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The official adaptation of the designer board game Carcassonne has landed on the iTunes App store. The TUAW Review does a nice job of summing up what’s so wonderful about this game itself as well as the strengths & weaknesses of the iOS adaptation.

I think the developers, TheCodingMonkeys, have really knocked the Carcassonne App out of the park. It’s one of the best examples of gaming on iOS yet. I especially appreciate the ability to play several multiplayer games at once and have the app notify me when it’s my turn to play on any one of them. This enables real pick-up/put-down gameplay that’s perfect for the iPhone on the go. But even if you don’t play with people, the CPU players are pretty good and can present quite a challenge (if you want them to).  Furthermore, despite the fact that it’s only optimized for the iPhone right now, I’ve found the game to be very playable when pixel doubled on the iPad.

The game is on sale for just $4.99 which is a steal for something with this kind of functionality and replayability. That price goes up to $9.99 when the iPad upgrade, which will be free to existing owners, goes live later this year. If you do pick it up, be sure to send me a friend request so we can play some games and remember, “Sharing is Caring.”

For everyone looking for a more detailed review of the iPad; Macworld’s review is one of the best. I agree with most everything in the very detailed write up.

I’m still very pleased with my own; I read a book for a few hours last night on the device and I was very pleased with the reading experience. Viewing HTML5 video on the web is similarly nice; I certainly am not missing Flash support.

The iPad is not a substitute for a full fledged computer with a large hard drive, optical drive, keyboard, and mouse, but it certainly is my preferred lounging computer. Which is to say; I’d much rather use the iPad than a laptop or iPhone when I’m reclined on the couch or laying in bed. This is when the strength of the touch interface and form factor really shine.

I received my iPad today and I’m quite enamored with it so far. It does a great job serving as a little machine that you can pick up around the house to look up information on the web or check an email. Its best use so far seems to be as an ebook reader; I think it will be preferable to paper for just about anything you can find digitally. I even tried reading some PDF scans of magazines and was pleased with the reading experience, though the many full pages of ads were tiresome.

I think the iPad has some nice potential as a gaming device, if the touchscreen doesn’t interfere too much with your game environment. It even might be useful for productivity applications (if you don’t need to use the keyboard too much; I’m typing up this post with the iPad just sitting on my lap but clearly a physical keyboard would work better for longer typing sessions.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the iPad; it’s already more functional than my netbook and it’s a heck of a lot easier & much more fun to use. I think well be seeing them all over the place pretty soon.

Loads of good stuff announced today for the iPhone OS 3.0. Engadget has the details.

Apple is, unsurprisingly, not going to stand still and let Google Android and Palm WebOS get the upper hand on features. They pretty much went down the wish list of features for the update and checked of every one of them: copy/paste, push notifications, better Bluetooth support, and so on. Pretty much the only feature left out is background apps which Apple again dissed as a large source of battery drain.

Flash is also still a no-show, but that’s not a surprise, nor something I think Apple plans on addressing anytime soon. In any case, I still don’t think Flash would be any good on any phone device at this time.

Consumers get it this summer… I can’t wait.

1. Instapaper – Synergizes web reading between the phone and your computer through ‘the cloud.’
2. Evernote – Synchronizes notes between the phone and the computer through ‘the cloud.’
3. Delivery Status Touch – Tracks orders/packages/deliveries, gets information through ‘the cloud.’
4. Air Sharing – Allows you to copy all sorts of files to the phone over WiFi for viewing and reference without any network access
5. Now Playing – The best way to look up movie times and reviews. Uses phone location data to find theaters around you.

A note about the cloud:

Cloud synchronization is a key theme for many great mobile apps, because, with a persistent internet connection, the iPhone is a revolutionary tool to connect your life when you’re out and about with your life on your computer. This is vitally important to mobile computing because no one wants to enter much information on a little device, but we want that information quickly accessible when we’re out and about. Synching with the could is already working magic for the first 3 apps above (they wouldn’t be on any top list without this feature), and you’ll be seeing it all over the place over the next year (for example, iWork.com).