But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One area that could be very interesting is a video editing application for the iPad. Such a thing already exists on the iPhone, ReelDirector [$7.99 App Store Link] and it works surprisingly well. More after the jump….

Some additional notes on this app:

MEDIA COVERAGE

“ReelDirector is a powerful, easy-to-use, and fun iPhone app for creating videos with titles and effects.”
– tuaw

“ReelDirector beefs up iPhone 3GS’s editing capabilities”
MacWorld

This Week’s 10 Best iPhone Apps – October 23, 2009
Gizmodo

“File this one under sent from the future. ReelDirector is a pretty full-featured movie editor” … “a quite amazing demonstration of the march of technology.”
Wired.com Gadget Lab

“ReelDirector App Adds Surprisingly Capable Video Editing To The iPhone 3GS”
OhGizmo

ESSENTIALS

• Add and stitch together clips, drag-and-drop to rearrange order.
• Add text watermarks of title, opening credits and closing credits with 4 styles and 9 positions to choose from.
• Put transitions between clips to smooth or blend the change from one scene to another. With 27 transitions to choose from, create professional looking videos with ease and fun.
• Import you own music files and/or record voiceovers to create and mix soundtracks.
• Share your movies by email or save to Camera Roll where you can upload to YouTube, copy back to computer, etc.

EDITING

• Timeline: scrollable, seekable within clips, easy to arrange order
• Preview: full preview of frame at current timeline position, with watermarks and transition applied
• Record soundtracks and adjust position, volume and fade in/out
• Trim: you can keep original and go back to revise, or make a final cut
• Split: cut video into 2 or 3 clips seamlessly
• Add photo with Ken Burns effect

TITLES

• Title and multiline opening and closing credits with adjustable length
• Combine 4 styles and 9 positions to create 36 different appearance
• Gradually fade out title and opening credits, fade in closing credits

TRANSITIONS

• Cross Dissolve
• Fade Through Black/White
• Flash Through Black/White
• Blur Fade (fade out of focus)
• Blur Cross (first scene fades out of focus)
• Wipe Left/Right/Up/Down
• Wipe Soft Left/Right/Up/Down
• Wipe Blend Left/Right/Up/Down
• Push Left/Right/Up/Down
• Push Left/Right/Up/Down with Border

If this sounds like your cup of tea while we wait to see what video editing possibilities the iPad brings, check out ReelDirector on the iTunes Store.

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Kindle for iPhone is a very light download so you’ll be up and running in no time, you just need to enter your Amazon.com account details. Then you are taken into a Safari browser session to pick out books. Couple of nice features, you can download decent sized free samples of any book you’re interested in and if you have a Kindle it will automatically sync up so you have one copy on the Kindle and one for the iPhone. I chose a cookbook about making Japanese food.

Once you leave the Safari session, Kindle for iPhone automatically takes over again and your titles appear in the Home section of the application. You point to the book you want to view and it immediately jumps to the chapter index. To read a book you tap on the left side of the screen to go back a page and the right side to go forward, all very intuitive and I daresay more fun than using the physical buttons on the Kindle.

While reading you can tap once on the screen to bring up the navigation options. From top to bottom you have a link to your Home library along with the title of the current book. Then you have 5 font size settings to give your own personal trade off between legibility and amount of text per ‘page.’ Finally you have a choice of black text on white BG, white on black or a faux sepia look. You can also add bookmarks and there’s a slider to quickly jump around the pages of the book.

You can also easily view books in portrait or landscape mode by tilting your iPhone. In general the navigation is great though I couldn’t understand why pinch to zoom into the text didn’t work. Instead you have to call up the menu tab and select one of five font sizes, perhaps this is a function of Amazon’s book format that’s optimized for the Kindle. Also pictures jump out from the text clumsily, though at least you can pinch zoom those.

It’s interesting to compare the experience not only to a physical book but also to Amazon’s actual Kindle device. Compared to a book, there are obvious differences, either you much prefer looking at paper or you can handle looking at an LCD screen to read text. These days I’m thinking more and more people are completely accostumed to reading text on a screen so print may well be dead. My dad has an Amazon Kindle that I got to play with a little last Christmas. Personally it’s a toss up between the Kindle and the iPhone version:

Kindle Pros

• Much bigger screen that’s easier on the eyes and usable in direct sunlight
• Feels more book-like
• Longer battery life

iPhone Pros

• You can do a lot more than just read books, pocketable
• Can listen to music simultaneously
• Touch screen navigation feels more natural than Kindle’s many buttons

I like the idea of reading books on the iPhone but I think it would be impossible to read a lot this way. Maybe a quick sneak at a book you’re reading on a Kindle while you wait for a train, doctor’s office, etc. It’s a lot easier than trying to shoehorn 40 books into your pocket, that’s for sure and you can also make calls on it and listen to music. If you want to know a little early what reading a book on the iPad/Tablet/Slate’s screen might be like, try this out. It’s also FREE so what have you got to lose?

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The hotly anticipated Apple Tablet — or the Apple Newton II — will feature a wireless chip made by Qualcomm. This discrete little fact would confirm that Apple has chosen Verizon (VZ Quote) as its telco partner, says Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar.

If true, it validates what TheStreet first reported in July — that Apple and Verizon are working together to sell the new Tablet.

“This makes sense for Apple,” says Nielsen Wireless analyst Roger Entner. “It behooves them to build a relationship with a company they haven’t worked with yet,” Enter said referring to Verizon.

Having a telco partner means the price of the Verizon Tablet will be less than a Tablet purchased directly from Apple. Analysts estimate that Verizon will subsidize about $200 of the Tablet’s price and require a two-year data service plan of around $60 a month. Apple is expected to sell the Tablet for around $800 without a subsidy.

Apple is expected to unveil the Tablet next week and make it available for sale in March, though the sale date might be delayed until June due to component supply shortages, Kaufman analyst Shaw Wu indicated in a note Tuesday.

The Tablet will also include a docking station, according to Northeast Securities’ Kumar. This could be a crucial feature for consumers who harbor an ongoing love affair with keyboards. For those unsatisfied with touchscreen typing, a dock would connect to a keyboard and mouse.

Qualcomm chosen for iPhone 4G?

And earlier this month, as TheStreet exclusively reported, Apple chose Qualcomm’s wireless chip for a new version of the iPhone that’s headed to Verizonthis summer.

It hasn’t all been homeruns for Qualcomm however. Some analysts say the chip shop failed to deliver an all-in-one world phone chip that would have enabled Apple to build one iPhone for all carriers.

Qualcomm also didn’t win the processor slot for the Apple Tablet. Instead, that victory went to Apple’s ownP.A. Semi, as Kumar first told TheStreet. The snub was more painful for Intel (INTC Quote), which had hoped to get involved with the flagship Tablet device, should that category attract consumers.

And that is the wild card for the Apple Tablet: Proving there is big consumer demand be for an in-between device with no keyboard and a $2,000 price tag that includes a data contract.

Thousands of people won’t blink at the price, but millions probably will.

$2,000 + No Keyboard= Not Likely

Don’t buy into that last bit at all. No one has ever said we’d be looking at a price well above 1K and the rumors are more and more clear that the Slate or Tablet will ship with a dock that transforms it into a desktop computer, complete with mouse and keyboard. Hopefully wireless on the latter. Check out this forecast from theAppleBlog for more concepts:

A hardware keyboard designed specifically for the tablet and doubles as a dock might fit the bill. Given Apple’s apparent cloud ambitions (building a data center in North Carolina, purchasing LaLa, etc.) and cost concerns, the tablet is likely to have a small amount of onboard storage compared to laptops. Chances are that Apple will view the tablet as a cloud computing device, or one of several satellites orbiting around a full Mac serving as the digital media hub. Like the iPhone or iPod touch, the tablet may only hold a portion of your songs, movies, pictures and other media, meaning it will need to connect for syncing. A dock for syncing that doubles as a keyboard, with Jon Ives’ design panache, would be an excellent way to meet core needs while also extending the functionality of the device.

Given all of these options, I’m expecting three things: a variant of the software user interface that further limits users need to input text even more than the iPhone already does; an advanced multi-touch user interface that is optimized for five-finger input; and the option to use a keyboard–possibly a new keyboard that doubles as a dock–when necessary. The next-generation multi-touch capabilities that Apple has patented and developed are likely too advanced for many of today’s computer users. I expect the tablet multi-touch user interface to follow a similar path of increasing complexity and capability over several years as the trackpad and Magic Mouse have.

Hmm- are we really talking about an ultra-portable device that does double-duty as a docking desktop replacement. Basically it’s iMac + iPhone= what do you think?

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Bloomberg is the latest outlet to come up with some rumors about the possible new iPhone model coming this year (the iPhone, not the tablet, although doesn’t it seem like the flood of tablet rumors has encouraged all kinds of Apple speculation lately?). They say that the new handset will include a 5 megapixel camera to match Google’s Nexus One, and will also include a touch-sensitive casing, working similarly to the Magic Mouse. That one just seems strange — what would you gesture on the back of the iPhone while you’re using it?

They also say, quoting Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chen, that there’ll be plenty of new innovations in the software as well. We certainly hope so. According to this round of rumors, the new phone would go into production in April, and be released to stores in June or July, a timeline that actually matches up with what we’ve heard before.

Rumors are a dime a dozen, and even if a new phone does come out in July, that’s too long to wait if you need to buy a phone right now. But we’ll keep our ears open — there certainly is a lot of increased speculation about Apple hardware lately, and there ought to be something in the pipeline driving it all.

Meanwhile iSlate seems to think this configuration seems unlikely.

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AT&T today began ramping up its 3G network plans in a newer direction by adding one of its earliest “second layers” to its Atlanta service. The approach gives about 90 cell sites in the area a second node each and helps balance the load of data on the network, particularly during peak hours when the one node would normally be full. Atlanta had already had a certain level of duplication but now is much more comprehensive.

The rollout had technically begun with a handful of Florida deployments in November and December of 2009 but is now moving on to a more national level this year, the company tells Electronista. It didn’t provide a timetable for when these upgrades would roll out or in which cities.

AT&T’s expansion is treated as a second wave of upgrades beyond what it managed in 2009. Most of its efforts last year were centered on adding the 850MHz frequency to key areas, to expand the amount of available bandwidth, in addition to improving the actual behind-the-scenes capacity at existing nodes.

Most of the expansion is a direct response to the sheer weight put on the network by the iPhone, whose heavy data use has been largely responsible for 3G data often becoming unusable in major cities like New York City and San Francisco.

Perhaps this is more evidence that points to an iPhone ’4G’ and perhaps a Tablet on the way. Or maybe AT&T is struggling to fix what is already broken…

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Suppliers for Apple Inc’s new tablet computer have begun shipping touchscreen panels and will start delivering aluminum casings for it next month, sources said, implying a second-quarter product launch.

Hmm- aluminum casing, that’s typically reserved for Apple’s more pro products like the Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The iPhone, iPod and MacBook typically come in white or black (or in the case of the Nano and Shuffle, many colors.) Does this give a little hint to the Tablet’s possible pricing- somewhere in the neighborhood of $899 to $1,000 perhaps? Then again, perhaps it’s only the back which is aluminum casing, much like the first generation iPod/iPhone. Time will tell.

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This is an interesting use of the iPhone to act as a sort of remote trigger and monitor for your DSLR. It’s not quite as useful for video as it is for still but as more folks are mixing it up between stills and video at once in the studio, it could come in handy. Besides, let’s face it, who doesn’t like using their iPhone in new and cool ways. Check out DSLR Camera Remote for more info. $19.99 is a bit steep for an iPhone app, so there’s also a LITE version.

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