The next generation iPad may not be called iPad 3 but iPad HD instead. We’re already expecting a higher resolution screen and the HD suffix would no doubt be more marketable to the general public than a generic number. The question remains as to whether Apple will switch up their naming scheme this time around to center around a single feature.

Considering Apple is rumored to be doubling the resolution of the current iPad 2, it may make sense for them to market the heck out of an arguably retina display capable iPad. The general public understands what HD is and what it means. It would also make the new iPad the first tablet to be able to natively support 1080p at its full resolution. Apple could market that feature to distract people from the fact that it may not receive an A6 processor update like originally rumored.

If the new iPad set to debut at the March 7th press event does indeed sport the expected 2048×1536 resolution, I’d be betting to guess the screen will be its main selling point.

When the iPhone 4 was released the naming scheme didn’t change. When the iPhone 4S dropped it also followed the same pattern with the S appendage added. It appears that Apple’s cycle tends to focus on a large update every other year with an incremental update filling the gaps. We’ll see if they break that cycle with their third iteration of the iPad.

The iPad 2 received a processor bump over the original iPad as well with many other added features. It’s possible that the higher resolution screen may be the largest upgrade. If that’s the case, Apple will want to make sure they market the heck out of it accordingly. I’m still not quite sold on Apple changing their naming scheme just yet. One thing I think we can agree on is that we’ll be seeing a new iPad come Wednesday.

Source: VentureBeat

Ten One Design has just announced that it is working on a pressure sensitive Bluetooth 4.0 stylus for the next generationiPad 3. Ten One has a great reputation when it comes to accessories and this one looks to take that to the next level. The new stylus which is currently in development uses technology that has never been used before in an iPad stylus.

Using the latest Bluetooth 4.0 standards' enables Ten One Design to create a stylus that is pressure sensitive. This basically means that it can represent a much truer pen like experience where a line is thicker or darker depending on the pressure made with the sylus. As the iPad screen is capacitive, it can't distinguish how hard the screen has been pressed; just that it has been pressed. Ten One Design believes with the use of Bluetooth 4.0 this can now be made a reality.

You may have been hearing good things about Bluetooth 4.0. It’s a fast wireless connection, and is fully supported by the CoreBluetooth framework in iOS5. Bluetooth 4.0 devices don’t need to pair with your iPhone or iPad, they just connect and work. Also, the battery life is dramatically better – think months or a year on a single coin battery. We’ve developed the first pressure-sensitive stylus for iPad that uses Bluetooth 4.0.

The pen will offer full pressure sensitivity, palm rejection capability, lights, buttons and no need for Bluetooth pairing. There is already an SDK available which will allow app developers to immediate integrate support for the stylus in their apps. The pen will only work with iOS devices that have Bluetooth 4.0. Currently that is only the iPhone 4S however it is almost certain that the iPad 3 will have it too.

The pen still needs to garner FCC approval but Ten One Design is hanging back on full production until it believes that there is enough developer support for the product. If this works as advertised, that shouldn't take very long!

Source: Ten One Design

Following their 25 Billion app download, Apple has updated their list of all-time top App Store apps in both the free and paid categories. The original list was launched back when Apple celebrated 10 billion app download.

This time around, they’ve gone ahead and increased the section sizes from 10 to 25 for both iPhone and iPad apps, making them rather long.

Federico Viticci from MacStories did some heroic work parsing out the trends.

• 17 apps from Top Paid for iPhone chart are from the Games category.
• There are no Apple apps in the Top Paid for iPhone chart.
• There are no Apple apps in the Top Free for iPad chart.
• There are 4 Apple apps in the Top Paid for iPad chart.
• There are two Google apps in the Top Free for iPhone chart, no Apple apps.

Check out their full analysis via the link below. For a full list of the apps (and an easy way to get any you may be missing) hit the iTunes link.

Source: Top App Store apps on iTunes via MacStories

The same source that originally told iMore Apple would be holding their iPad 3 event on March 7 has now let us know that the announcement will include 4G LTE networking. We’d heard previously that 4G LTE would be coming to iOS in 2012, but not whether it would make the cut for iPad 3, or whether Apple would save it for iPhone 5 in October.

Sounds like LTE is good to go, though it remains to be seen how Apple will handle the many different 4G bands being used internationally. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that AT&T and Verizon would be getting LTE-equipped iPads, but had no word on carriers outside the U.S.

Verizon has the most to gain from an LTE iPad. Right now, Verizon is stuck carrying an iPad 2 that gets up to 3mbps on EVDO Rev. A, well below the theoretical 14.4mbps offered on AT&T’s HSPA network. Given how far ahead Verizon is with LTE, that has to sting, as has to be something they want Apple to address.

Despite recent uncertainty about the process, iMore is also still hearing that the iPad 3 will ship with a quad-core processor. We’ll find out one way or another on Wednesday.

For a complete rundown of all the rumors, check out our iPad 3 event preview or jump into our iPad 3 Forums.

Yet more iPad 3 rumors today, including reports of Apple working on a new Smart Cover with a back, and sticking with the glass back for the iPhone 5. iLounge‘s Jeremy Horwitz says:

[The new Apple case] has a folding magnetized Smart Cover on the front, and a rear shell made from fiberglass covered with PU/bicast leather.

Apple is nonetheless continuing to experiment with glass and ceramic rear shells for a future iPhone model. The upshot is that the new design would be like the iPhone 4, but thinner, thanks to Corning's stronger Gorilla Glass 2 and the further reduction of internal components.

We took a look at Gorilla Glass 2 at CES 2012 and it could make for thinner, lighter iPhones. Horwitz also says a larger screen for the iPhone 5 is still “in the cards”, and echoes what iMore first reported over a week ago, that Apple is working on switching from the traditional 30-pin dock connector to a “micro-dock”.

We’re only days away from the iPad 3 event, but it’ll probably be the fall before we see iPhone 5.

TestFlight, the popular beta distribution service for iPhone and iPad apps, has just launched TestFlight Live and aims to give iOS developers real-time analytics (how many users are using their apps right now), engagement metrics (how often and how long users are using their apps), and more.

TestFlight LIVE has arrived. Use Testflight for more than just Beta testing. Just one SDK for Beta and Live.

One simple line of code empowers developers to take control of their beta testing and their app business. Our goal is to help you build better apps.

Both services are free and we plan to add optional premium features in the future. The features offered today will remain free.

In addition to real-time and engagement, TestFlight Live will also measure audience (which devices and which features are most used), revenue, and stability.

No word yet on what those premium features are, but developers can download the TestFlight Live SDK now via the link below. If any developers give it a whirl, let us know what you think about it in our iOS developers forum.

Source: TestFlight

Much like T-Mobile in the US, China Mobile’s 3G technology isn’t compatible with Apple’s iPhone, so unofficial iPhones are a strictly 2G only affair. While there are over 1 million unofficial iPhone on T-Mobile users, that’s dwarfed by China Mobile’s 15 million unofficial iPhone users. An unofficial number big enough, it seems, to garner a little official support from Apple. According to The People’s Daily Online:

China Mobile said that Apple had updated the system of all iPhone 4S handsets manufactured after Feb. 8, 2012 to fully support its network, and will offer a software update for previously manufactured iPhone 4S handsets in early March.

The issue apparently stems from the iPhone 4S supporting the P frequency band (885-915MHZ) but not E frequency band (880-890MHz). China Mobile supports both, primarily E for indoor and P for outdoor. So if a user tried to connect while on the E band, the iPhone 4S wouldn’t work.

China Mobile has 665 million subscribers, so even though it’s not an official iPhone carrier today, it’s a huge potential market for Apple. It’ll be nice for everyone when the iPhone 4S unofficially works better on China Mobile. It will be something else entirely when a future iPhone goes official.

Source: The People’s Daily via The Next Web

For today only, the iMore iPhone Accessory Store has the Seidio Innocase II Surface for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 on sale for only $16.95! That’s a whopping 43% off! Get them before they’re gone!

Shop Seidio Innocase II Surface for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 now!

Crafted from a hard yet flexible material, the Seidio Innocase II Surface provides an amazingly thin layer of protection without adding the excessive bulk of other cases.

The Innocase II consists of interlocking top and bottom pieces that fit your iPhone 4S, AT&T iPhone 4, or Verizon iPhone 4 precisely, and Seidio’s signature soft touch coating provides a great feel and better grip without attracting lint.

Features:

• 1mm thin case provides scratch protection without adding much bulk
• Crafted from a heard, yet flexible material with Seidio’s signature soft touch coating
• Unique slide-in design consists of top and bottom interlocking pieces that fit your iPhone 4S, >- AT&T iPhone 4, or Verizon iPhone 4 precisely
• Precision cutouts for ports and controls

“Matthew” is an autistic boy from Andover, Massachusetts, whose Bar Mitzvah — the Jewish Rite of Passage for 13 year old boys — was made possible thanks to Apple’s iPad. According to The Boston Globe, Matthew is on the severe end of the autistic spectrum; not able to speak complete sentences, write or read. What Matthew can do is touch icons on the iPad and put together complex thoughts and ideas with the help of touch technology.

Matthew could record the names of his family member and have each represented by an icon on the iPad. He could then touch that icon and have their name announced over the PA as they were "called" to the Bima (the stage upon which the Sabbath service is conducted.)

The article went on to then mention that when it was time to recite the "watchword of the Jewish faith" – the prayer known as the "Shema," Matthew just touched an icon of an” ear.” What I found particularly interesting about that was that in Hebrew, the word Shema means to "hear" or to "listen" and, thus, Matthew connected the meaning of the prayer to the icon on the iPad.

As Rabbi Robert Goldstein, Matthew's rabbi stated: "We're blending the most cutting-edge technology with tradition; with reading the ancient text of Torah. It's facilitating spirituality.''

It is clear that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what this remarkable device can do – not just for us tech enthusiasts – but to literally "give a voice" to those who have none.

Read the full article on the Boston Globe web site.

Source: The Boston Globe

Apple has followed up their previous website announcement with a press release, repeating that the iTunes App Store has reached 25 billion downloads, and revealing that the person who downloaded the 25 billionth app, Where’s My Water? Free, was Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China. He’ll be getting a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

"We'd like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. "When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users."

The App Store, which launched alongside the iPhone 3G and iOS 2 (iPhone OS 2) in 2008, is now in 123 countries, with over 550,000 apps, over 170,000 of which run natively on the iPad.

Here’s the full press released, and congratulations to Chunli Fu!

Apple's App Store Downloads Top 25 Billion

CUPERTINO, California—March 5, 2012—Apple® today announced that more than 25 billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store™ by the users of the more than 315 million iPhone®, iPad® and iPod touch® devices worldwide. The 25 billionth app downloaded, Where’s My Water? Free, was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China. As the winner of the App Store Countdown to 25 Billion Apps, Chunli Fu will receive a $10,000 iTunes® Gift Card.

"We'd like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. "When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users."

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 550,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 123 countries around the world, with more than 170,000 native iPad apps available. App Store customers can choose from an incredible range of apps in 21 categories, including Newsstand, games, business, news, sports, health & fitness and travel. The App Store has paid out more than four billion dollars to developers.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

 

Square is already well known for the way it brought easy credit card transactions into the hands of small businesses and sole traders. Now it has gone one step further and announced its latest creation which is a register app for the iPad. The new app aims to replace a traditional POS (point of sale) cash register with an iPad.

“I truly believe POS, as you know it today, is dead,” says Megan Quinn, director of products at Square. “This will bring Square to an entirely new, small-market audience (bricks-and-mortar stores).” The new app extends Square far beyond just a payment-processing service. It replicates and, Square claims, enhances the features of a cash register for mom-and-pop storefronts. The app accepts cash and credit payments, lets merchants easily list menu items, and tracks the history of customers’ purchases.

The app which is called Square Register will be offered for free and Square will make its money through its existing revenue stream of taking  2.75% of every credit card transaction made using its service. The app also contains a highly impressive analytics application which will allow any small business to assess sales data and then tailor all aspects of their business to maximise sales.

Source: USA Today

Square Register from Square on Vimeo.

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This weeks selections include a few games, a fun children’s book, an app for writers, and an interesting photography app.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Draw Something — @Alli_Flowers

Did you ever play Pictionary? Great party game. This is basically the same game on your phone or tablet. Notice how nonspecific I was there? That’s because you can play on your iPhone, iPad, or Android phone or tablet – so you can play against your friends, no matter what they use.

You’re given a choice of 3 words, easy, medium, or hard. You choose the one you think you can draw, and you draw. So far so good. When your opponent’s turn comes, he sees a video playback of you drawing. Beneath the drawing are some letter tiles, so he has a good chance of figuring out what you’ve drawn, regardless of your talent. You tap the letter and pop it into the spaces to spell out the word.

You get “coins” for guessing your words, 1 for the easy word, 2 for the medium, and 3 for the hard ones. There are a few opportunities to get help. For instance, you can choose a different set of words if you can’t draw any of the words you initially pull. If you can’t guess the drawing, you can get rid of some of the letters so that you have a smaller pool of letters from which to choose. But your second chances are not unlimited, so use them wisely.

There are two versions of Draw Something. One is ad sponsored and free, the other is currently on sale (on all platforms) for $.99. This is a great game that’s fun for all ages. (My youngest opponent is 8!)

Free – Download Now, $0.99 – Download Now

Ladybird Classic Me Books –- @chrisoldroyd

I have a real soft spot for classic children’s books as I remember them fondly from my childhood. Luckily Ladybird Classic Me Books is available in the App Store and it brings back the magic of these wonderful books.

The App is a little buggy but the way the books are reproduced to look and feel like the original hard backed books I read is very impressive and you soon forgive the bugs. The titles available are excellent and includes classics like The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs. My little girl absolutely loves this app.

The app costs $0.99 and for that you get one book included, the other books are all available through an in-app purchase at an additional $0.99 per book. I can’t recommend this app enough if you have young children and enjoy reading to them!

$0.99 – Download Now

Elements for iPad – @iMuggle

I’ve tried several writing apps on my iPad and always find myself coming back to Elements. Sometimes I just don’t want to carry around my MacBook Pro but have a need to write or take notes on the go.

Given I do a fair amount of writing with Markdown for iMore, I’ve found Elements to be a perfect combination of writing on the go and from my computer. Since it syncs all my notes with Dropbox, I can pick up right where I left off when I get back home or to the office.

When you’re done writing you can export to PDF or HTML, print, or email the file. Elements also gives you the option to publish directly to Facebook or tumblr is either one of those services are important to you.

If you’re looking for a lightweight client for anything from shared notes to lengthy articles, I highly recommend checking out Elements. I don’t do much writing from my iPhone but for those that do, Elements is available as a universal binary for both iPhone and iPad.

$4.99 – Download Now

WordFoto — @andrewwray

WordFoto is a neat little photography app that lets you turn iPhone photos into typographic masterpieces. It features a smart algorithm that inserts preselected words or user input phrases into any photo you’ve taken on your iPhone, or any image you’ve imported from your iTunes library. By letting you create your own unique word sets, the possibilites are quite literally endless, and the results are superb.

By offering up a number of fine-tuning options like Color Tolerance, Edge Threshold and more, you can really drill down to make your photo enhanced to perfection and the word set will perfectly integrate into the image without a hitch thanks to the algorithm they’ve come up with. You can also choose from a number of built-in styles, including classic Gray, Comic, Black Label, Howling, Prankzter, Romance and Blocky. If you’re not partial to the included styles that comes with the app, you can create your own custom style to personalize the image with absolute detail. Adjust shadowing, highlights, color saturation and image contrast, padding and even font selection.

Of course, the app wouldn’t be complete without social integration, so WordFoto lets you share all of your creations on Facebook or send it off to friends or family via email. Additional adjustments let you crop the image and inspect everything in great detail using zoom functionality so you get everything just the way you want it. Create amazing typographic images with WordFoto and wow your friends like never before!

$1.99 — Download Now

Treasure Trouble – @reneritchie

We had the pleasure of speaking to Michael Flarup of Robocat on the last episode of our Iterate podcast, and during the show I downloaded their Treasure Trouble for iPad game. It looked gorgeous but I couldn’t exactly launch it and start playing in the middle of the show. Things got busy, as they usually do, and I didn’t have a chance to check it out until last week. And yeahbutwow is it a lot of fun. The core idea is simple — you trace paths on a treasure maps. It starts slow but builds up fast. More paths. More complicated paths. It’ll challenge your eye-hand-coordination, and your multitouch gesturing skills both. And this being a pirate themed game, there might just be some drinking involved.

Yo. Ho. Ho.

$2.99 – Download now

Circadia – @llofte

Circadia is such a fantastic puzzle game. Each level has both colored dots and a white dot. Tapping a colored dot will emit a tone and circle who’s radius grows a specific rate. Each color emits a different tone and the circles for the lower tones grow slower than the higher tones. The goal is to tap the colored dots in the right timing so that they converge on the white dot at the same time.

It may sound easy, but it’s actually very challenging.

The levels start out pretty easy with just two colored dots and a stationary white dot. The level I’m on now (level 41) has 3 colored dots and the white dot is moving. Crazy. I know.

The other thing I really like about Circadia is that it’s just so incredibly gorgeous. The bright, vivid colors against a black backdrop is pure eye candy. That, and Circadia is geometric, so as a math nerd, I was instantly drawn in.

$0.99 – Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it’s your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun. Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Phew! That March 7, 2012 announcement date rumor turned out to be accurate. Apple will indeed be unveiling their next generation iPad in San Francisco this coming Wednesday, and it will not doubt dominate the news, and our attention, for weeks to come. As we wait for that giant wave to hit us, however, there’s a lot of other interesting stuff happening…

iPad 3 event

Now that invitations have gone out and the iPad 3 event is official, we went through all the hardware and software rumors we’ve been tracking and put together a monster iPad 3 event preview. Georgia also put together a couple of polls asking for your iPad 3 expectations. Make sure you get your votes in.

While a ton of material has allegedly been leaked already, including what could be a fairly complete outer casing there’s still a lot we don’t know. Especially about the software.

What apps will Apple show off on stage? They’ve done GarageBand and iMovie in the past? What’s left? What will be the big hero features that highlight iPad 3 commercials for the next year? And will it get Siri? Many of us would love to see Siri on the iPad 3, but there are a lot of challenges Apple will have to overcome to make it a great experience.

All we can do now though is sell off our old iPads, watch for last minute rumors, and wait for Wednesday.

Speaking of rumors…

iMore is fairly cautious about posting rumors when we get them. Several times we’ve gotten good stories, sat on them to check and check again, only to see a mainstream publication run the story first. That’s okay. Sometimes it’s better to sure than first. When we do run something it’s because we’ve got a good reason to, so it’s nice when something like the March 7 iPad event date pans out. (Sometimes it’s even hilarious.) Now we’ll just have to see what happens with the quad-core processor we, and several others, heard was on board, the March 30, 2012 released date we heard about last week, and that big micro-dock story for the iPhone 5.

We link to a lot of other sites’ rumors though, and there has been a ton of iPad 3 stuff lately. Some of you seem to love it — you get angry if we take too long to get them linked up. Others of you don’t seem to care for them very much at all. The good thing about the timeline nature of web sites is that you can always skip something that doesn’t interest you and go on to something that does. But for interest’s sake, here’s how we’re handling it.

Our current strategy is to post anything that gets a lot of attention and try to provide some analysis and some context. If it sounds possible, we’ll say so, and if it doesn’t make sense, we’ll tell you that too. If it’s just utterly ridiculous, we’ll err on the side of not posting.

Our job is always and only to serve our readers, viewers, and listeners. If that means helping sort through the deluge of rumors that come up before a major Apple launch, that’s what we’ll do.

Which brings me to what we won’t do.

Linking to Linkbait

Definitions for linkbait vary. Here’s mine — when someone smart posts something incendiary, outlandish, or otherwise asinine in a faux attempt to be controversial and attract negative attention. When it comes to iMore, that means dumb Apple stuff. A lot of big sites and big personalities have been posting dumb Apple stuff lately and it’s really tempting to take the bait and respond. We’ve done that in the past. But it never ends. In fact, it just shows them their strategy works and encourages them to do it again. And again.

I love snarky rebuttals, but I can’t read the pull quotes that are being snarkily rebutted anymore. Claim chowder takedowns are worth a chuckle but all they ultimately beget are more chowder claims to take down. Whether it’s on websites or Twitter, links to dumb Apple stories only proves their formula and all we end up getting are more dumb Apple stories. There’s so much intelligent, insightful, inspiring commentary being written in the Apple space it’s really disheartening that the dumb stuff seems to be getting so many links. What we really need is an un-link protocol. Absent that, there’s still something we can do.

We’re going to make up for the linkbait we don’t post with high quality, carefully curated links to really good content from really smart people. Like Richard Gaywood’s recent article on TUAW about Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math that we linked to earlier in the week.

Here are some more:

• OS X @2X by App Cubby‘s David Barnard, which continues the exploration of Retina display Macs.
• iPad 3′s Retina display means trouble for many apps due to Apple's 20MB 3G download limit by The Next Web‘s Matthew Panzarino, who rightly asks what inflating app sizes will do for impulse app sales.
• Retina & Universal by MacStories‘ Frederico Viticci offers some potential solutions to the problem.
• Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes by Marco Arment looks at Apple’s ongoing, inconsistent, flabbergasting practice of labeling any app with a built in web browser (UIWebView) as 17+ and scaring potential customers with warnings of “Frequent/Intense” content.
• The Readability Fallacy by Ben Brooks about the confusion Readability’s business model causes for content creators and users of the service alike.

I don’t agree with all of their opinions either, but when I read thought-provoking ideas, it causes me to question my own preconceptions. Sometimes I change my mind, sometimes I don’t. But either way I’ve gone through a process, sharpened my thoughts, and come to have better opinions.

When I read the dumb stuff, even when I read smart people explaining why it’s dumb, ultimately I still feel dumber. I’d rather focus on the smart stuff.

Speaking of the smart stuff

Those new columns I mentioned last week just keep getting better.

• How I use my iPhone for police work is from CrackBerry.com‘s David Boyd and delves into how law enforcement officers can benefit from Apple’s mobile tech.
• In defense of Cydia, the jailbreak app store is Ally’s counter-argument to Georgia’s Agony and ecstasy of Cydia piece from a couple weeks back.
• How to make your iPhone photographs more powerful with negative space is the latest entry in Leanna’s outstanding iPhoneography series.
• How my iPad helped me learn to play guitar is a wonderful piece by Gary that makes me think even I have a chance at figuring out how to jam…
• Nexia Home Security Bundle review: The future of iPhone home automation is now has Georgia taking a look at home automation, iPhone style

Look for more to come, even if we take a pause this week to cover iPad 3.

Adobe Photoshop Touch

One of the things that didn’t get written last week was my Adobe Photoshop Touch review. I’ve been using it all week and I’m still deeply conflicted by it. On one hand, it’s a fantastic app, with excellent tutorials for beginners, and that brings a lot of great features and functionality to the iPad, and shows just how incredible big screen, multitouch devices can be for content creation. On the other, it’s a terribly frustrating experience that stymies my attempts to really use it at every turn.

I’m not sure if it’s because Photoshop Touch is an AIR cross-compile and not a native iPad app, and that reduces its intuitiveness and raises the cognitive overhead for almost every activity. It could also be some of the UI decisions, for example having an & button is an odd, utterly opaque choice. I’m assuming the iPad also imposes limitations, for example the maximum canvas size is fine for blog images but way too constrained for professional work. (Could an iPad 3 with more processing power and RAM overcome this?) The masking is also far too imprecise for my tastes.

The bottom line for me is this — I’ve worked as a designer for over a decade and lived in Photoshop for years, and I while I can have a lot of fun with Photoshop Touch, I can’t even begin to do real work with it.

It doesn’t even natively support PSD files for crying out loud.

There’s a real opportunity here for a Pixelmator or Accorn or even an Apple-made iPhoto/Aperture to redefine the king of the imaging hill for the next generation of computing appliances.

Adobe should be scared out of their socks about that. They should forget all this AIR/Flash nonsense, forget protecting the platform lock-in, roll up their sleeves and focus 100% on making a fantastic content creation app again.

Join us on March 7

We’ll be on Ustream Wednesday at 1pm ET/10am PT/6pm GMT during the iPad 3 event with a special edition iPhone Live podcast, and we’ll follow up with a post-game show during our usual 9pm ET/6pm PT/2am GMT. Whether it’s an iPad 3 or it gets another name, whether we see a 1080p Apple TV or a new iPod touch, whether new Time Capsules are in the wings or something completely new, we’ll give it all the commentary, color, and analysis, it can handle. And we’d love for you to join us.

Actual out.