The iPad may not have been blasted off to space aboard a shuttle like its sibling the iPhone, but it has reached 100,000′ above sea level attached to a weather balloon. It also fell from that altitude after the balloon burst — and survived its crash landing on a rocky hillside in Nevada. If you’re wondering how the iPad remained fully-functional, it’s because it was protected with a 6-ounce Extreme Edge case by G-Form, which is the company behind the project.

“It’s the first iPad that’s ever free-fallen from space and survived to play more movies,” says G-Form’s Vice President for innovations, Thom Cafaro. It’s worth noting, however, that outer space doesn’t technically begin until 328,084′ above sea level. Regardless, the iPad surviving a 100,000′ free fall is still more impressive than the company’s previous stunts. G-Form once sent an iPad skydiving from a height of 1,300′, and tossed another one out of a Porsche speeding at 113 mph.

G-Form is exhibiting its full line of products and unveiling its new iPhone case at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

The Toshiba Excite X10 is a sexy slab, my main man. And that’s saying something, because I hate when people use “sexy” to describe gadgets – especially slabs.

But it’s true. I can’t properly convey how weird it is to manhandle this tablet, which weighs 1.18 pounds and measures 0.3 inches thin. It’s not ridiculously thinner or lighter than an iPad 2, either, but the X10′s more rectangular 1280×800-resolution screen and non-curved backside just make it seem much easier to tote around.

The tablet sports microSD, micro HDMI and a micro USB port despite its svelte frame, which are nice additions as far as expansion goes. It’ll be available in February in 16- and 32-gigabyte flavors for $529 and $599, respectively. Toshiba’s probably going to find that to be too expensive for widespread adoption, sexy slab though the tablet may be. Hopefully it’ll come way, way down at retail. It’d be mighty hard to resist at – say — $399 or less.

Still, it’s a nice feat of engineering. We’ll get our hands on one for review in the next month or two, so make sure to check back once we put the X10 through its paces. Check out the above video for a quick demo of the tablet. Sorry about the low lighting – Vegas is a dark and mysterious place; a fickle mistress. She takes without asking.

For the last three weeks, iOS hacker pod2g has been tinkering away toward an untethered iOS 5 jailbreak and blogging about his progress. We’ve been keeping track as he succeeds in jailbreaking device after device, starting with a third generation iPod Touch. He’s now freed almost every iOS 5-compatible device from the grips of Apple’s restrictions. The only ones still underway are those with A5 processors like the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

Aware of how eager the jailbreak community is to get their hands on an untethered solution, pod2g decided to share his work with the Chronic Dev team, who develops the greenpois0n jailbreak for public use. Early this morning, an untethered jailbreak for A4 processor-based iOS 5 devices was released via both greenpois0n and redsn0w, another popular tool for jailbreaking iOS.

This is the first time such a jailbreak has been available for iOS 5 since the new mobile operating system was released in October. Previously, users could only jailbreak the OS using a “tethered” solution, meaning it required devices be connected to a desktop or laptop whenever they are rebooted. It may have hit the spot for hardcore jailbreak addicts, but for most users a solution of that nature is too cumbersome.

Starting today, the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, first generation iPad and two most recent iPod models can be jailbroken using either the greenpois0n or redsn0w tools. Now that this release is out, pod2g is going to focus on hacking the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Why Jailbreak?

When it comes to jailbreaking iPhones, iPads and iPods, there’s really no “killer app” to justify the move. Rather, doing so unlocks a world of unauthorized apps and user interface tweaks that aren’t available via the iTunes App Store. For some, playing vintage video game emulators makes the effort worth it. For others, they like the ability to tether their phone’s Internet connection to a laptop or open the phone using facial recognition instead of a pin number. Last year we rounded up more than 30 reasons to jailbreak, a list that has only grown since then.

Some of what comes out of the jailbreak community is of such high quality that Apple itself has borrowed ideas from it. The iOS 5 user notification system may look familiar to folks who had jailbroken iOS 4. Likewise, jailbreaking iOS 3 allowed users to shoot videos and customize their backgrounds, both features that are now very familiar to most iDevice owners. The company even hired jailbreak developer Nicholas Allegra (aka @Comex) as an intern in August.

Fans of the clean, inviting look of the iPhone, iPad and other blockbuster Apple products are legion, and that includes Queen Elizabeth II.

The British monarch has awarded a knighthood to Jonathan Paul Ive, a Brit and head of Apple Inc.’s design team since the mid-’90s.

Ive received a KBE, short for Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The honor was announced Saturday for services to design and enterprise.

“To be recognized with this honor is absolutely thrilling and I am both humbled and sincerely grateful,” Ive said in a statement. “I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design. I feel enormously fortunate that I continue to be able to design and make products with a truly remarkable group of people here at Apple.”

Ive is credited with helping the late Steve Jobs bring the consumer-electronics company back from the brink of financial ruin in the late 1990s with his whimsical design for the iMac computer, which originally came in bright colors at a time bland shades dominated the PC world.

He later helped transform Apple into a consumer-electronics powerhouse and the envy of Silicon Valley with the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

The knighthood is the second royal honor Ive has received. He was awarded a Commander of the British Empire honor in 2006 for achievements in British design and innovation.

Britain’s honors are bestowed twice a year by the monarch – at New Year’s and on her official birthday in June. Recipients are selected by committees of civil servants from nominations made by the government and the public.

Most of the honors go to people who are not in the limelight, for services to community or industry, but they also reward a sprinkling of famous faces.

Oscar-nominated actress Helena Bonham Carter and music producer Steve Lillywhite were among those included with Ive in the queen’s New Year honors list for 2012.

Ive started out far from Apple Inc.’s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple.

In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, Ive was hired as a senior designer.

After Jobs returned, he and Ive worked closely, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.

Apple’s pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, “Designed by Apple in California.” Six of Ive’s works, including the original iPod, are part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Design, as well as software that makes the gadgets easy to use, is a crucial part of setting Apple products apart from those of its rivals. Apple didn’t make the first music player or smartphone, but it dominated the market by making ones that looked cool and worked well.

Now, Apple’s products are more popular than ever, vaulting it past rival Microsoft Corp. in 2010 as the most valuable technology company in the world.

Lady Gaga may love her little monsters, but not enough to give each and every one of the 17 million-plus that follow her on Twitter a free iPad. That’s why, when she appeared to do that very thing yesterday, people were understandably cautious…and with good reason.

Gaga’s Twitter account updated yesterday morning with the message “Monsters, I’m giving away FREE iPad2′s to each one of you in the spirit of the holidays Go to bit.ly/s5MTqM to receive one!” This came after an earlier (deleted) offer of Macbooks to each of her followers, also in the spirit of the holidays. Either Gaga had gone…well, gaga with yuletide generosity, or something was clearly up. After bit.ly updated the link to define it as “potentially problematic”–a polite way of saying “Please don’t go to this spam site”–that tweet was also deleted, and a third one posted, again inviting followers to a Bit.ly-ed site with the promise of free goodies.

Clearly something was up, a suspicion confirmed when Gaga replaced the offending tweet with a message that read “Phew! The hacking is over! And just in time, I’m on my way to Japan! So excited to spend Xmastime with my TokyoMonsters!”

According to TechCrunch, at least 7,000 of Gaga’s monsters did as their leader suggested, according to Bit.ly stats, with Twitter showing that a number of them also retweeted the offer. Gaga wasn’t the only Twitter account hit by the hack; singers Nelly Furtado and Nichole Scherzinger were both apparently affected and offering “free” Apple products to unsuspecting followers yesterday.

The moral of this story? Spirit of the holidays or not, there’s no free iPad, MacBook or other Apple toy out there for you, especially one hidden behind a Bit.ly link.

Apple’s iPad may finally have a clear second-place competitor. After months of jockeying by various manufacturers to become the key competitor to the category leader, a new survey indicates thatAmazon’s recently released Kindle Fire has moved into that second position.

The survey, by ChangeWave Research, found that 65 percent of those who intend to buy a tablet in the near future would choose the iPad — while 22 percent would buy the new Kindle Fire. “Amazon is going to leapfrog the competition,” ChangeWave said in a statement, “and become the number two product in the tablet market.”

Doing Apple a Favor?

While this means that the iPad now has a clear-cut competitor, ChangeWave noted that Amazon may actually be doing Apple a favor. That is because the Fire’s success may damage “the tablet market hopes of the remaining competitors in the field.”

Among several other tablet makers — Motorola, Research In Motion, Dell, HTC, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba — none have more than 1 percent of the future tablet demand, according to ChangeWave. The only exception is Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, with 4 percent. In addition to struggling at that very low position, Samsung is also locked in a worldwide legal war with Apple, which contends that Samsung has infringed its patents and other intellectual property in its tablets and smartphones.

Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nook Tablet, which began shipping a day after the Kindle Fire became available, was not mentioned in the ChangeWave results even though the Nook Color e-reader/tablet has been the No. 2 competitor to the iPad in terms of units sold prior to this month.

Forrester Research predicts that by the end of the year, Kindle Fire sales could reach 5 million and the Nook Tablet could hit 2 million.

Some other reports have suggested that the Fire is beginning to impact sales of the iPad, with as many as a quarter of those who have bought or intend to buy a Fire saying that decision meant they would delay buying an iPad. The Fire is priced at about $300 less than the starting price for the iPad.

With such a great reception, rumors that Amazon plans to release new Fire models are not surprising. The rumors indicate that, before the end of second quarter next year, Amazon will release an 8.9-inch and a 10.1-inch Fire to complement the initial 7-inch model.

The Content Ecosystem

The ChangeWave survey was conducted of 3,043 North American consumers. It also found that interest in buying a tablet is increasing quickly. Fourteen percent of those surveyed said they planned to buy a tablet in the next three months, a major increase as the holiday season begins over the 6 percent who stated that desire in August.

Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said it was “too early to say yet” if the tablet category has become a two-company race. For example, he said, sales over the last year have been “the iPad, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, and then everyone else.”

When faced with a choice of Amazon or Barnes & Noble, Greengart said, the consumer who is looking for a tablet at $200 or less for content consumption will find Amazon’s Kindle Fire more attractive, because it has so much more content than Barnes & Noble in movies, music, and other categories.

He noted that it makes sense PC makers might be thinking they “can’t compete in that kind of content ecosystem.” Google, maker of the open-source Android platform, is building its own content ecosystem, but slowly, Greengart said.

The PC manufacturers, Greengart said, might decide to “find something else to do,” or they might wait for the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8, for which they’ll be making PCs anyway, in the hopes that Microsoft will be able to supply and maintain a competing content ecosystem for Windows 8-based tablets.

I use my AIM instant-messaging account every day, but I can’t remember the last time I used the AIM software. Instead, I use iChat, Meebo, Imo.IM, and other third-party clients that work on AIM’s network. AIM’s app itself has long felt like software that goes all the way back to 1997 and has been getting more bloated ever since. Which it has.

Until now. AOL has launched a preview of an all-new AIM, and it has very little to do with the creaky old one except that it works on the same IM network. It’s so all-new that AOL even dumped its venerable “running man” stick-figure—who, let’s face it, screams “Old AOL that used to send us trial discs”—in favor of a hip little bot as its mascot.

Here are some of the major features of the Windows and Mac clients, most of which are new:

• The Windows and Mac versions sport a streamlined new paned interface that’s reminiscent of Twitter’s iPad version, with a vertical toolbar and panes that show your buddies and chats. It’s clean, straightforward, and nice.
• AIM now delivers IMs that people sent when you were offline and retains your entire IM history, giving it a real-time/non-real-time feel that’s vaguely reminiscent of Facebook messaging.
• It lets you do group chatting on the fly by IMing with multiple other people; they, too, will get the IMs whether or not they’re logged into AIM at the moment.
• It displays images and videos right inside a chat session’s word balloons.
• It has one-to-one video chat (but not group video chat like AOL’s AIM AV service.)
• It supports Facebook Chat and Google Talk as well as the AIM network.
• It’s dumped the Lifestream feature that tried to thread together all your status updates into one stream, but there are separate panes for Facebook and Twitter updates. For some reason the Twitter one isn’t working for at the moment, and these panes are only for incomingupdates, not your own ones.
• It’s got a (non-customizable) news section with content from AOL properties such as the Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch.

Besides the Windows and Mac clients—which are preview editions that haven’t replaced their predecessors yet—AOL is launching a new version of the browser-based AIM, plus new iPhone and Android apps. It doesn’t have any immediate plans to update the iPad app.

The single best thing about the new AIM isn’t any one feature: It’s that it finally feels like it was designed in the 21st century. I’m not sure whether I’ll stick with it, but I’m going to give it a try—and given AIM’s history in recent years, that’s an accomplishment in itself.

The Kindle was always an odd product name.Amazon used a verb to name a thing, raising the question: Kindle what? Now we have the answer: Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is the first full-color, touch-screen Kindle. It’s available in the U.S. starting Monday for $199.

A price like that for what’s essentially a small iPad is bound to light the flames of desire this holiday season. I want to cool those down a bit, or some of you will buy the Fire and feel burned.

The Fire is the best Kindle yet, no doubt about it. It’s amazing that it costs half of what the first Kindle cost, just four years ago, yet does so much more than display books.

It’s more of an all-purpose computer than an e-reader. It shows movies, TV shows and Web pages. It does email and lets you play games. You’ll be lucky to get any reading done, with so many other things to do.

But it has to be weighed against the competition. When you do that, it becomes apparent just how spare Amazon had to keep the device to limbo under that $200 price level.

The Kindle’s design is even starker than the iPad’s. It’s a black monolith with only one button — the power switch — and two jacks, for headphones and power. All the controls are on the screen.

The screen measures 7 inches diagonally, a bit larger than the monochrome Kindles and a bit less than half the size of the iPad’s. The smaller size does make the Fire more portable than an iPad; it will fit nicely into a handbag, for instance.

The size of the screen wasn’t much of an issue on the monochrome Kindles because they were mainly good for showing text anyway. But the responsive color screen of the Fire opens up a lot of possibilities, such as showing magazine and comic-book pages.

Here, the small size of the screen gets in the way. It’s just too far from standard page sizes to do them justice. Magazine pages look tiny. Amazon has to jump through some hoops to make them readable, like including a mode that shows just the text. But flicking through a magazine is still a lot of work — and that’s one thing that should not be like work.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, launched last year, has the same problem — a nice color screen that’s too small. The iPad gets it right, for a few hundred dollars more.

While we’re on the subject of “too small,” let’s talk about the Fire’s memory. It has 8 gigabytes of storage. That’s enough for more books than you’ll ever read, but 10 movies will eat up the whole thing.

The cheapest iPad, which costs $499, has twice as much memory. The Nook Color, which costs $199, also has 8 gigabytes, but it comes with a slot for memory expansion with cheap cards. I don’t understand why the Fire doesn’t have a slot like that. The very first Kindle did. There’s no step-up model of the Fire with more memory.

Amazon says the Fire doesn’t need more memory because the company provides an online storage locker, where you can stuff all your music and other content. That works when you have Wi-Fi coverage, but not otherwise — the Fire doesn’t have the ability to use cellular networks, as some of the monochrome models do.

The Fire also lacks a camera and a microphone. Those aren’t things you’d expect in an e-reader (the Nook also lacks them). But they are standard features on tablets and are quite useful, particularly for videoconferencing. Their absence is forgivable at $199.

The color screen means, inevitably, that battery life suffers compared with e-readers that use power-sipping monochrome screens. Amazon puts the reading time at eight hours, compared with about 30 hours for the new $99 Kindle Touch, which has a monochrome, touch-sensitive screen and is designed just for reading.

The Fire’s software is based on Google Inc.’s Android software, used in smartphones and a bevy of tablets that compete with the iPad. None has really caught on, except to some extent the Nook Color. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says this because the other tablets lack an ecosystem of the kind Apple provides in iTunes: an integrated market for books, movies, music and applications.

Amazon has done a good job of setting up its own store. Buying and downloading books and movies is a quick process — as long as you’re buying them from Amazon.

People complain about how Apple dictates the terms of access to the iPhone and iPad, but Amazon’s Kindles have always been more restrictive, and the Fire is only a slight departure from that strategy.

You can’t buy copy-protected books from anyone but Amazon and expect to read them on the Fire, as you can on the iPad. Even the Nooks allow third-party books. Amazon achieves this control by operating its own app store, separate from the Android Market run by Google. Clever people will figure out a way to bypass this and install any app they want, but most people won’t want to bother.

To Amazon’s credit, it’s allowing the excellent Comixology comics app onto the Fire. That means you don’t have to buy your comics from Amazon, and you aren’t restricted to the Fire’s built-in (and inferior) comics browser. It’s also letting the apps for the Netflix and Hulu streaming services onto the device, in competition with Amazon’s own streaming service.

So the Fire does justice to fiction and movies, but the iPad does better in almost every way, particularly in the selection of apps, which is about 50 times greater than the Fire’s.

If the step up to $499 is too much, you might want to consider the Nook Tablet, which comes out Friday. At $249, it will be the same size as the Fire, but with twice the memory, plus a memory expansion slot. It won’t access all of Amazon’s goodies and apps, but it will have Netflix and Hulu. Take a look at it before jumping to the Fire.

 Oregon was first in the nation to have all residents vote by mail. Now it’s pioneering another idea: vote byiPad.

Voters in five counties are filling out and returning their mail-in ballots for a Tuesday special primary election to replace former U.S. Rep. David Wu, who resigned following a sex scandal. A handful will mark their ballots not with a pen but with the tip of their finger.

It’s the latest attempt at using new technology to help voters with disabilities cast ballots privately.

Armed with iPads and portable printers, county election workersare going to parks, nursing homes, community centers and anywhere else they might find groups of voters who have trouble filling out traditional paper ballots.

Using the iPad, disabled voters can call up the right ballot and tap the screen to pick a candidate, with or without the help of election workers. The voters then print the completed ballot and stuff it in an envelope to sign, take with them and drop in the mail or an official ballot box.

Voters with poor vision can adjust the font size and screen colors, or they can have the iPad read them the candidates’ names and even the voter pamphlet. A voter with limited mobility could attach a “sip-and-puff” device to control the screen. Lewis Crews, 75, who has severe arthritis, didn’t have to hold a pen to fill out his ballot.

“It’s a lot simpler for me. I think it’s a great setup they got,” Crews told The Associated Press last week in a phone interview after he filled out and printed one of the first-ever iPad ballots.

Elections officials helped Crews operate the iPad, he said, “but now that I’ve seen how it works I’m confident I can do it on my own.”

State elections officials say they’ll use the same system in the special general election in January. And if the pilot project is successful, they’ll make the service available across the state. They believe Oregon is the first state to try using iPads to mark ballots.

Oregon officials decided to try iPads because their other equipment for helping disabled people vote is nearing the end of its life. The old tools, including laptops with various accessibility modifications, were hauled around in two suitcases and were difficult for election workers to set up.

About 800 voters used it in 2010, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Officials hope the iPad’s portability, simplicity and relatively low cost will make it easier to deploy to more places and reach more voters. People with their own accessibility tools like joysticks and paddles can connect them using Bluetooth wireless technology.

“Some people want to vote independently, and they’re the ones that we’re talking to,” said Steve Trout, state elections director. “Others just want someone to help them, and that’s fine too.”

Apple Inc., which makes the iPad, has donated five of the devices for the experiment, and the state spent about $75,000 to develop the software. Oregon would need at least 72 iPads, two per county, to bring the program statewide, Trout said.

At $500 each, the state could buy the iPads for about $36,000. Portable printers cost about $50 each, Trout said, or counties can use existing printers from their offices. The cost of software is still unknown.

In the last two-year budget cycle, Oregon spent more than $325,000 to maintain accessible voting tools.

Elections officials emphasize that, technically speaking, nobody is voting by iPad. Rather, they’re using the device to mark a ballot that’s dispensed from a portable printer and mailed to elections offices for counting, just a like a hand-marked ballot.

Federal law requires that people with disabilities have the same opportunity for access and participation in the voting process, including privacy and independence. That means polling places have to be accessible, and elections officials have to make accessible voting equipment available.

Curt Decker, director of the National Disability Rights Network, a Washington-based lobby group, said he’s concerned that Oregon’s iPad plan still relies on a paper ballot. Visually impaired voters won’t be able to tell if the printout matches their selections. Elections officials say the iPad can read back the voters’ selections before the ballot is printed.

“Any time you start using paper, then people who are blind can’t see it, and they would then need assistance. That’s what we’re trying to get away from.” Decker said. “People with disabilities should be able to vote independently and privately. That is our goal.”

Sometimes, girlfriends drag their doting but unwilling boyfriends to department stores. It’s a fact of life. What could make this situation better? An iPad probably.

Call it strategic marketing, but at least one Macy’s men’s department has recently added vending machines stuffed with alluring gadgets, such as cameras, GPS devices, headphones and yes, even iPads. This is something we’ve only recently started seeing in airports. It’s at least a bit surprising to see in a Macy’s, if only because there are many electronic stores steps away. After all, it is a mall. Ben Popken, a writer for the Consumerist, came across one recently. Surprised, he wrote, “I kind of hate it, and I kind of love it.”

The machine was against the wall, to the side of several round tables stacked with dress shirts. It was an unexpected sight. I guess impulse buys aren’t just for Skittles anymore. Yes, the iPad vending machine. Perfect for those times when you’re running late and need to pick up a 3-pack of Hanes and a $499 multitouch WiFi-enabled tablet computer in the same trip.

The writer actually had to make two trips to the mall that day: once to drop off his laptop for repair at the Apple Store, again to pick it up. The experience was frustrating: finding parking twice, walking the many steps to get there. “Why does it take so long to get from one part to the other? Why do I feel like I’m moving so slowly?,” he pondered. He concludes this chapter with some deep reflection.

So, maybe a vending machine with a gadget that I want right by the door of the anchor store’s men’s section, letting me dash in and out of the mall’s event horizon without getting sucked into its singularity, isn’t just not the worst idea ever. It’s a kiosk of convenience, dispensing mercy.

I just hope my hundred dollar bills aren’t too wrinkled for the machine to accept.

Now you have the best sign we’ve entered a new age, the future: Vending machines take hundred dollar bills and most major credit cards.