Korg iMS-20 vs ReBirth

Both of these appps are retro-styled emulations of classic studio kit that have shaped the sound of dance music for the past 25 years. Forget Garageband, these apps represent retro beat and groove creation at their most synthetic.

Heritage

Just as Gibson and Les Paul set a benchmark for rock guitar, so Roland's TR-808, TR-909 and TB-303 defined and detonated hip-hop and house. And all three machines are perfectly recreated in ReBirth. It was released on iPhone in 2010, and thanks to the extra finger room of the iPad all three classics have room to shine.

Korg's MS-20 may not be as famous as the Roland originals, but in many ways it's an even more fashionable and prized synth. The MS-20's raw powersynth sound has been key to tracks by the likes of Daft Punk, Soulwax and The Chemical Brothers. The iMS-20 is a gorgeous recreation of this classic plus a drum synth, sequencer, mixer and effects - all you need to make a banging tune.

Ease of use

As synths go, the MS-20 is a simple unit but the way its oscillators and filters are arranged (and patchable through the addition of cables to the front panel) allow some truly ear-shredding sounds. It's not particularly easy to 'make a sound' but you can spend hours happily tweaking, and the built-in presets (a luxury unavailable on the original) are a great head start in learning what certain sounds 'look like'.

Rebirth on the other hand makes it amazingly easy to bash out tunes. You now own a pair of 303 bassline machines linked to 808 and 909 drum machines. You program your beats and melody in the exact same laborious, stunted way you programmed the original machines and then you hit play. With no practice, no talent, and no idea what you're doing it's childsplay to make amazing, technically accurate house. This is because - thanks to the fiddly, near impossible to master interface of the 303 in particular- that's exactly what the makers of all those hit records did.

Authenticity

Fiddling with ReBirth's knobs-opening and dosing the sound thanks to the Multi-Touch interface - is the sound of acid house. The built in compression, distortion, reverb and delay effects help push the sound to the same dizzying extremes. Meanwhile the sound of the iMS-20 is richer and nothing short of incredible for an app. All the grit and grime is intact. Forget any 'cello', 'choir' or miked 'drum kit' sounds: this synth is raw vintage.

Making the upgrade

This time, sensation-seekers, I'm going to talk about the three different bits of hardware in my office that I considered upgrading, and how I walked myself through each decision.

Device 1: Compact digital camera.

Reason for upgrading: A maturing technology. My three-year-old, but highly-beloved, Nikon P6000 pocket camera is exactly the sort of camera I like: small enough to slip into a pocket, but big enough to operate comfortably, and with a sprinkling of advanced features that allowed me to use it as my sole travel camera.

Last year, I did some work for a pal and he generously gave me his Olympus PEN E-P1 camera as a thank-you gift. I soon fell in love with the Micro Four Thir-ds system. It filled a gap for me: I travel a lot and take a lot of photos. and I am hellaciously fussy about the results. As great as my Nikon is, there's no ignoring the facts: it has a tiny image sensor and you can't swap out its fixed zoom for a more appropriate lens ... like Panasonic's magnificent 20 mm f1.7.

With that lens on the Olympus' body, I had nearly the optimum travel camera. It had most of the important features of my Nikon and it wasn't that much larger.

One problem: the Olympus doesn't have a built-in flash. What a pain in the butt! Also, the E-P1 was one of the first Micro FourThirds cameras made and I was eager to see how far the cameras have come after two years.

February seemed like the perfect time to upgrade. Olympus and Panasonic released new Micro Four Thirds cameras. The new Olympus was much like the E-P1, but it had a flash; the new Panasonic was barely larger than the Nikon. After a temporary dalliance with Nikon's fairly awesome P7000 (with its heroic assemblage of mechanical controls), I knew it'd be one or the other.

What I did: I bought an external flash for my Olympus.

Why: After poring through technical specs and advance reviews, I couldn't get excited about either new camera. I was hoping for a major advancement in Micro Four Thirds that would materially improve the Olympus, but I sure didn't see it in the reviews.

The clincher came when I found a couple of intense hardware teardowns and learned that both cameras were using two-year-old image sensors. I want the next-generation component: the one that'll allow next year's Micro Four Thirds cameras to shoot gorgeous photos in low light. And honestly, my big problem with the E-P1 was no flash. Fine: buy a flash. Sometimes you're so enamoured with having The New Version that you forget that the point of the expensive exercise is to solve problems.

Device 2: iPad.

Reason for upgrading: Er ... it's the iPad 2! I love iPad! That's, like, one whole iPad better than my iPad 1!

What I did: I stuck with my original iPad.

It's not that the iPad 2 isn't a huge improvement. Its CPU is a monster. When I ran it through its paces for a review, I didn't test its speed with an engineering benchmark suite. I used real-world apps. One task that took my old iPad more than three and a half minutes to process was chewed up and spat out by the iPad 2 in just 52 seconds. Whoosh!

Oh, yes, and the cameras and the Smart Cover and the gyroscope. I duly tested and wrote about it all. After I filed my review and I started thinking about the iPad like a consumer instead. I recognised all of those features as Nice Things that nonetheless I didn't really need.

But the speed!

Yeah. Well, Apple does a great job maintaining iOS as One Platform, With liberty And Time-Wasting Apps For All. Any app written in 2011 and probably even 2012 will work on my iPad 1. In the end, the speed of the iPad 1 isn't a handicap; the speed of the iPad 2 is a bonus.

Given that I wouldn't do anything with an iPad 2 that I can't already do, I'll wait until next year to upgrade.

Device 3: MacBook Pro.

Reason for upgrading: My current MacBook Pro is three years old. That's like having 125,000 miles on a car. You don't drive it to the scrapyard, but you know that it's entered its zone of Obsolescence.

There's always a faster CPU on the horizon. Tastes change, too. My 2008 MacBook has an ExpressCard slot. In theory, it'd open up a world of hardware enhancements. In practice, I wish it were an SD card reader.

Plus, my MacBook is my daily-use computer. I pound on it for hours a day, seven days a week and I've carried it around the world. Wear and tear is starting to show. The trackpad button hasn't worked since I splashed some coffee on it, and I'm lucky if the battery lasts 15 minutes.

What I did: I bought a new MacBook Pro.

If I'd upgraded last year, I would've had a slightly faster Mac, an SD slot, a working trackpad, and a nine-hour battery. Nice ... but this year, I got a CPU whose architecture is a whole generation ahead. It's clear that Apple's investing heavily in this new ultra-high-speed. multi-channel Thunderbolt I/O port. too. If the standard takes off, my new Mac Book will work with all of the great new high-performance hardware that's going to be released in the coming years. And if Thunderbolt fizzles ... who cares? It's still a functioning Mini DisplayPort.

This is a Mac that will get me through the next three years. That's a big deal given the scale of Mac OS X 10.7 and the OS to follow. I just need to not spill a drink on it.

The past month served as a reminder that hardware should only be replaced if it's about to stop working (whether it's worn-out or just not up to challenges that didn't exist when you first bought it) or if the new one can transform the way you work. Otherwise, you're just being a big, dopey consumer.

I did the smart thing. I thought my way through three potential upgrades, and only made one purchase. lucky me: it was the $2,000 item.

Apple, iPad and Fashion

Anyone who dismisses the iPad as simply a big iPod touch is missing the point. Because of its size and the fact that it's based on an OS designed solely for touchscreen devices, the iPad could be called the first truly usable tablet. It's a great way to read, watch TV shows and movies, surf the Web (sans Flash, yes), take notes and even write longer-form items (with or without an add-on keyboard), and do a hundred other things. Businesses are finding ways to use them, as well.

With every new tablet released, pundits proclaim the arrival of an "iPad killer"- claims that echo the many false predictions regarding the fate of the iPhone. The fact is that the iPad has a big head start, and Apple and the huge community of developers will continue to make it better. There's no such thing as an iPad killer-get used to it.

iPad 2

The iPad 2 is here. All of you people who refuse to buy the first version of any product can now emerge from hiding and buy an Apple tablet device safely and securely.

As with all new Apple products, the iPad 2 is fascinating because of the choices the company made about which features to add (cameras and a magnetic case), which ones to change (thickness and weight), and which ones to leave out (an iPhone 4 - class Retina display).

But for me, perhaps the most interesting thing about the iPad 2's release was the pair of Apple-created apps that appeared alongside it: Garage Band (which also runs on the original iPad) and iMovie (which ran on other iOS devices, but has now been expanded to run on the iPad 2).

Tapping Out Rhythms

Let's get this clear: I'm no musician. I can play a bit of piano and I can sort of sightread music. But my musical education ended when I was in my early teens. Over the years, I've noodled around a bit in the musical corners of Garage Band on the Mac. But I never had as much fun as I did in the first few hours I spent playing with GarageBand on the iPad 2. The introduction of "smart'' instruments and the tactile nature of the iPad make the difference, I think GarageBand's Smart Instruments eliminate the learning curve usually required to make pleasant sounds: Once I set my song in D major, the smart guitar transformed into eight complementary chords, which I could play it' by touching the chord name, strumming in the strings, or choosing one of four auto- g play styles. Within 15 minutes I had created f2 a multilayered track with guitar, bass, organ, and drum parts. (My apologies to Fountains of Wayne: I butchered "Hey Julie." But I had fun doing it.)

Now, the tactile thing: To use GarageBand on the Mac, you have to use a mouse or (if you're really cool) a USB keyboard or a guitar with a fancy input. Playing music with a standard keyboard isn't fulfilling. But tapping out chords on an iPad screen, and running your fingers over virtual guitar strings? Fun. It's that simple. Not that Garage Band on the iPad is frivolous or dumbed down.

Unless you just don't like music, you will never get more for your $5 than by buying GarageBand for your iPad.

Making Movies

iMovie on the iPhone showed that a simplified video-editing app could work on an iOS device. iMovie on the iPad 2 shows that it doesn't even have to be that simplified. The app actually makes the radical redesign of the Mac version of iMovie make sense. iMovie on the iPad isn't the same as iMovie on the Mac, but you can tell how the two are related, and I'd imagine that they'll become even more so in the future.

iMovie on the iPad has room for an editing timeline, a preview window, and a view into the iPad's video library, making it easy to pick clips and add them to your project. I was able to piece together a video, trim clips, set transitions, and even record a voice-over in no time at all.

Unfortunately, iMovie can't use video files that aren't in the specific format shot by iOS devices. That will limit its appeal until more cameras start to support the ability to shoot video in formats iOS devices can understand. As a result, I won't be using iMovie on the iPad to edit my home movies just yet. Unless, that is, I ditch my camcorder and just start shooting everything with my iPhone 4.

But that quibble aside, let's step back to appreciate what iMovie on the iPad represents. This is a tiny, thin tablet that can edit high-definition video files without breaking a sweat, and then package them up and shoot them off to YouTube or Vimeo. A few years ago my iMac struggled to edit SD video.It's amazing the strides Apple has made, and it's no wonder the company chose to release this new version of iMovie to show off the increased power of the iPad 2. It's impressive.

The App Story

These days, so many stories about Apple focus on the success of the App Store, especially the sheer number of apps that are available. With the release of iMovie and GarageBand, Apple is sending a slightly different message: It's not just the number of apps; it's the quality of those apps-and of the devices that run them.

Conclusion

Finally, let 's send all the best wishes we can to Steve Jobs and his family. He's on a medical leave of absence again and I'm sure we'll find out sooner or later what the reason is this time but let's hope he recovers quickly. I'm not saying that for Apple's sake as I think the company will be just fine without him. Hopefully he'll return fully recovered to the helm of Apple during the year.

iPad - The Most Quickly Adopted Electronic Product Ever

Putting out the iPad in 2010 was a brave move by Apple. It's a product in a category all of its own. Introduced into a dismal economic climate. But Apple's gamble paid off-the iPad was the company's most successful launch in its history, and the iPad itself has been lauded as the technology product of the year.

You only have to have a go on an iPad to see why it's been so popular. It takes the usability gold that is the iPhone's multi-touch display and makes it more luxurious. While the iPhone is designed for information and communication on the go, the iPad feels like something you could comfortably use in the home as well as out and about.

Quite aside from ergonomic 'look and feel' factors, though, the iPad is an incredibly powerful device. The A4 chip that Apple has designed especially for the purpose is incredibly snappy - in most tests the iPad is the fastest of all Apple's mobile devices. The software update should bring multitasking to the first version of iPad which will make it a much better device for working on documents.

It's not perfect of course - the onscreen keyboard is a compromise however you look at it, and it should never be mistaken as substitute for a proper computer. But as a games, web, communications, and media device, the iPad is exactly what the gadget consumer ordered.

iBooks

The suitability of the iPad as a reading device could give authors who have difficulty in getting their work published conventionally access to a whole new market. Apple could set up an iBookstore for independent publishers where submitted works are categorized and for a small fee made available for readers to download. This cuts publishing, storage, marketing and distribution costs and will help sell a good many more iPads.

iPad is the most quickly adopted electronic product ever

Apple's iPad is becoming history's most quickly adopted consumer electronics launch, according to Bernstein Research.

iPad sales are hugely eclipsing the 350,000 DVD players sold in year one, the previous "most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product." says the report. "The iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion."

With other tablets reaching market this year, is Apple under threat? "We expect the slew of upcoming competition to fall flat from a user experience standpoint while struggling to materially undercut the iPad on price," said Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore.

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Hubert remarks, "The net book market is getting absolutely crushed by the iPad."

I love iPad, it is a fantastic and universal gadget.