How to watch TV and movies on your Apple iPad

Whether you own the original Apple iPad or the new thinner iPad 2, one of its best less-talked about uses is to watch films and television on.

Everybody knows how great Apple’s tablet device is for music, apps and surfing the internet but tuning in to movies and TV shows on the move brings a whole extra world of entertainment.

Now you must remember that if you are watching television on your iPad, you need a TV Licence to do so. As long as you have one for your household telly, then you're fine. But you can't get away with only owning an iPad and no TV at home. All digital TV watching whether through this gadget or on your PC or laptop needs an official TV Licence.

But it's well worth it as there are plenty of websites and apps out there to help you make the most of the iPad’s video capabilities. Below are some of my favourites to get you started.

Television

The first port of call has to be the BBC iPlayer – just like you would with your computer.

It is available both through the Safari browser or now as an official BBC iPlayer app – just type ‘iPlayer’ in the App Store – and you can catch up on seven days’ worth of shows from all the BBC’s channels, in stunning HD quality. You can also watch the various channels live and it is so simple to use.

In fact, a child could use it, so it's handy for keeping the kids quiet in front of CBeebies.

Unfortunately, it's not as easy with the other key terrestrial stations but luckily Channel 4 has just released an app for its 4oD catch-up service, free for a limited time.

There is also a website called TVcatchup.com to fill the void. Just go to http://ipad.tvcatchup.com on your tablet and hit ‘sign up’. It’s completely free to anyone in the UK as long as your ISP is compatible, which almost all are.

You can then choose from 50 channels – made up of pretty much the same selection you get on Freeview – which stream live. The only drawback I’ve found as an iPlayer fanatic is that the picture quality and buffering times don’t live up to the BBC standard-bearer.

For those who like their premium sporting content on TV, it’s all about Sky for the iPad.

The satellite provider’s Sky Mobile TV app allows you to watch Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and 4, Sky Sports News and Sky News on any Apple device.

There is a monthly cost however – ranging from £5 for a current Sky Sports subscriber to £35 for a non-customer.

The new Sky News for iPad app however is free and brings you a live stream from the channel as well as archived video reports.

Movies

The most obvious, and easiest, way to watch a movie on your iPad is to simply press the ‘iTunes’ button on your desktop or on the iPad itself and then either search for the flick of your choice or hit the ‘Films’ tab for a selection.

Films are available to buy or rent, with rentals staying on the iPad for 30 days with a 48 hour period to complete viewing once you’ve started watching.

As you’d expect the quality is excellent, and the download process simplicity itself, however the pricing certainly takes those two facts into account. It can cost up to £13.99 to buy an HD movie and anywhere from £2.49-4.49 to rent one.

A cheaper option is to simply stream the films you already own on your PC or Mac direct to the iPad via Wi-Fi by downloading an app called ‘Air Video’ and the corresponding software for your desktop fromwww.inmethod.com/air-video/download.html.

A simple sync and you can now watch all the videos from your computer on your iPad – no matter what format they are stored in – thus saving the time, effort and, most importantly, the hard drive space that it would take to transfer them over.

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iPad 3, iPhone 5 launch

The iPad 3 and iPhone 5 are almost certainly coming in 2012, but what else does Apple have planned? Check out our look at the top Apple tech trends to watch out for in 2012.

Apple iPad 3 set to launch in 2012?

A new year, a new iPad. Surely it will come in 2012? Perhaps with all the elements most tablet users are crying out for this time – like a USB key and an LED lightbar. A bit of a complaint among iPad 2 customers, the issue of brightness is certainly one Apple need to address. Rumours are of dual-LED lightbar technology to brighten up the iPad’s display, which will be even more vital given the iPad 3’s expected 2048x1536 display. 3G for free would be great, too.

Apple iPhone 5 set to launch in 2012?

Unless there is a major technology disaster when it comes to production, or BlackBerry/Samsung/Nokia/HTC create a smartphone in the next few months so advanced that it can transport users Star Trek style to make ‘calls’ face-to-face, the Apple iPhone 5 will be with us in 2012. What will it include? A better camera, better processor and more storage hopefully.

Apple Siri to get serious in 2012

It’s the gadget of the moment for sure – capable of doing everything from starting a car to creating a media storm around abortion, but one thing is certain; Siri means business. Expect plenty more Siri hacks and interesting developments as Apple utilise and perfect the technology for the future. But the real question for 2012 and Siri remains – will it be able to decipher the hidden meaning of the Scottish accent?

Will Apple go 3D in 2012?

This will largely focus on the iPad 3, for sure, where given the competition in the tablet market even something as supposedly innovative as Retina Display isn't a big enough deal to keep the iPad 3 ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately producing large screen auto-3D is difficult. Every plane of depth you create robs the screen of resolution. To bring out a large no-glasses display you have to use a next generation 4K2K panel - that's 8 million pixels give or take.

Today's 1920 x 1080 Full HD screens are 2 million pixels. So to produce a no-glasses 3D panel requires four times the resolution as a flat picture - which is exactly the same PPI bump that Apple's 78 micrometers pixel technology allows. Could this technique be used give the iPad no-glasses 3D? The numbers seem to add up. But could we see 3D iPhones? 2012 will tell.

End of the iPod?

Could 2012 be the year that Apple kiss goodbye to the product that kick started their tech renaissance? While Apple seem to be running plenty of updates and innovations with the iPod Touch and iPod Nano, where there is still a big potential market, with the iPhone doing the same – and a whole lot more – as the Classic iPod, do we still need it? Figures from April show a 17 per cent decline in sales of iPods from the same time in 2010 – so could the number be up for the iPod Classic in 2012?

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Intel Says Android 4.0 for Smartphones, Tablets Ready

The company had a version of Android 4.0 for Medfield up and running within a day of Google open sourcing the OS, and now packages for smartphones and tablets with Medfield drivers are available to device makers, said Alec Gefrides, head of the Google Program Office at Intel.

Intel is working with device makers to optimize and fine-tune the OS for specific platforms and products based on Medfield chips. While the OS is expected to be ready in time for the product releases, it will be up to the device makers to decide whether they want to implement the OS in smartphones or tablets.

"We'll see products next year on Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich and Honeycomb," Gefrides said, referring to Android versions 2.3, 4.0 and 3.x. "Every OEM has to put a stake in the ground to get a product delivered."

Intel in September said that the first Intel-inside smartphones would reach the market in the first half next year. Intel also said it was working closely with Google to optimize Android to work on upcoming smartphones and tablets with Medfield chips. The chipmaker showed off a Medfield smartphone running on Android 2.3 and a tablet running on Android 3.x at the Intel Developer Forum trade show in San Francisco that month.

The ability to run Android 4.0 on mobile devices is important for Intel, which has no presence in the smartphone market and a minor presence in the tablet market. Intel is trying to establish a beachhead in a market dominated by ARM, whose processors are found in most smartphones and tablets.

Intel's efforts to bring Android 4.0 to future Atom-based handheld devices is parallel to other efforts to port the OS to the x86 architecture. Earlier this week, volunteer developers of theAndroid-X86 open-source project ported the OS to work on a tablet with x86 processors from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD supported the project with engineering support and donated devices, said Chih-Wei Huang, an open-source developer, in an email.

"Intel continues ignoring us. I've tried to contact Intel many times, but they are not interested in helping us," Huang said.

Intel is grateful that developers are working on Android 4.0 for x86, but Gefrides said drivers will be released to the open-source community only with device releases. Intel wants to ensure the OS works properly on Intel-based devices, and wants to try and prevent Android from getting fragmented.

"Intel has to focus resources on building products, not experiments," Gefrides said.

Complaints about lack of early access to Intel code is reminiscent of the open-source community complaining about Google not releasing Honeycomb code, which was made available only to certain vendors, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.

If Intel did release the drivers prematurely, the user experience on smartphones and tablets could be inconsistent, Gold said. Intel wants to ensure a consistent and functional Android OS on devices, which is critical given the chipmaker is just starting off in the tablet and smartphone markets.

Intel usually optimizes code for its chipset, bus systems and other components to ensure applications take full advantage of hardware for tasks like multimedia, Web browsing or multicore processing. Those capabilities could go awry on faulty code and hurt the user experience, so Intel is trying to standardize the drivers ahead of a wider open-source release.

"Intel wants to avoid people doing weird things in weird ways that makes their platform look bad," Gold said.

But the open-source community is vocal and wants to commence development as soon as possible, for which they need Intel's cooperation.

"It's damned if you do, damned if you don't," Gold said. "I'd have to weigh in on Intel on getting the user experience right."

Intel submits x86 code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which is run by Google. Intel has already been an active participant in Android development for the past two years, submitting more than 200 core patches to AOSP, which have carried over to Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Android, Samsung Smartphones Popular, iPhone 4S Boosts Apple

An Android-based Samsung smartphone is the device to beat, according to Friday stats from comScore.

Of the 3,000 people surveyed by comScore, 25.5 percent of smartphone users in the U.S. had a Samsung device, and 46.3 percent of smartphones were running the Android OS in the three-month period ending Oct. 31.

Samsung's share, however, doesn't represent any sort of increase. It had 25.5 percent back in July, too. The only handset maker to see an increase was Apple, which came in at number four with 10.8 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, up 1.3 percent. Apple's latest smartphone, the iPhone 4S, hit store shelves on Oct. 14.

LG was in second place with 20.6 percent, followed by Motorola with 13.6 percent. RIM rounded out the top five with 6.6 percent, a 1 percent drop.

Google's Android OS saw a 4.4 percent increase in the U.S., though, jumping from 41.9 percent to 46.3 percent between July and October. Apple's iOS came in second with a 1 percent increase to 28.1 percent.

RIM, Microsoft, and Symbian made the top five, but all three saw a market share drop, the largest of which went to RIM with a 4.5 percent decline to 17.2 percent.

About 90 million people in the U.S. had smartphones between July and October, a 10 percent increase from the previous three months.

What were they doing with those devices? Texting was the most popular activity, with 71.8 percent people participating. That was followed by using the browser (44 percent), using downloaded apps (43.8 percent), accessing a social networking site or blog (32.3 percent), playing games (29.2 percent), and listening to music (21.2 percent).

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Google releases Android 'Ice Cream Sandwich' source code

Google is now sharing its Ice Cream Sandwiches with everybody.

The tech giant has released the source code for its eagerly anticipated Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system -- the first version of Android designed to run on both phones and tablets.

The version of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.1) released by the Mountain View, Calif., company is the same software that will run on the upcoming Galaxy Nexus smartphone, built by Samsung and exclusive (so far) to Verizon Wireless.

"We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in," Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru wrote in a post in an Android developer Google Group on Monday. "Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available."

The Ice Cream Sandwich operating system and download instructions are available here.

In announcing the release of Ice Cream Sandwich, Queru also offered a new bit of reasoning behind Google's never open sourcing Android Honeycomb, its only version of Android built specifically for tablets.

"This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases," he said of the Ice Cream Sandwich source code. "However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich."

Although Queru described Honeycomb as incomplete, Google's head of Android, Andy Rubin, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine in March that the company didn't want to open source Honeycomb because it didn't want the tablet-optimized operating system to end up on smartphones.

From Bloomberg Businessweek's March report:

Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the software on phones "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones."

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Apple Patents Additional iOS Interface Gestures

Apple has applied to patent more powerful touch-based gestures in iOS devices with smaller touchscreens. The said technologies also involve sensing the device’s position and angle, and will manipulate data and images with these gestures.

Touchscreens are among Apple’s favorites when it comes to user interface. Touching elements on a device is more intuitive than pressing buttons or moving a mouse cursor around. Unfortunately, with limited screen sizes, a user is also limited in terms of manipulating the data from within. We already have pinch and zoom gestures on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with which we can manipulate images and data on these iOS devices. However, Apple wants to further improve this gesture-based touchscreen experience.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has published a few patents that Apple has recently applied for, and these include two technologies for manipulating images and data on a touchscreen surface with gestures. These include “Hold then Swipe,” “Swipe Then Hold,” displaying more visual data, and the use of the accelerometer.

The two hold and swipe patents mean that single-finger touch gestures will become more powerful than just dragging elements around and panning the screen. With these features, a user can manipulate a photo or image onscreen in terms of zooming in, panning, and even changing view angles without lifting one’s finger.

When a user swipes and then holds the finger in position, the speed of panning or flipping through content can be changed by angling the smartphone or iDevice left or right. Holding a finger in position can also bring up a context menu or an additional screen with more information about the element being manipulated. In the same way, the hold-then-swipe gesture can be used to bring up additional information about the item being manipulated. One example could include touching a person’s face in a photo, and then iOS showing other pictures of the same person stored in the device.

On the other hand, the new patent also takes better advantage of a device’s accelerometer in manipulating content. Tilting an iPhone, iPad or iPod left or right might be useful when flipping through photos, music albums and the like.

Even bigger applications of these new touch-based gestures include displaying related items depending on context. For instance, touching and holding on a certain landmark in an online map can bring up a set of photos for that particular area. Apple has yet to integrate these technologies into their actual product, and so these are mainly concepts that might see their way into real devices soon. As such, Apple is likely to be able to integrate these in a seamless and intuitive manner with existing iOS user interface elements.

Read: Apple Patents Additional iOS Interface Gestures ["Hold Then Swipe" & "Swipe Then Hold" Provides More Powerful Way of Manipulating Photos on iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch] | TFTS 

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Samsung Galaxy Player 5.0 vs Galaxy S II

Now that we’ve reviewed the gigantic Galaxy Player 5.0 for what it is on its own, it’s time to compare to the rest of the market a bit more in-depth, starting with what at first glance might appear to be the Player’s closest cousin: the Galaxy S II. Before we continue, know this: it’s almost as if these two devices aren’t from the same family, that’s how different they are. Though the Galaxy Player 5.0 is only being released now near the holiday season, the Galaxy S II (in all its forms here in the United States) takes no prisoners when it comes to power and abilities.

The Galaxy S II comes in several different shapes and sizes here in the United States, two of the more powerful ones being the two we’ve got right here, the Galaxy S II from AT&T and the Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. The first of two has a 4.32-inch display at 480 x 800 resolution and a 1.2GHz dual-core processor made by Samsung. The Epic 4G Touch has the same specifications on a 4.5-inch display. This means that the pixel density is down but the power is the same. The Galaxy Player 5.0 has a single-core processor at 1Ghz that’s also made by Samsung and a display that’s 5-inches large with the same 480 x 800 pixel resolution. In addition, the Galaxy Player has a TFT LCD display while the Galaxy S II units both have a Super AMOLED Plus display. Have a look here to see if you can spot the differences in quality:

Each of the displays above are set to full brightness, and the device on the far right is the Samsung Stratosphere. This device is a 4G LTE enabled Samsung device with a Super AMOLED (not plus) display also at 480 x 800 pixel resolution. Again, see if you can tell the difference from the photo above. Have a peek at the video below for a hands-on comparison of the Galaxy Player 5.0, the Galaxy S II in the two flavors mentioned, and the Stratosphere, each of them in kind:

So what about price comparisons? Have a peek here at some prices that are live RIGHT this second here:

Galaxy S II AT&T $199 on contract $549 off contract
Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch $99.99 on contract $599.99 off contract
Samsung Stratosphere $149.99 on contract $409.99 off contract
Galaxy Player 5.0 $259.00

And heed this again: the Galaxy Player 5.0 has no on contract price because there is no contract in any instance, it’s a Wi-fi only device. The question you’ve got to ask yourself, as with all decisions between devices like these, is “what do I want this device to do?” If it’s just having a one-time-only cost for a 5-inch display having device that’ll work as a display for games and videos in a variety of places on a Samsung interface, the Galaxy Player 5.0 is your clear winner as it’s essentially your only choice.

If on the other hand you want power, thinness, and connectivity wherever you go, you’ll be best off with one of the Galaxy S II devices. For 4G LTE, you can either choose the Stratosphere here or the DROID Charge, another lovely choice from Verizon. Of course all of these are Samsung devices. What if you want a comparable device to the Galaxy Player 5.0 but don’t mind if it’s not a Samsung-made interface and set of hardware? We’ll be working with an iPod Touch next – stay tuned to SlashGear for more!

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