As soon as Apple started accepting pre-orders for the iPad, the product page for one of its most important component, iBooks was also updated. It’s not really surprising that Apple will highlight the iPad’s e-book reading features especially since this is a hot market right now. And besides how good is a new Apple product if it doesn’t have a competitor to taunt? Sorry Kindle fans, but whether you like it or not, Apple is taking on the Kindle’s dominance in the e-book market.

Anyway, so what’s up with iPad and iBooks. Nothing much really, except for the fact that apparently the iPad can actually read e-books to you aloud.  Yes, I know Amazon Kindle has this. But we all know that this feature has been an issue before with the Kindle. So, it’s kind of surprising that Apple decided to have this feature in the iPad.

So, once the iPad starts rolling into the hands of those who pre-ordered it, expect some legal issues to arise once more. But I’m pretty sure Steve and his boys are more than ready for this.

In a related note, another indication that Apple is really prepping up the iPad as a fierce Kindle competitor is the fact that the device will be supporting e-books in EPUB format which will not be sold from the iBooks E-Bookstore. This simply means that you won’t be spending additional money to use your iPad as an e-book reader. You can practically load it up with free e-books that are freely available from various online sources.

This is a welcome feature and is good for both Apple and iPad users who are planning to use their iPad for e-book reading purposes. For Apple, it will be able to capture an already established market – the e-reader market. And for iPad owners, it’s one less cost.

In case you’re not aware,  the Apple Store has just started accepting pre-orders for the highly anticipated and perhaps even highly ridiculed product – the Apple iPad. If you’re like me who have been waiting for this day and wants Apple to ship the iPad on April 3, then If I were you visit the U.S. Apple Store and look for the iPad pre-order page. I wouldn’t waste time especially because it seems that Apple will be running short of supply in no time at all.

In fact, Apple has limited the number of iPads that every customer can pre-order to two units only. This was probably decided upon to ensure that more people will be able to get their units and not just a few who might take advantage and purchase more with the objective of selling them in the black market.

Apple is accepting pre-orders for all the announced models of the iPad – Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi +3G and their respective variants with different storace capacity ranging from 16GB to 64GB. I had to contend with ordering the 16GB Wi-Fi version since based on my experience with the iPhone I could barely consumer 8GB of storage with several dozens of apps already installed. I’m hoping that my storage need for the iPad would be covered by the 16GB model.

While pre-ordering for all the units can be placed now, only the 16GB Wi-Fi model will be shipped on April 3. The rest of the other units will start shipping around last week of April. Prices for each of the models of the iPad vary and depend on their storage capacity.

So, are you placing an order today? Do you think there will be enough interests for the iPad that Apple will closed pre-order as earliest as possible?

Sony Computer Entertainment America has just snagged a content distribution deal with several major movie studios that will allow Playstation 3 owners to have some great movie titles delivered via the Playstation Network.  This deal just made the Playstation as the first to offer HD movies from practically all the major studios, hence establishing itself as a powerful home entertainment platform not just for video gaming but for total entertainment as well.

Among those who agreed on the movie distribution deal are 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. The deal includes both purchase and rental of the major studios’ titles on their movie catalogs.

To kick this deal off, here are new titles available today on the Playstation Network:

• “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”, “Jennifer’s Body” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – 20th Century Fox
• “Up”, “G-Force”, “Earth” – Walt Disney Pictures
• “Star Trek”, Paranormal Activity”, “Zoolander” – Paramount Pictures
• “This Is It”, “2012″, “District 9″ and “Zombieland” – Sony Pictures
• “The Hangover”, “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, “Wizard of Oz” – Warner Bros
• “Inglorious Basterd”, “Couples Retreat”, “Public Enemies” – Universal

There are great movie titles. One is even nominated for the Oscars recently – Inglorious Basterd”. So if you own a Playstation 3 and have registered for the Playstation Network, you can grab these great movies and have delivered to you via your connected Playstation 3 console.

Apple finally dropped the bomb that many of us have been waiting for, the past couple of weeks. The iPad will start hitting Apple Retail Stores on April 3 and you better get yourself ready as early as now because the Apple.com will start accepting pre-orders seven days from now. You read it right folks, you can pre-order your iPad starting March 12. Did that get you excited?

Anyway, whether you’re excited or not, here are some major details that you should know in relation to Apple’s announcement today. First, the start of pre-order will be for all models of the iPad – Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi+3G and each of the various models that these two have that differs in storage capacity – 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

Now, if you order the Wi-Fi only version, regardless of its storage capacity, you can either pick up your iPad at a designated Apple Store or have it ship directly to your home on April 3 only if you order the Wi-Fi model. If you order the Wi-Fi+3G model, you can only have your iPad later in April.

And those apply only if you are in the U.S. If you’re in any of these countries – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, all models of the iPad will be available in late April as well.

As for the iPad pricing, here goes - $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB for the Wi-Fi model, and $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB for the Wi-Fi+3G model.

So there you go. Are pre-ordering the iPad on March 12? Which one are you going to get, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi + 3G?

Via Apple Press

Skype and Nokia’s partnership has been going for quite some time now. In fact, their plans of integrating Skype to Nokia devices has been discussed as early as February last year. Although Nokia devices were able to get a default Skype client it is only now that it is finally made available for majority of Nokia’s smartphones – specifically those running on Symbian ^1.

Skype for Symbian will let you to use Skype even while on the move, either through WiFi, GPRS, EDGE or 3G.  Skype for Symbian is now available for download at the Nokia Ovi Store and you can install it on your smartphone if it belongs to the following long list of Nokia devices that support it:

Nokia N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia X6, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia 5530 and the following non-touch devices: Nokia E72, Nokia E71, Nokia E90, Nokia E63, Nokia E66, Nokia E51, Nokia N96, Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8Gb, Nokia N85, Nokia N82, Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8 Gb, Nokia N79, Nokia N78, Nokia 6220 classic, Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia 5320.

If your current Nokia phone is any of those devices listed, then you can enjoy the following features of Skype on your device:

• Make free Skype-to-Skype calls to other Skype users anywhere in the world
• Save money on calls and texts (SMS) to phones abroad.
• Send and receive instant messages to and from individuals or groups
• Share pictures, videos and other files.
• Receive calls to their existing online number
• See when Skype contacts are online and available to call or IM
• Easily import names and numbers from the phone’s address book

Of course before you go on a Skype holiday, make sure that you are subscribe to an unlimited data plan, since even though Skype-to-Skype call is free, you are still using up air time of your mobile carriers.

You may download Skype for Symbian by following this link.

Via The Skype Blog

Wal-Mart has been in the DVD retailing business for quite some time now. And while this has been doing good for them, the company lacks one service which has been the the more popular way of bringing digitial movies to U.S. consumers – video-on-demand service.

But Wal-Mart may be preparing up to enter this arena soon, as New York Times is reporting that the video company is eyeing Vudu, an online movie service provider. Although the deal has not been confirmed yet by both companies,reports had it they have began informing Hollywood studios about the deal.

If the deal is indeed true, Wal-Mart maybe facing up stiff challenge against the likes of iTunes, Netflix and other online video-on-demand services. While Vudu for its part has been pretty much making some noise especially during the recent CES Event wherein the company managed to struck some deals with LCD TV manufacturers in putting Vudu services in their products.

Previously, Vudu has been advocating the use of a separate device that would connect to home TVs but could not manage to get some leverage. Since then, the company concentrated on delivering online movie service instead.

We’ll see whether this deal would make some headway in the coming days. It will be exciting to watch how Wal-Mart would put up a challenge against iTunes, Amazon, and other big names in the video-on-demand service. And whether which one will emerge as the households’ choice of VOD provider.

Comcast has just launched it new Secure Backup and Share service with the aim of helping you reduce the risk of losing important files that are saved on your computers. In short, it’s a cloud storage service with a facility for sharing some of the files you store easily.

While there maybe free services of this kind available online, Comcast however will offer the service for a fee. If you’re an existing Comcast subscriber you automatically gets 2GB of file storage for free, or should I say as an incentive for subscribing to its Internet service.

But of course, 2GB of storage won’t be enough for you, so you can always upgrade to a paid account. A 50GB storage plan will cost you $4.99 monthly or $49.99 annually. While a 200GB storage plan will set you back for $9.99 monthly or $99.99 annually. Those two options give you enough storage for all your photos, videos, files and other digital documents.

And since you are paying for the service, Comcast assures that all your files are in good hands. They’ve got a secure and reliable protection system plus a file restoration facility in case disaster strikes and your files are destroyed.

For file sharing and access to files, Comcast gives you a site which you can share with your family and friends.  You and your friends and family can access the said site from any Internet connection as well as on your mobile phone.

So, if you’d rather store and back up your files on a highly secured server, you might want to give Comcast Secure Backup and Share service a try.

Google Voice is one of the most important products that Google put a lot of stake on. Hence, we really couldn’t blame them for going out of the way to make this endeavor a success. But apparently, Google Voice doesn’t s seem to be getting the mileage, or perhaps usage that it wants to have.

What could be the reason for this? Google thinks that their service is overwhelming for its many users. So, to remedy this and perhaps to spike up interest towards it, Google has prepared a series of videos explaining, demonstrating and exploring the said communication service.

In case you’re  like me who have never experienced using Google Voice and is wondering what it does and how it can make your communication life better, I suggest you check out all the videos. But if you’re don’t have the time and just want to know what Google Voice is – it’s actually a communication service provided by Google with various features ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email. What’s good about Google Voice is that it allows you to use one number for all your communication transactions.

The series of videos explaining the service include the following:

1. Voicemail transcription
2. One number
3. Personalized greetings
4. International calling
5. SMS to email
6. Share voicemails
7. Block callers
8. Screen callers
9. Mobile app
10. Conference calls

And while you’re at it, you might want to subscribe to the Google Voice YouTube channel to be notified of new videos about Google Voice in the coming days.

Here we have Adobe’s contribution to the ongoing Mobile World Congress.  And what contribution it is as Adobe demoes something that might possibly give the Android platform an edge over Apple’s iPhone OS – Adobe AIR running on Droid.  Since the demo looks quite well,  it follows that other Android devices including Google Nexus One will be to run Adobe AIR apps as well. Likewise, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available for Android devices as well as iPhone.

With Adobe AIR, developers will have access to a feature-rich environment when developing their rich applications outside the mobile browser of Android devices and on multiple operating systems via individual marketplaces and applications stores. Adobe AIR  will bring about mobile apps that are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and takes advantage of the capabilities of native devices.

Adobe AIR will also allow developers to include multi-touch, accelerometer, geolocation, and other functionality offered by existing mobile OS into their own mobile AIR apps. It also let developers to create contextual apps with different display screens, device-speficif interaction techniques, mobile platform specific functionality and network access and bandwidth differences.

In addition, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available on Android devices such as DROID and Nexus One as well as other mobile platforms including the BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile. Interestingly, while the iPhone was not mentioned as part of those mobile platforms that will support, Windows Mobile was included in the list despite the fact that Microsoft may not be supporting it on Windows Mobile 7.

Or perhaps this is just a miscommnication?

As part of Google’s ongoing effort to make the web faster, YouTube has just introduced its Video Speed Dashboard.  This tool was created to give you an insight into what your YouTube speed looks like compared to the YouTube speed of users in other regions with different ISPs. In short the YouTube dashboard could either tell you that your YouTube video speed is either too fast or too slow, like mine.

In measuring the speed by which you stream YouTube video, the Video Speed Dashboard takes into account  various factors including speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you are using and your distance to the YouTube video servers.

Aside from telling you information about your own video speed, the Dashboard can also list  down the YouTube speeds of users in your neighborhood who have different ISPs as the one you are using. That way you can decided whether you should ditch your current ISP in favor of your neighbors’ ISPs.  No, I’m just kidding. Or perhaps I may be true.

Incidentally, the YouTube Video Speed Dashboard measures video speed based on the speed at which YouTube video is received by the browser. The Dashboard then averages this over the previous 30 days you’ve used the same browser during the same period.

So, how fast is your YouTube Video Speed? You may check it out from YouTube Video Speed Dashboard. Hope it’s not as pathetic as my ISP’s 256kbps speed.