.tipb.com/live

If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, just leave them in the comments then come be part of the show!

(And yes, you can watch from iPhone via Ustream Viewer app (here’s how) — just search for “mobilenations” and iPad (we recommend Duet Browser.)

Facebook Messenger for iPhone has been updated and brings the ability to see when the other person is typing, shows if a person is online or mobile, and has the people you message most quickly accessible.

Despite Facebook’s claim of bringing the ability to see when the other person is typing, I haven’t seen any such indication. How about you?

Facebook Messenger is a faster way to send mobile messages to friends. With Messenger, you can send and receive messages with any of your friends around the world or anyone in your mobile contacts list. Messenger is available on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry.

Here’s the update details:

• Ability to see who’s online and who’s mobile
• Ability to see when the other person is typing
• A faster way to compose new messages to the people you message most
• Various performance improvements
• Support for 12 additional languages
• Support for iOS 5

Facebook Messenger is available on the iPhone for free.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Fun for Kids HD is an iPhone and iPad app that includes a picture book, puzzles, and games. It covers four main groups: animals, baby animals, vehicles and things and offers support for English, German, Spanish and Swedish.

An attractive design with clear images, sound and text catch your children's curiosity and keep them interested with independent activities.

• Picture book with four different groups of images and with a voice explaining, in the language of your choice, what the picture depicts. The child also gets to hear, for example, what different animals sound like.
• One out of four – choose the right image in order to keep playing.
• Jigsaw puzzles with cute illustrations, both entertaining and stimulating.
• Memory game with images from the picture book's four different categories.

Fun for Kids HD is available on the iPhone and iPad for $0.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

If you are currently jailbroken on iOS 5 you can now return to skinning and theming your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your heart’s content — Saurik’s most recent update to Winterboard (0.9.3901) adds iOS 5 compatibility.

Although Winterboard is now compatible with iOS 5 it still isn’t safe to assume that all themes and skins are. As always, make sure you’re reading the descriptions carefully. In most cases themes just don’t apply properly if they haven’t been made compatible but it’s still good to check.

Anyone found any awesome themes that work with iOS 5 they want to recommend? Let us know!

Busy day in tech yesterday, with Android Central running a never-ending live blog, covering everything from the new Motorola RAZR to the Galaxy Nexus, to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). If there’s a common hardware thread to be had, it’s that Android continues to spit out phones that are big, thin, and as wedged as an iPhone 5 rumor. The Galaxy Nexus in fact, with a 4.65 inch screen looks big enough for me to hollow out and use as an iPhone 4S case. Pretty much top-tier components all around, including innovative features like NFC beam for content sharing and facial recognition-based unlocking. The camera seems strangely weak, however, and Super AMOLED while bright and beautiful still doesn’t seem as well balanced as LED.

As to RAZR, where’s the flip? My old RAZR flipped. Just saying…

ICS seems to deliver on the promise of merging phone-bound Gingerbread to tablet-bound Honeycomb, creating a consistent UI that scales across the vast range of Android device sizes. It looks like they finally let Matias Duarte — the designer of webOS who went over to Google — loose to interesting effect. There’s a new font, which clones Helvetica better than Microsoft’s Arial ever did, and now looks very close the iPhone’s current Helvetica Neue. It’s also decidedly un-skeuomorphic, with flat, untextured regions that are deliberately unlike iOS. (We’ll talk more about that on the next Iterate. The lack of clear differentiation between smaller screen phone and larger screen tablet apps could be either brilliant or baffling. We’ll have to see.

Meanwhile over at BlackBerry DevCon 11, CrackBerry sat through the longest. Presentation. Ever. Seriously, it had an intermission. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hosted most of it, almost like Regis Filbin doing a gadget segment, but the technology they showed off was really impressive. Everything from the new QNX-based BBX operating system to the Torch-powered HTML5 engine to the TAT-driven new Cascade UI and framework elements show that while RIM did fall behind, they’re investing heavily in getting ahead. The developer story remains a little overwhelming — yes, there can be too many options — but the focus on results seems better. Much of this will make it’s way into BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0. Sadly, no new BBX superphones were so much as previewed. Yet.

With iOS 5 and iPhone 4S here, the competition isn’t giving Apple any breathing room, and a ton of new devices are already hurtling towards us like a fleet of Star Destroyers.

Check out all the Android and BlackBerry coverage and then jump back here and tell us if any of it tempts you away from iOS.

Apple has put “iTunes Match (Coming Soon)” placeholders up on iTunes in pretty much every country store we’ve checked, including the US, UK, and Canada, and the Music Settings in iOS 5 have just gotten an iTunes Match ON/OFF toggle, so… is iTunes Match about to go live? And if so, will it really go live everywhere?

iTunes Match was announced as part of iCloud and is Apple’s version of a music locker service. For $24.99 a year, iTunes Match will scan your desktop iTunes library, give you a 256-bit AAC version of every song it finds there that’s included in the 20 million strong iTunes catalog, and let you upload any songs (at the original quality) that aren’t. It’s been in developer beta since the end of August, with the only public launch date give as “coming soon”.

That means it’s perfectly feasible that Apple is indeed getting ready to launch iTunes Match. At least in the US. And maybe a few other countries. However, music licensing being what it is, it’s very hard to imagine Apple has secured the rights for every country that currently has the “coming soon” tag in place.

So we’re going to expect it when we see it, with the strong feeling it’s coming “sooner” to some countries than others.

UPDATE: While the page is still there, the link saying iTunes Match (Coming Soon) from the menu seems to be gone from the Canadian and UK Stores. Maybe Apple pushed that piece out wider than they intended to?

You’re sitting at your computer, mapping out your latest plan to take over the world, as your brand new iPhone 4S sits next to you, its accelerometer quietly measuring your every keystroke, figuring out what you’re writing… and sending it back to SHIELD.

Sound like science fiction? Something out of James Bond, Chuck, or Person of Interest? Not according to Georgia Tech.

“Using a smartphone accelerometer—the internal device that detects when and how the phone is tilted—to sense keyboard vibrations and decipher complete sentences with up to 80 percent accuracy. The procedure is not easy[…]but is definitely possible with the latest generations of smartphones.”

Needless to say, you could just think of all the espionage and privacy issues this raises. Personally, I’m just waiting to see which lazy screen-writer skips character development and wedges this into a spy flick first…

Source: Georgia Tech

We’re getting tons of email asking us about a supposed iPhone 4S/iOS 5 untethered Jailbreak that’s being shopped around — yes, a paid Jailbreak. Needless to say, it’s fake. Fake.

Don’t ever pay for a Jailbreak. Not ever. Every legitimate Jailbreak to date has been given away to the community by the well known Jailbreakers and/or Jailbreak teams.

If someone is offering you a Jailbreak for money, they’re trying to rip you off, just like any scam. They want to steal some money now before the real Jailbreak is released.

Until that time comes just sit tight, the moment the real Jailbreak is ready, the news will be everywhere.

(Please pass this on to your friends, especially new iOS users.)

PCMag notes that Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son revealed in an interview with the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on Apple’s next big product up until the day before his passing.

“I visited Apple for the announcement of the iPhone 4S [at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California]. When I was having a meeting with Tim Cook, he said, ‘Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting.’ I said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘My boss is calling me.’ That was the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S. He said that Steve is calling me because he wants to talk about their next product. And the next day, he died.”

Really, could it have been otherwise?

Source: PCMag



iCloud is Apple’s new, free don’t-call-it-sync service that stores your stuff up on Apple’s gigantic servers and pushes it down to all your devices. And it works great… but it can be a challenge if you have a family. Now apple has never been great about handling the whole family thing to begin with. Their digital hub has always been fantastic for a single person but started to break down when you wanted to manage a family, especially with multiple accounts. iCloud is no exception.

So what are you doing about it? Are you settling for one iCloud account that just shares everything for every family member, from spouse to child and back again? Are you keeping separate accounts for you and your significant other, but sharing one with your child? Did you use your iTunes account for iCloud, did you transition a MobileMe account, or did you create a new one?

Find my iPhone certainly works better when shared, and it’s cheaper to buy apps on one account than buy them more than once on several accounts, but things like Photo Stream end up being like crossing-the-streams — an explosion of stuff on everyone’s devices that no one particularly wants.

So how are you handling iCloud in your family? Any tips on keeping things economical and productive but still contained and manageable?