Amazon has launched a new web based Kindle Store designed specifically for the iPad. The new site looks and feels like an actual app rather than a web page however you don’t need to install anything to use the store.

Books are laid out in a cover flow arrangement and you can swipe through the books, click on the covers to see more information, read reviews and of course buy a book. If you do make a purchase, the book is automatically sent to your designated reading device. If you can’t wait that long, you can even read it within the new Kindle Store web page because Amazon has now made its Cloud Reader compatible with the iPad too. If you have your iPad handy, simply visit  http://www.amazon.com/iPadKindleStore to take a look at the new layout.

iPad users that use twitter.com in safari, instead of the downloadable iPad app, will be getting a new HTML5 web app in the next few weeks

Currently, iPad users who navigate to ‘twitter.com’ are greeted with the old iPhone layout, with an option to switch to the default desktop UI. However Twitter announced on the ‘Twitter Mobile’ twitter account that they have begun rolling out a new HTML5 based web UI specifically for the iPad, which should reach all users in the coming weeks.

We’ve launched our HTML5 version of twitter.com for iPad. It will be rolling out to device owners over the next week or so.

The screenshot above shows that the UI is similar to both the desktop design and the recently updated iPhone design.

I haven’t had the updated web app yet, but I’m interested to know if any of you have had a chance to play with it yet.

[9to5mac] [@TwitterMobile]

iCloud.com is now live… if you have an Apple ID that works with iCloud. Here’s the thing — it’s meant for developers right now, and Apple IDs are still fragmented to the extent that for some people, iCloud might not be too useful yet.

For example, you may try to login with your MobileMe ID and be told it hasn’t been migrated to iCloud yet. You might try to login with your iTunes ID and then, once you’re in, be told you need a MobileMe address to access Mail. You can set up a new, free iCloud ID, but then all of the content you have connected to your existing Apple ID(s) won’t be there.

So, yeah, meant for developers. Still, it’s nice to see it up and running, and get a preview of the design (which we’re guessing is a fairly straight front-end port of the SproutCore web app code from Me.com, now running on the all new iCloud backend.)

Current web apps available include Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find my iPhone, and the new Documents, which currently offers Apple’s iWork formats for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. (The last three of which require the new iWork for iOS beta apps, downloadable via Apple’s developer site.)

Gone are iDisk and Gallery. iCloud is no doubt an attempt to abstract away the file system-like behavior for the former, but will a web front end for PhotoStream be made available to replace the latter?

Meanwhile, on iPhone you just get a placeholder card, nicely rendered, and the ability to get more information and a link to the developer beta.

Gallery of screenshots after the break.

According to a poster Hacker News, the Nitro JavaScript engine brought to iOS 4.3′s Safari browser, is now available to embedded UIWebViews and home screen WebClips in iOS 5. Apple originally claimed the Nitro engine, ported from desktop Safari, would make iOS Safari 2x faster, but due to restrictions on code interpretation (Nitro uses JIT, or Just-in-Time compilation), it was only available in the Safari sandbox. This effectively made web pages embed in apps and saved to the home screen feel twice as slow. No longer, according to this thread:

Q: Did they fix the bug from 4.3 where home screen web apps don’t use Nitro?

A: This is probably breaking my NDA to say this, but yes, they did. Web.app now has the “dynamic-codesigning” entitlement, which enables Nitro.

In other words, embed webpages and home screen web apps just became first class citizens, and should have the speed to prove it.

[Hacker News via CNET]

Google has posted an update to their blogger account notating some new changes to their mobile version of Gmail.  From the looks of it, scrolling looks to be much improved as far as smoothness goes.  Before the pages seemed to be a bit more choppy and the distance it would scroll wasn’t always very accurate.  That problem appears to be fixed.

They’ve also added a floating toolbar that will remain static even when you scroll.  This should make it a lot easier to jump around your mailbox instead of having to scroll all the way back up a long thread in order to return to your inbox or another folder.  Google is noting these updates are compatible with devices running iOS 4.0 and up.

They’re also asking that if you have suggestions or comments, you should feel free to visit the Google Support Forums or tweet it and mention #gmailmobile.  Do you guys use the web version of this app at all? I personally just have Gmail set up as exchange.  Seems a lot less work to me.  What do you guys think?

Having played Spider on the iPhone, I was really excited to see what Spider: Bryce Manor HD had to offer for the iPad. As with most iPhone to iPad games, the experience is much better having the increased screen real estate. Let’s take a look at the game.

Movement is accomplished by tapping and holding the direction on the screen you wish to walk. You can leap great distances by swiping your finger in the direction you want to go. You can spin webs by tapping the spider, then swiping the direction you want; that will spin a section of a silk web. You need to interlace at least three pieces of silk to make a web.

How do you defeat your enemies? Well, you have a couple of different ways. Your enemies consist of several different types of annoying bugs. Some are simple to capture, others can be very frustrating (such as the mosquito that dodges your every move). You capture insects by spinning silk. You have a silk meter in the bottom left. When you launch to make a web, you use one piece of silk. Silk is replenished x2 when you capture and consume your prey. So, it may take 3 pieces of silk to make a web, but if  you only capture one insect, you are down one piece of silk. The goal is to capture as many insects in a web as possible to rack up silk and points. If you run out of silk, you have just a little bit of time before it’s game-over; you will need to consume prey before the timer runs out!

Insects can be killed differently depending on the enemy, for example, wasps can’t be captured in a web, you have to leap at them and crush them against a surface. Moths can be tricked to swarm together by triggering a light and dragon flies and be knocked dizzy and pushed into a web for consumption.

Spider HD has 38 levels to keep you busy and many levels have “secrets” to unlock. There is also a fun multiplayer mode and once you beat the game you have additional game modes to play such as a time attack mode and more.

I really enjoyed Spider HD and with the iPad’s larger screen, it is even more fun to play. This is one of those must-buys on iPad if you like this style of game.

[$4.99- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Unique game
• Beautiful graphics
• Lots of levels
• Challenging gameplay

Cons

• Sometimes I find the leaping precision to be off, but it could be me
• Some levels are really short

Summary of the new features include:

• Safari Reader
• Even Greater Support for HTML 5
• Better Performance
• Bing Search
• Safari Extentions

How about our readers? Are you seeing a speed difference? If you find a site that can take advantage or Reader, post it in the comments!

You can download Safari 5 here.

***UPDATE: In order for Reader to appear, you literally have to click on an article on a website. For example, click on this article in its entirety and the Reader button will appear in the smart address bar.

TechCrunch links to noted developer Tim Bray who’s taking a position as “Developer Advocate” at Google for Android but who announces it while taking a swipe at Apple’s iPhone:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

Which is completely and utterly wrong, of course. That’s Apple’s vision of the mobile, curated App Store which they intend to be a family friendly, corporately liable software repository. Apple’s vision of the mobile internet is Mobile Safari and its WebKit rendering engine and other technological underpinnings, most of which are open source and heavily supported by Apple.

You can, now, today, get porn on the iPhone via Mobile Safari. You can get Google Voice. You can pretty much get anything and everything without any interference from or need for approval by Apple. It’s the definition of the Winer-ian vendor-less platform Bray quotes. Never mind:

I’m going to have to get savvier about HTML5-based applications, because a lot of smart people think the future’s there, that the “native app” notion will soon seem quaint.

And HTML5 (which allows web-based apps to behave more like native apps) is something Apple has been pushing very hard as well (from promotion at Apple’s Developer Tech Talk World Tour to WebKit.org itself). And again, now, today, you can code and run some of the best, most robust HTML5 applications for mobile to run well on iPhone Safari — and other WebKit-based mobile browsers.

We’ve said many times Safari is Apple’s open app store, and Apple even includes it beside Mac and iPhone on developer.apple.com. That’s what confuses us about comments like Bray’s and TechCrunch’s mention of former Facebook for iPhone developer Joe Hewitt (who has since said the iPad is “everything he’s wished for”).

We’ll stop short of assigning motives to Bray’s comments, given his new job. It’s awesome for Bray and Google and Android and developers to even have that sort of person in that sort of position, and we congratulate and wish all of them well. But it’s important to point out that while Apple’s App Store might be “closed as in managed”, Mobile Safari is wide open; if you’re a web developer it’s delivering as well or better than anyone else on the promise of of that platform today.

When Steve Jobs whipped out the iPad, the first thing I did was do a double-take on the screen’s 4:3 aspect ratio. At 1024×763 it’s what I used to have on my 2005 Windows XP CRT screen. It’s wide. It’s iPod “phatty” nano G3 [Wikipedia link] wide and that design only lasted 1 generation before Apple back-peddled to the long and slim. Apple used to default to 16:10, and the new iMac is 16:9, which is modern HDTV aspect ratio. (The iPhone and iPod touch are 3×2)

At 4×3 the iPad will require the same monstrous letterboxing on videos that old SD TVs required. (TUAW has a great post up on this). So what’s the deal?

First, unlike a TV where you sit across the room and the screen fills a relatively small part of your field of vision, like the iPhone, the iPad will be held much closer. Even with monstrous letterboxing, the video will still fill a large part of your field of vision.

Of course, the iPad isn’t only a video player. There are other forms of content to consume. For web browsing, even 16:10 sometimes feels too “short”, and you need to scroll more than you like. For books, a narrow page may not be ideal, and with a two-page spread, those pages will seem squat, squarish.

Now don’t get us wrong, if Apple added pixels and made it 16:10 (1280×800), TiPb wouldn’t complain (they could pillarbox the books!). If they took pixels away to make it 16:9 (1024×576), it might lose part of that “big screen iPod touch” infamy. And it might lose functionality for anything other than video.

It’s definitely a compromise, but is it a good one?

[Thanks Antony for bringing the counter-argument to our attention!]

Earlier today Google unveiled their new Google Voice WebApp for iPhone. Sure you can place calls, send text messages, get your voice mail, and access all of your account settings but TiPb was curious how it would stack up to the real-deal native app on Google’s own Android platform.

For the full scoop and screenshots, follow me after the break!

If you are a Google Voice user, the first thing you will want to do is add Google’s crafty little icons for each part of Google Voice directly to your iPhone Home Screen. Doing so gives you quick access to contacts, the dialer, the voicemail/SMS inbox, and create new SMS pages. Once you select the icon of your choice, Safari pulls up the iPhone optimized WebApp and you’re good to go. So, for example, tapping the Google Voice icon will bring you straight to the dialer just as you’d expect — fast and simple.

Next up we have contacts and that too is laid out very nicely. You get your top called or messaged contacts along with your complete contact list and a search button to search through your contacts. It is important to note you must have your contacts in your Gmail account to access them as this WebApp can not access the contacts stored on your phone.

Going into the inbox you will see not only your SMS messages but your voice mail as well. When you select a voice mail it shows a transcript of the message that was left for you (or I should say it tries it’s best to do so). You have three choices for voice mail — have a transcript sent to via email, via SMS, or open it directly in the WebApp.

So what we have here is a very good effort on Google’s part to work with their hands tied behind their back due to Apple rejecting the Google Voice App Store application. Is it as good as the native Android Google Voice app? Not even close.

At the end of the day even though it is a great WebApp, it’s still just a WebApp. It can’t access your local iPhone contacts, only your online Google Contacts. The bigger issue, however — and one even a native App Store Google Voice app would suffer from — is that’s it is not integrated into the OS the way it is on Android.

If it was, you could receive calls and SMS from your Google Voice number right on your iPhone. On Android, your Google Voice number can become your phone number. No WebApp, or iPhone app, can currently provide that level of integration and there’s no sign Apple has any interest in ever allowing one to.

So, on the bright side, the Google Voice WebApp is close to as good as an App Store app could be.

Below are some screen shots of the native Android Google Voice application.

Interface

Meebo has a very clean interface with subtle hues that blend together. I know, it sounds like I am appraising artwork, but Meebo’s interface is really clean. You begin by selecting the service you want to use, let’s use AIM for example, your login, password and a convenient “remember me” checkbox. After you have filled in the appropriate information, tap Sign On and Meebo will sign you into that service.

Once logged in, you are treated to a familiar IM interface with all of the standard amenities such as who is online/offline and your status. The status does not pull from online, so if you have several saved status, they do not transfer. However, since Meebo uses cookies effectively, you can create your own local custom status messages.

Messaging

You can begin an IM chat by simply tapping the persons name you wish to chat with. You are given a simple text box on the bottom of the screen. Tap inside of the box and it expands Safari’s soft keyboard to enter in your text. You can then tap “Send” when you are done composing your message. Chatting occurs relatively quickly. Meebo appears to use a what I call “open connection”. What I mean by this is while you are chatting, the iPhone data icon located by the EDGE or Wi-Fi icon is constantly spinning. This means you get your IM replies as they happen! Way to go Meebo! If you are done with a conversation you can tap the icon to the left of the text box to bring you back to your list of contacts.

Conclusion

I really like Meebo, but it is not perfect. The biggest issue that I have found is that you can only be connected to one service at a time. I don’t think this is too much of a distractor though, the service is streamlined and accessible and most of all it is free. It is only a matter of time before there is a native client on the iPhone whether it is Apple’s own iChat or chat clients from other companies (iAdium anyone?)

Ratings (out of 5)

• Look and Feel: 5
• Navigation: 5
• Features: 4
• Reliability: 5

Overall: 4.75

Pros:

• Fills a need on the iPhone
• Free!
• Clean, pleasant interface
• Quick, even on EDGE
• Most popular services to choose from
• Emoticons automatically convert when IM’ing

Cons:

• Can only access one service at a time

When I first heard of iCopy through fellow Phone Different writer Rene Ritchie, I thought, “Wow, what a great idea, I hope it works”. When I installed the software, I was immediately skeptical due to the complexity of the steps involved. So, without saying too much more, let’s dive right in!

To use iCopy is simple; install the JavaScript-based bookmarklet and you are good to go. To begin you simple tap the Copy/Paste bookmark in Safari on the iPhone. After doing this you are presented with three choice: Copy, Paste and Cancel.

Copy

After tapping copy you are presented with a few more choices:

• Copy Text
• Copy URL
• Email Text
• Email URL

These choices do what they say the do. For example, if you choose Copy Text, the iCopy page disappears and what ever body of text you tap on, iCopy will “copy” and store the text in a cookie within Safari. You can then feel free to navigate to what ever webpage you want to paste to and tap the iCopy bookmark again, and tap “Paste” which in essence retrieves the cookie… but wait, you are not done. Now you tap in the area you want to paste to again, select the text area for pasting and you are good to go.

Sound like fun and easy to use?

Not quite. However, the other choices such as Email Text or URL are vastly easier. If you want to copy text on a page into an email, simply tap the Copy/Paste bookmark and choose Email Text. You are then taken back to the webpage you were on. Tap a body of text and iCopy pastes it into a new email message! Sweet!

Bugginess

After using iCopy for a few days, I went back to it to use again and… nothing. The link just died. When I went to edit the bookmark, the JavaScript was still there, but it just was not working. I removed the bookmark and reinstalled it. After the install it appeared to work fine. However, the problem here is that this occurred 3 more times in the course of a week. This is very frustrating. To be fair, the product is still early and this developer seems enthusiastic and has a list of enhancements on the iCopy website.

Conclusion

I probably should be more positive than I am about iCopy, but I really feel the only redeeming function of the app is the Email Text function. It is certainly something to keep around for its usefulness, but I really don’t see using this tool all the time; it is a far cry from a real copy/paste feature we so desperately desire on the iPhone. But kudos are due since this is the only app of its kind (that I am aware of) that can give us this type of functionality.

Ratings (out of 5)

• Look and Feel: 4
• Navigation: 3
• Features: 4
• Reliability: 2

Overall: 3.25

Pros:

• Fills a need on the iPhone
• No hacking needed
• Useful if used occasionally
• Easy to copy text to an email

Cons:

• Very buggy, refuses to launch sometimes; needs re-installation
• Overly complicated process to copy text from page to page

I have to admit, when I first heard about Pimp My News for iPhone, I was… less than enthusiastic. I mean, “Pimp” My News? Perhaps I am a little old school, but I thought with a name like this, the website is all bling and no substance. Boy was I wrong…

Pimp My News (PMN) has a standard website with an optimized iPhone interface. As you can imagine by the title, the website is an aggregator for multiple site feeds and more. Let’s start off with the aggregator.

Feeds

Once you create and account on the desktop version of PMN, you are led through a wizard to select feeds you would like to view. Feeds are broken down into categories such as Technology→ Apple or Politics→ Wonkette and so on. There is a surprisingly good selection of news choices. I was pleased to see plenty of familiar websites and a few I have not heard of before. Once you checkmark your selections, they get added to “Your Feeds”. The only issue I had with this is that you are unable to add your own feeds. This is not too much of a detractor however since their feed selection is rather good.

Viewing Experience

One you access PMN on the iPhone, you are given a familiar experience to their desktop version. Your feeds are combined into a running list. Simply flick your finger to get to the bottom. Once there you can view previous news stories by tapping a corresponding previous page such as 1, 2, 3 and so on.

You can look at each news story via a Summary or Full article. The summary choice will give you a summary below the article on the same page, the Full choice will open the page in the native website in a new tab. There is even an option to email the news story to a friend, however this is not done via the native Mail.app, rather in HTML. I would have preferred Mail.app integration like with i.Bloglines.

So What is the Difference?

By now you are asking yourself, “What makes PMN any different than any other feed aggregator such as Google Reader or Bloglines?” The difference in is the “pimp” factor. PMN, believe it or not, has the ability to play each story audibly or have a custom on-the-fly podcast created of your content! Let me explain how this works:

Among the list of news stories along with the Summary, Full and Email option is a speaker icon. Tap the icon and the iPhone will stream the article to you via the PMN voice. The voice is very good and only really stumbles on words that are spelled out, other than that, it sounds great. Though very cool, I did not find this feature particularly useful. When using the iPhone and reading the page, why would I stop and let the audio stream to me; it is faster to just read the page.

However, the podcast component is “pimp”. It will serve up about 10 minutes of spoken text from your feeds every morning! Now that is service. PMN even gives you a handy Subscribe in iTunes link.

Conclusion

PMN really surprised me. At first I thought it was just another news feed clone, but it offers something very unique that I have not seen presented before in other sites. I really like the idea of having my news read to me in a Podcast and the convenience of iTunes availability makes it that much more accessible.

Ratings (out of 5)

• Look and Feel: 4
• Navigation: 4
• Features: 5
• Reliability: 5
• Overall: 4.5

Pros:

• Choose between many available news sources
• Custom Podcast is awesome!

Cons:

• Account must be created on desktop Mac/PC
• Cannot add your “own” news sources
• Cannot use native Mail.app for emailing of news
• Cannot change that awful purple color!

For an extra bonus, here is a video showing you Pimp My News in Action!

With the iPhone’s lack of a built-in task list, the world of iPhone users have come to rely on web-based task solutions. For the most part these solutions fulfill on their promise; a web-based task list with iPhone optimization. For this week’s review I have decided to look at Toodledo (http://www.toodledo.com/slim) for the iPhone.

Toodledo is a task management system with ideas taken from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. If you don’t know what that is, you can use Toodledo as a conventional task list. Toodledo for iPhone is a companion to its big brother on the web. The web application is free but there is also a pro account available if you want additional features. Everything in this review is based off of the free account. Toodledo organizes your tasks into different areas. We will take a look at these different areas and what they do.

Hotlist

The Toodledo Hotlist contains tasks that are due soon. By tapping on this link, you can easily see what is due in a running list. Depending on how you configure Toodledo, this list also tells you the priorities of these tasks and their due dates.

Folders

I akin folders to categories. They are simply an area for you to organize your tasks into meaningful groupings. Some typical examples of folders might be Home, Work or School. When you are looking at the lit of folders, there is a number at the end of the folder name. This number tells you how many tasks you have in that folder. There is even a “No Folder” folder, in case you forget to add task to one.

Due Dates

This list shows your tasks by their due date. I really like how Toodledo organizes the due date options. The top tier is Overdue, followed by Today, Tomorrow and so on, down to This Month and No Due Date. Tapping on a choice takes you to that dates grouping of tasks.

Priorities

Toodledo organizes Priorities into several categories, these include: Top, High, Medium, Low and Negative (you know, for that stuff you really don’t want to do, but have to do). These priorities are also given a number from 3 to -1, respectively. Just like with Folders, Priorities tell you how many tasks are marked a certain priority at the end of the priority name.

Recently Completed

This choice gives you a list of the tasks you have most recently completed. Not much else to say about that…

Settings

Settings allows you to choose what your default page will be. Perhaps instead of getting a list of choices such as Hotlist, Folders, etc, you prefer to log into Due Dates immediately. You can set this default option here.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other reasons to enjoy Toodledo beyond your iPhone. Some of these benefits include: iCal support, Twitter integration, Jottintegration, a FireFox Add-in, RSS subscriptions, SMS and email reminders and the list goes on. You can also customize what you see on the desktop version of Toodledo. For example, if you adhere to the GTD methodology, you can also ad Contexts, for example. Those Contexts will then appear on the iPhone version of Toodledo.

I also recommend Remember the Milk (RTM). It is a little fancier than Toodledo, has a lot of AJAX flying around, but in the end I like Toodledo’s simpler, more direct approach better. Also, RTM charges you for their iPhone web app! It just does not get any better if you are looking for a simple yet robust way to manage your tasks!… well, at least until the SDK comes, but that is another review.

Ratings (out of 5)

• Look and Feel: 4
• Navigation: 5
• Features: 5
• Reliability: 5
• Overall: 4.75

Pros:

• Highly customizable
• Can be used without desktop version
• Free! (With optional paid pro account)

Cons:

• On EDGE, loading Toodledo can be a somewhat painful experience

Google has announced that Google Gears is going mobile on Windows Mobile devices. Google Gears Mobile works the same way it does on the desktop version of Google Gears, via controlled caching of data. One of the first web applications out of the gate to take advantage is Zoho, a popular web productivity suite.

“Developers, look no further. Today we’re announcing the launch of Google Gears for mobile, a mobile browser extension for creating rich web applications for mobile devices. The first version is now available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6. It’s a fully functional port of Google Gears v0.2 that can be used to develop offline capability into your mobile web applications. You can also create slick and responsive applications by hiding latency issues through controlled caching of data and storage of information between sessions. We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers.”

Could Google Gears be part of the iPhone SDK? Will the SDK allow for a Google Gears type of functionality? Only a few more days until we know for sure. Meanwhile, we can laugh at the Windows Mobile folks who are forced to use Gears on Pocket Internet Explorer.