Since Apple introduced the new device a week and a half ago, we’ve been trying to answer your questions about which device to buy, whether you should upgrade and, once you have it in your hands, what to do from there. Which apps should you get? Which ones will look the best? Which data plan should you pick? Here’s what you need to know.

Details, details

Here’s a scientific explanation of what makes the new so-called Retina display so very bright and unpixelated.

Sure, you might feel silly taking video with an iPad. But Kevin Tofel thinks you might feel differently now that the new iPad has better cameras and useful photo-editing software. Here’s his analysis of the new cameras.

Making decisions

One-stop shop for the most insightful reviews of the new iPad: here’s Om’s meta review of the reviews.

iPad versus iPad: Now that Apple is bringing 4G to the iPad, which carrier should you go with? Kevin Fitchard compares the services and options from both AT&T and Verizon.

Now that you have your iPad

What if you already have a 3G wireless contract? We walk you through the steps to upgrading your 3G data plan to a 4G data plan.

With that 2048 × 1536 display resolution and 264 pixels per inch, the iPad’s most noticeable new feature is the Retina display. Here’s a roundup of the apps available in the iTunes App Store now that have been optimized for the new high-resolution display.

iPhoto, Apple’s photo-editing software for the Mac, is for the first time on the iPad. It’s been reworked for touch-based editing photos and creating Photo Journals pictures, maps, weather and calendar widgets — here are the details.

As our own iPads get delivered, we’ll have more coverage over the weekend and into next week, so stay tuned.

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In TaskRabbit’s case, that includes users offering up their time and skills to complete tasks that others are unable to do or would rather not do. But collaborative consumption runs a whole gamut of industries — whether it be automobile sharing through services like RelayRides or apartment sharing through services like Airbnb.

To highlight more of those stories, TaskRabbit is launching a series of video interviews with other “founders, entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and consumers” who are authorities in the collaborative consumption space. The series, called Collaboratively Speaking, kicks off with a conversation between TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque and RelayRides founder Shelby Clark about why collaborative consumption is not just catching on but accelerating as time passes. (It also includes a cameo by Busque’s awesome yellow lab Kobe.)

Future guests will include Lauren Anderson, Innovation Director at CollaborativeConsumption.com, and John Zimmer of Zimride. And the plan is for TaskRabbit to continue releasing the videos once a month until, well, it runs out of interesting entrepreneurs. So, never?

Check out the first video below:

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To bring the price down, Asus may be opting for a dual-core chip instead of the Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3. The OMAP 4 from Texas Instruments looks to be the front-runner to power the Nexus tablet. That makes sense, as Android is already primed for OMAP support, given that Google worked with TI on the Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which also uses an OMAP chip.

Why would Google even bother to build and support a Nexus tablet? The only tablets that showed any signs of life against Apple’s iPad were two low-priced, 7-inch slates: the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, which combined for 21 percent of all U.S. tablet sales last quarter. Both run on Google’s Android platform, but Google gets little benefit from these devices, which offer their own app stores and media ecosystems.

I’m still convinced that, while a Google Nexus tablet sounds appealing — especially at a sub-$200 price point — Google’s tablet issue isn’t hardware-related. There’s no lack of well-built Android tablets on the market today. But consumers either don’t find or don’t think they can find the same assortments of apps and media found on the iPad, Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet. It’s the ecosystem and consumer awareness that Google needs to work on, not a Nexus tablet.

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AT&T

First, you will need to log on to AT&T’s website and transfer your account over to your new iPad. (If you don’t know or forgot your AT&T account password for your iPad, you can have one re-issued to you.) You will also need to know your new iPad’s IMEI and ICCID settings. These are both located in the General settings on the iPad under the About section.

• Log on to www.att.com/ipadlanding to access your account information.
• Click on “Edit User & Payment Information,” and then select “Update Device Information.”
• Enter in your new iPad’s IMEI and ICCID settings, and click on “Next.”

This process should take effect instantly and will not change or affect any other information on the plan.  It has been reported that original iPad owners who have been able to retain their unlimited-data plan with AT&T will be able to keep this plan at the faster 4G LTE speeds. If you are unsure or just want to talk to an AT&T representative before doing the transfer, you can always call 1-800-331-0500 for assistance.

Verizon

It appears that, if you are transferring your Verizon data plan,  you will need to contact Verizon directly by calling 1-800-786-8149 and have a service representative transfer your plan from one iPad to another. Then you will need to “Reset Subscriber Service” as well as “Reprovision Account,” which are both located in the General settings under Reset.

For both carriers, you may have to restart both your old and new iPads in order for the changes to take effect (press and hold the Sleep/Wake button on the top of the iPad for six seconds). If you search Apple’s site, you will find an outdated support article claiming that you should transfer the SIM card from your old iPad to your new iPad. This may in fact cause some issues with your carrier and force you to re-activate your iPad, or worse, cancel your account.  The best bet is to stick with each carrier’s update instructions and keep the original SIM card in the iPad it came with.

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DigiTimes says its information has come from industry sources, but its report follows a similar one from Tech In Asia. Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, told a Chinese news agency that the first Lumia phone would be available on the 28th of this month. Elop didn’t provide any details of which model or models would be available at that time. However, the Lumia 800 and 719C were reviewed and approved for sale in China by the country’s telecom inspection unit, according to Tech In Asia.

Although there hasn’t been an official Lumia launch date provided, it shouldn’t surprise that Nokia will be pushing its product hard in China. As noted yesterday, China is expected to supplant the U.S. as the world leader in smartphone shipments by the end of this year. India and Brazil, too, are moving up the list as mobile broadband infrastructure matures. Given Nokia’s broad global distribution and worldwide brand recognition, I’d expect Lumia handsets to find their way to those countries soon as well.

Launching relatively low-cost but highly capable smartphones in populous countries could be a boon to Nokia, which has faced sales declines and increased competition from the iPhone and Android handsets. But it could bring even more benefit to Microsoft. The company has tried to start over with its mobile platform, launching the first Windows Phone devices in 2010, but hasn’t yet gained much of a foothold in the smartphone market.

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No cloud is perfect. And after some very public cloud outages, business customers are looking harder at divvying up their workloads among multiple clouds to mitigate risk.

The latest glitch was a 19-minute Elastic Compute Cloud connectivity issue at Amazon’s U.S. East region early Thursday morning. (More on this here and here.) Earlier this month, a 12-hour Leap Day Azure outage afflicted Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud.

With these snafus, business customers are starting to realize that, while cloud computing can cut costs, it is no panacea: Clouds run on data centers and data centers go down.

To hedge their bets, businesses are looking into multi-cloud solutions. That means companies that used to default to Amazon Web Services (AWS) might take a harder look at enterprise-class clouds fielded by Joyent, Terremark  or Savvis.

Special clouds for special workloads

Ty Amell, CEO of StackMob, a company that runs his mobile software development business on several clouds, says he sees the same trend emerging among customers.

“There are many advantages to the cloud, however it takes a different type of thinking when running cloud infrastructure. When architecting your system, you have to plan for any piece of it to be down at any time. This includes an entire availability zone or cloud service,” Amell said via email.

Bigger companies, at least, are divvying up their workloads, putting specific pieces in the cloud that makes the most sense. “If you have your data replicated, it is fairly trivial to spin up new servers somewhere else, or turn on idle ones. Having a multi-cloud strategy doesn’t mean you won’t have downtime, but you shouldn’t have the massive downtime we’ve seen with some companies when AWS has problems with their EBS volumes or Azure goes down,” Amell said.

Charlie Robbins, founder of Nodejitsu, agreed that multi-cloud deployments are driven by the desire to boost fault tolerance, to reduce latency between parts of their applications and to take advantage of specific features offered by a particular infrastructure-as-a-service vendor.

Of course, it’ s easier just to forkload a given application onto a single cloud and deal with one provider, but the fact that we’re well along into the cloud-computing era means that businesses are getting more sophisticated about what they can do to optimize their workloads and mitigate failures.

Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian, who has blogged on this topic, said cloud computing is succumbing to the traditional IT buying cycle. Customers start buying everything from one vendor, then move to best-of-breed services for different parts of their solution. He doesn’t see many Sonian customers deploying to multiple clouds now, but they’re headed in that direction.

Coming: Name-brand clouds

“They’re not mixing use cases, but over time, they will want a cloud based on brand name, the same way they choose internal IT. Every major vendor will provide a branded cloud; we’re just at the beginning of that curve,” Arnette said. That process is already underway with IBM SmartCloud, Microsoft Azure and Fujitsu Cloud.

And the fact is, some clouds are better suited for some tasks than others. Companies running the popular Node.js server-side framework for data-intensive-real-time (or DIRT) applications may run out of gas on generic public clouds once the workload scales up.  At that point, it makes sense to put at least those intensive workloads on Joyent or another cloud that handles low-latency disk and network I/O loads better than a vanilla public cloud, Robbins said.

Roger Jennings, CEO of software consultancy OakLeaf Systems, said his customers think about multiple clouds but typically end up rejecting the multi-cloud option. “DevOps issues with failover times and/or content sync cause them to stick with their original [single cloud] choice,” he said via email. DevOps refers to the software building process in which developers work with the operations side of the house to make sure goals are aligned.

Still, as companies get more sophisticated in their understanding of what clouds can and can’t do, look for more of them to split their computing loads among the clouds that suit each piece best.

Photo courtesy of by -JvL-.

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Here are several iPad apps that have been updated with Retina-ready graphics so everyone within eyesight can witness the pixel-pushing power of your new Apple tablet.

Besides the titles that were featured in the iPad introduction event, Apple has set up a new section on the iTunes App Store to highlight Retina-ready titles. I’ve handpicked a few titles from this list and from other updates I’m aware of for you to try out. Keep in mind that this list is not comprehensive, and there should be new Retina-optimized apps coming to the App Store pretty quickly.

Games

Real Racing 2

Motion graphics in games are particularly impressive on the new screen. Apple showed off the game apps Infinity Blade II and Sky Gamblers: Air Support at the introduction event. In addition to those, I would check out Flight Control Rocket (a new space-themed update to the beloved Flight Control series) and Real Racing 2 HD. Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation looks interesting too if you like shooters.

• Infinity Blade II
• Sky Gamblers: Air Support
• Flight Control Rocket
• Real Racing 2 HD
• Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation

Visual Arts

iPhoto and iMovie are pretty much must-buy apps for the new iPad. While the iPad’s built-in camera is much improved over the last version’s, you might want to load up iPhoto with some hi-res images from a Digital SLR just to put on a show for your jealous friends on the hi-res screen.

I would recommend SketchBook Pro, but I think you still have to display some actual talent for drawing to make this a true showpiece for your Retina display iPad. If you can draw (and I don’t mean you’ve scored some points in Draw Something), then by all means show off with this amazing app for artists.

• iPhoto
• iMovie
• SketchBook Pro

Education / Science

Star Walk is already a gorgeous app. Updated for the Retina display, this will be an absolute stunner. Solar Walk, too.

• Star Walk
• Solar Walk

Social Networking

A few of the major Twitter apps have been updated, including the official Twitter app, Twitterrific, and TweetBot. Facebook’s app is expected to be updated soon as well. These aren’t necessarily great showoff material, but people seem to love looking at Twitter and Facebook streams (I know I do).

• Twitter
• Twitterrific
• TweetBot

Reading

Kindle for iPad

The Retina display is actually really useful for showing off how sharp and crisp text is rendered onscreen. iBooks is a good place to start. The Kindle app was updated Thursday so that text would render correctly, but otherwise the graphic elements are still standard resolution. The Daily has been updated as well if you already own that news app. Instapaper should be updated in the next week or so.

• iBooks
• Kindle
• The Daily

More Apple Apps

• Apple Remote
• Find my Friends
• Find my iPhone
• GarageBand
• Keynote
• Numbers
• Pages

Personal Pick

I’m a huge soccer fan, and MLS MatchDay 2012 is awesome for keeping up with U.S. soccer action. The Colorado Rapids aren’t quite set up to make another run at the league cup, but I still like to follow all the games.

• MLS MatchDay 2012

Wallpaper

Don’t forget to pick out a full-resolution image for your lock screen and wallpaper. Apple provides some, of course, but you might want to check out this Reddit thread to find some hi-res wallpaper images to show something a little different from the built-in choices.

If you didn’t find something above or on Apple’s Featured Apps page, TechCrunch has an even longer list of Retina-ready apps that is worth checking out.

If you find something else to show off your beautiful new iPad screen, be sure to share it in the comments below.

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Above is the final design, and to the right, one of the prototypes. The final design includes:

• Extensive logging capabilities
• The ability to work in scenarios where Internet and power have been out for days
• A sensor that can detect all three forms of radiation.

(It doesn’t have a radio (wireless capabilities).)

Huang says he doesn’t plan on manufacturing the Geiger counter, but has donated the design to the community (and open-sourced it), and that means a long-time Geiger counter maker International Medcom will be able to commercialize the product if they choose. Huang says it cost $3,000 to make the design and the two prototypes. Not bad.

Some of the designs that Huang abandoned I’ve included below:

Images courtesy of Bunnie Huang.

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At 8 a.m. local time, the exact time Apple is planning to open the doors of its stores to sell the first of its third-generation iPads to hordes of customers — with plenty of news cameras on hand — Change.org will hold another demonstration, this time asking Apple to create “an ethical iPad.” They are petitioning Apple to create “a worker protection strategy” to prevent worker abuse and injury. Change.org so far has a little over 251,000 signatures on the petition.

The demonstrations are planned for Apple stores in Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco.

This follows a series of protests asking for “an ethical iPhone” last month at six Apple stores. Those attracted some media attention, but none were coordinated around an event like a new product sale. Apple typically has long lines of customers ready to buy new products at its stores the first day they’re available, so Change.org will definitely have a bigger audience and potentially better media coverage for Friday’s protest.

Apple has taken steps to assure its customers that it is trying to improve the conditions at its partners’ factories. Last month the company sent representatives of the Fair Labor Association, a trade group Apple joined in January, to inspect contract manufacturer Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen, China. Audits are also scheduled for Foxconn’s Chengdu facility, and the factories of suppliers Quanta and Pegatron.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged the outcry from concerned customers and investors, saying, “We believe that every worker has the right to a fair and safe work environment, free of discrimination, where they can earn competitive wages and they can voice their concerns freely. And Apple suppliers must live up to this to do business with Apple.”

The leader of this ongoing protest, Mark Shields, said he appreciates the steps Apple is taking, but wants to draw more attention to new products like the iPad.

“It’s great to see Apple taking important steps like the factory audit this month, and pay raises for the factory workers,” said Shields in a statement. “But Apple hasn’t crossed the finish line yet. New product releases, like the iPad 3 this week, have typically been the most dangerous for workers because of the incredible pressure they are under to meet release production deadlines.”

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The iFixit teardown confirms something else I suspected. There’s no special chip magic helping to boost the battery life for the 4G tablet. Most LTE devices to date have struggled to offer more than 4 to 5 hours of battery life while using LTE networks, save the Motorola Droid Maxx, which does so the same way as Apple’s iPad — with a higher capacity battery.

How do I know there’s no magic pixie dust on the chips in Apple’s LTE tablet to help increase the run-time? Apple is using Qualcomm’s MDM9600 3G and 4G baseband chip, which has been used in Verizon’s LTE MiFi since April of last year, not to mention a number of other LTE devices since then.

Ultimately, iPad owners don’t care how Apple solved the LTE power consumption challenge, but now you know it’s all battery, which explains the increased thickness and weight. Maybe the next iPad will have that magic pixie dust!

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