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Everybody wishes the iPad 2 had a higher-resolution display like the iPhone 4, but Apple didn’t even have to go there yet.

All Apple did was put the iPad on a treadmill. The tablet shed some weight and gained some speed to become the iPad 2, and it’s incredible what a difference that makes. It feels like a brand-new product.

Most important of all is the iPad 2’s thinness. The iPad 2 is 0.34 inches thick, about 33 percent thinner than its predecessor. Now, reaching your fingers across the screen to swipe and tap is far easier than it was on the chunkier iPad 1.

People who enjoy reading will love the thinner body: Cradling an iPad 2 in your hands for an hour doesn’t feel that cumbersome. You’ll also be surprised how often you’ll be using the tablet with one hand. Even though it’s only a few ounces lighter than the older iPad (1.3 pounds versus 1.5 pounds), the changes to the tablet’s weight and ergonomics feel substantial.

The iPad 2 is only slightly thicker than a pencil.

Imagine how significant thinness and weight are for people who are considering tablets for use in a professional field that requires a lot of moving around, such as doctors who could use the iPad to replace a stack of X-rays, architects relying on an iPad as an interactive display for blueprints, or students using the iPad as an all-in-one textbook, note-taker and daily planner. The thinner and lighter a tablet gets, the more useful it becomes for various types of customers.

As a standalone device, the iPad 2’s soft keys still aren’t ideal for typing compared to a physical keyboard. However, this problem seems to be eroding over time, as the skinnier profile already makes it easier to hold the device with one hand while pecking away on keys with the other.

Also, Apple’s Smart Cover protective accessory (sold separately for $40 to $70) is a cover that folds to create an angle to prop up the device so you can type on it more comfortably. The built-in magnets, which cling to the side of the iPad, are very cool and make the cover extremely easy to take off or put on. Personally, I prefer using most gadgets bareback, but the Smart Cover is the only cover I’d consider keeping with the iPad 2 since it’s so easy to take off.

The other most important change is speed. Apple claims the new A5 processor in the iPad 2 offers double the performance of the original iPad. Indeed, apps and websites load more quickly, and 3-D games look more detailed; the entire iOS experience is just buttery smooth.

Web performance has largely improved, thanks to iOS 4.3, the latest software update shipping with the iPad 2, which includes an improved JavaScript-rendering engine for Safari. The iPad 2 took 2,180 milliseconds to complete a SunSpider benchmark test, whereas the iPad 1 took 3,353 milliseconds. Running the earlier iOS 4.2, the iPad 1 took over 8,100 milliseconds to complete the same test. That means JavaScript-heavy websites (such as Gmail) should run significantly faster.

Surprisingly, despite the major speed boost, the iPad 2 retains a 10-hour battery life, the same as the slower, first-gen iPad.

Pop quiz: How do you find the volume of a cube?

If you said, “Multiply the length of one side by itself twice, duh!” you’re technically correct, but also wrong.

In the case of TDK’s 10-inch-by-10-inch-by-10-inch Sound Cube, here’s the answer: Locate the knob that goes to 11.

This is not a joke. This boombox’s volume control maxes out at 11 (yes, that’s a reference to This Is Spinal Tap). But all kidding aside, this sleek speaker cube puts out some serious sound.

It’s not just that the two 5.25-inch coaxial drivers really crank. Or that there’s crisp quality and separation. Or that the bass gets impressively aggressive. What the Cube does really well is: fill a room.

There are four cones, one on each side. Two of them are active drivers, and the other two are passive reflectors. With sound being pushed in every direction, you never need worry about repositioning the speaker to boost the audio.

That’s not to say you won’t be moving this thing around. Beyond the AC power supply, it also runs on D batteries. We rocked the Cube indoors and out. It’s not exactly featherweight (16.6 pounds with batteries), but the comfy leather handle made it easy to tote. There are other little details and tiny touches that make this Cube a winner: The volume knob clicks when you turn it on, just like hi-fi stereos of the ’70s and ’80s.

Aesthetics aside, the Sound Cube has more ports than the Riviera: USB (for thumb drives or iPods–iPhones), 3.5mm audio jack, and an auxiliary audio jack — wait for it — for a ¼-inch instrument cable. That’s right: The Cube doubles as a small, portable amp. Granted TDK’s “11″ didn’t exactly shred our ear drums with 20 watts of total power, but hey: Do the math. Multiuse + portable + excellent sound = three bills = : )

WIRED Recharges devices connected by USB (even when it’s running on batteries). Solid battery life: We rocked for an entire weekend, including one 4-hour party, and are still going strong. Rubberized top keeps your connected iPhone from slipping in transit. Matte-black shell prevents fingerprints. Straightforward navigation + easy-to-adjust digital equalizer. Surprisingly decent AM–FM reception. 3.5mm and 30-pin iPod–iPhone cables included.

TIRED Requires 12 D batteries (12!) for portable play. Weak mix between instrument and other sources (i.e., Cube is great as an amp, but not as a Karaoke box). No remote control. Battery-cover screws can’t be removed without a coin or screwdriver. Ports located towards bottom: If you move the Cube, cables often get caught underneath.

Top photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com. Bottom photo courtesy TDK.

Two backups are better than one. It’s the only principle geeks follow more closely than the Prime Directive.

Back up your data to one drive, and make the second drive into an exact duplicate of the first — voila, a backup of a backup. In IT parlance, this is known as a redundant backup, and the most popular system for handling it is called RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

The PopDrive from DHK Storage intends to be one of the first inexpensive, consumer-level RAID drives. It comes with two separately packaged, Western Digital 2.5-inch hard drives, like those found in notebooks. The package with two 500-GB hard drives will cost you $250, for two 750-GB drives, you’ll pay $350.

You also get both a USB 2.0 cable and an eSATA cable. The drives, which pop into the two retractable slots on the PopDrive’s aluminum case, are hot swappable when using the eSATA cable, but not when using USB. Unfortunately, most computers these days don’t have the faster eSATA ports, but for those that do, the throughput performance is blazingly fast — you’ll get 3 gigabits per second over eSATA versus USB 2.0’s 480 megabits per second¹.

While the idea for the PopDrive is simple, setting it up is not. In fact, setting up the PopDrive is like getting stuck overnight at the airport in a blizzard. Even by the DHK Storage’s own admission, the process takes a plodding 10 to 15 hours. It took me 12, mostly while the drives mirrored and verified each other for the first time using the included, enigmatic SteelVine Manager software. The virgin discs then needed to be formatted and partitioned; another hand-holding exercise, but this time using native Windows or Mac utilities. Fortunately, the illustrated step-by-step guide that came on the install CD guided me through the process, but I kept wondering why a product aimed at consumers would come loaded with highfalutin’ mumbo jumbo. Like furniture from Ikea, the package should read “assembly required.”

But once this excruciatingly slow exercise is complete, the PopDrive is ready to rock ‘n’ roll. To prevent any confusion, the PopDrive sets up with just a single drive letter. We only backup to one drive anyway, the second drive being merely a slave of the first.

With the price of external hard drives in the 500-750 GB range now well under $100, what’s the big deal about the PopDrive, which costs about three times more? For one thing, while external hard drives are cheap, they offer no security if they crash or malfunction. You’re still left without that “fail-safe” backup. The PopDrive always contains a second, exact duplicate drive. And if one drive dies, you can easily stick in another one by popping open the door. The PopDrive accepts virtually any 2.5-inch hard drive, be it new or one from your notebook.

The real expense of the PopDrive is the effort it takes to get it up and running. Past that, it offers the peace of mind that the backup of your data has a just-in-case twin.

WIRED A portable consumer version of IT-style RAID drive with a set of two hard drives, one backing up the other simultaneously. Aluminum construction is light — about a pound — but sturdy. Works with either USB or eSATA, both cables included.

TIRED Spending half a day setting it up using an obtuse utility will try your patience. You could build your own for cheaper if you have the smarts.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

1: The original version of the review misstated the speeds of eSATA and USB, citing gigabytes instead of gigabits, and megabytes instead of megabits.

Ultralights aren’t for everyone, but with the ThinkPad X220, Lenovo sure is doing its best to make the case that they can be.

This latest version of its super-slim executive standby is ThinkPad doing everything it does best. Still impossibly portable — at 3.3 pounds despite the bumped-up 12.1-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display — Lenovo packs in everything a traveling professional (or just about anyone else) is likely to need.

The centerpiece is a new Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor, which upends the middling performance we usually expect from an ultralight. Benchmarks trounce just about everything we’ve tested of late — save for a few recent-vintage high-end machines — and they completely blow historical ultralight benchmarks out of the water, beating most machines with the last-generation chip by 30 to 40 percent.

What’s more remarkable is that the chip’s beefed up integrated graphics gave us a solid gaming experience on the machine, too, with performance clocking at or above what you’d normally get with a lower-end discrete graphics processor. Much has been said about the joys of Sandy Bridge already, of course, but to see it put to good use in such a compact machine is almost beyond words.

Beyond the i5, the machine’s specs are totally up to code: 4 GB of RAM, 320-GB hard drive, SD and ExpressCard slots, and three USB ports (one chargeable). There’s no optical drive and while there’s no HDMI port, there is a DisplayPort socket, so plan your cabling accordingly. The keyboard is outstanding and typical of the ThinkPad brand. Audio isn’t particularly inspiring but it’s good enough for a machine of this stature.

Lenovo trumpets the X220’s better-than-average battery life, but in our testing, it hit a mere 4:53 using the six-cell battery. Hardly epic, but that’s still good. There are a few battery options available as upgrades if you want to stretch your work time.

I reserve just one complaint for the X220 and that is the touchpad design. The textured surface is pleasing to the touch, but Lenovo has foregone separate buttons in order to maximize the size of the touchpad in a very cramped area. The bottom portion of the touchpad wraps around the end of the palm rest, and to click you press on these corners of the pad. Unfortunately, something’s off with the engineering of this: The pad misses clicks all the time, and it makes the cursor stutter badly when you’re (subconsciously or not) resting a thumb on the pad as you prepare to click. Great idea, but the execution isn’t there.

At $1,300, it’s certainly on the higher end of prices for modern laptops, though it isn’t obscenely expensive. We’ve seen higher price tags for bulkier machines that didn’t come close to performance like this.

WIRED Insane battery life flirts with five long hours. Blazing performance outdoes your kid’s gaming laptop. Super-lightweight, but solidly built. Milspec tested (though not yet certified).

TIRED Half-baked touchpad design. Please, Lenovo, please swap the Fn and Ctrl keys once and for all.

Photo courtesy of Lenovo

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has finally decided to put an official end to its Zune media player line. “A person familiar with the decision” has informed them that Microsoft will not be putting out any new hardware in the line, and will be henceforward focusing on integrating Zune functionality with the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Not exactly unexpected; the Zune hardware hasn’t changed since mid-2009′s release of the Zune HD, although it has received several significant software upgrades. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but whether Microsoft would double down (again) or cut their losses was far from clear. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

Continue reading…

Mapping is a big boy’s game, with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest dominating maps on both the Web and mobile. But sometimes it takes a startup to push things forward. 3D mobile mapping startup UpNext is hoping to get on the map, so to speak, with its detailed 3D maps of cities and venues like the Super Bowl stadium. The New York city startup, which has been around since 2007, just raised a $557,000 series A round of preferred shares, according to an SEC filing. That amount includes $57,000 that converted from a previously-undisclosed friends-and-family round in 2009. The new round is $500,000 and investors include Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, David Cohen of TechStars (who invested individually), David Tisch and Oleg Tscheltzoff

Co-founder Danny Moon says the company will use the funds to expand its platform from its own mobile and iPad apps to become an underpinning technology for “travel guides, resorts, event planners, amusement parks, to name a few,” which can incorporate UpNext’s 3D maps into their own apps. UpNext allows a level of detail not seen in most mapping technologies, including directories of business inside specific buildings or the ability to zoom down to the seat level inside a stadium, as it showcased with its Super Bowl app.

UoNext will also keep pushing with its own iPhone app. “We’re creating exciting new technology to enable users to explore cities, visually. Think an interactive, social city model that changes in realtime,” hints Moon. Realtime, in 3D,—what more could anyone ask for?

UpNext On The iPad Introduces Fluid Labels For 3D Maps

Zynga is debuting its previously announced points program, RewardVille, today which adds a rewards layer across all of the social gaming giant’s games. Now, Zynga’s 250 million players can earn “zCoins” when they are playing Zynga’s games on Facebook and other platforms.

As you play more of Zynga’s games, you earn zPoints and zCoins which can then be used towards purchasing exclusive virtual goods on RewardVille. The new program is essentially tying rewards between all of Zynga’s games, including CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille, and Vampire Wars.

So users can now earn zCoins and zPoints by playing Zynga games. You can spend your zCoins on cool in-game items in Zynga RewardVille!For some users, Zynga has already enabled them to earn the points. Other users will have to go to RewardVille’s website and activate the program. Once you’ve activated RewardVille, earning zPoints lets you advance your Zynga level, gain zCoins, and just as in the games, unlock different RewardVille items along the way. You can earn as much as 80 zPoints per game or 300 zPoints total in one day. You’ll be able to see how many points you’ve earned on your Zynga Game Bar on Facebook. The more you play Zynga games, and the more Zynga games you play, the faster you’ll level up and earn rewards in RewardVille.

In order to redeem your zCoins, you have to visited RewardvVille’s site where you can sign in with Facebook Connect. Zynga will automatically tally how many points you’ve earned and you can use redeem points for limited edition virtual gifts, such as the “Stepped Skyscraper” in CityVille or a “Ring of Fire” in FrontierVille (you can only redeem virtual gifts with points, not cash/credit card). And you can send mystery gifts across games to friends playing other Zynga games.

The idea behind the program is to get users to start playing multiple Zynga games so they can earn more rewards. It unifies the gaming portals rewards and incentivizes users to play Zynga games on Facebook, so they earn these rewards.

So how does Facebook Credits fit into this? The reason Zynga is not using real money with RewardVille is because of Facebook Credits. Facebook recently mandated that Credits will be the exclusive way for users to get their ‘real money’ into a game, but developers will still be allowed to keep their own in-game currencies. I’m assuming RewardVille’s zPoints and zCoins will be considered an in-game currency.

Of course, RewardVille also gets users to start interacting with Zynga games off of Facebook, which is interesting considering the two company’s tumultuous history. Things seem to be peaceful now, but I’m curious how RewardVille will effect the relationship.

The dust has finally settled on the Sheen media hurricane from the past couple of weeks and bloggers have pretty much moved on in expectation of the next easy content fustercluck. Internships.com however, who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign (in the guise of a social media intern job post), is reaping the benefits of the two Sheen tweets, and have revealed their related traffic totals to TechCrunch in the wake of the blitz.

According to its internal Omniture data, Internships.com saw 1,035,021 unique visitors (almost two uniques per link click) as a result of the tweets and the subsequent shares and media attention (Representative Todd Leeloy tells me they subtracted out normal and affiliate traffic to get these numbers).

Between the campaign’s run of 1:03pm PST on Monday March 7th and midnight on Friday March 11th, the original bit.ly link received over 475,375 clicks and over 82,148 people applied for the internship, which Internships.com CEO Robin Richards tells me will be boiled down to 50 highly qualified candidates (eliminating all the reporters who applied as an experiment for example).

While internships.com says Sheen is “absolutely not” their spokesperson, in my opinion jury’s still out on what you call someone who is paid to tweet (hint: “spokesperson” would be a good word for it). But whatever you may call it and what ever you may think of Sheen’s lifestyle, these numbers are another bit of evidence proving that Twitter as a marketing tool can no longer be ignored.

In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry–Lugar legislation. That’s because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money—even in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen jobs.  Yet our political leaders would have claimed “Mission Accomplished”, and we would have lost a valuable opportunity to stem the brain drain.

I was delighted to receive an e-mail, last week, from Garrett Johnson, who works for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Garrett said that the Senator had read my articles and asked his staff to consider my comments. After consulting with Bob Litan, of Kauffman Foundation; Brad Feld, of Foundry Group; Eric Ries, of the lean-startup movement; and other champions of the visa, Garrett had revised the legislation. He sent me a draft of the bill that was introduced today.  This new legislation is even better than I had hoped for. If it gets through both houses—and doesn’t have bureaucratic constraints—I expect it to unleash a flood of entrepreneurship.

The new legislation provides visas to the following groups under certain conditions:

1. Entrepreneurs living outside the U.S.—if a U.S. investor agrees to financially sponsor their entrepreneurial venture with a minimum investment of $100,000. Two years later, the startup must have created five new American jobs and either have raised over $500,000 in financing or be generating more than $500,000 in yearly revenue.
2. Workers on an H-1B visa, or graduates from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or computer science—if they have an annual income of at least $30,000 or assets of at least $60,000 and have had a U.S. investor commit investment of at least $20,000 in their venture. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.
3. Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S.  Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.

The investor must be a qualified venture capitalist, a “super angel” (U.S. citizen who has made at least two equity investments of at least $50,000 every year for the previous three years), or a qualified government entity.

The really good news is that this enables foreign students and workers who are already in the U.S. to qualify for a visa. The requirements for them are very reasonable—they must show that they have enough in savings not to be a burden to American taxpayers, and get a qualified investor or a government entity such as the Small Business Administration to validate their ideas by making a modest investment.

Yes, there is a risk for holders of this visa that, if their venture fails or doesn’t go anywhere, they must start again or leave the U.S. But that’s entrepreneurship—there are no guarantees. This won’t appeal to everyone, and it is not meant to. The Startup Visa is for risk takers.

This version of the bill will, I expect, encourage tens of thousands of workers trapped in “immigration limbo”, and foreign students who would otherwise return home after graduation, to try their hands at entrepreneurship. Many of these people would not otherwise have considered entrepreneurship; they will now have the incentive to take the risk.

Even though the bill doesn’t allow visa holders to work for any company other than their own, I have no doubt that the anti-immigrants will rally against it. They always do, regardless of what is good for the country and of what is good for them. They fear competition and will make claims that these startups will, somehow, take their jobs away.

But the fact is that skilled immigrants create jobs; and recipients of the startup visa will not be allowed to stay in the U.S. permanently unless they do. Right now, these job creators have no choice but to take their ideas and savings home with them and become our competitors. This legislation allows them to create the jobs here.

A lot of hard work has gone into this bill, over the last two years, by tech notables Brad Feld, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Manu Kumar, Shervin Pishevar, Fred Wilson, and Paul Kedrosky. This group is launching a campaign to gain the bill political support. It is using social-lobbying tools powered by Votizen to take tweets, Facebook posts, and SMS messages and hand-deliver them to Congress. The Startup Visa website details how you can get involved and help the bill to succeed. Now it is your turn to speak up and help us revitalize the economy.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions, more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app (iTunes link) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video).

It’s a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year’s subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin’s rockstar photo shoots. But it’s also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin’s music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them.

The one thing that always bugged me about music mags is that the writers sing the praises of bands, or alternatively trash them, and it all sounds convincing enough, but you buy an album based on their suggestion and it’s awful. Or they dismiss the songs that speak to you. Music is so subjective anyway. Now you can actually play some of the songs they are writing about, while you read the review. And you can decide immediately which music reviewers share the same musical taste as you and which ones need to clean the wax out of their ears.

Are 60 streaming-only songs a month worth $1.99 when you can get millions of songs on Rdio or Rhapsody for $4.99 or $9.99 a month, respectively? If you get the $7.99 annual subscription, it comes to less than 75 cents per months, but you can’t really compare the two. Spin is offering a highly curated playlist. If it’s editors really do have better music tastes than the rest of us, then it could be like getting the best mixed CD every month from your friend who is in a band. If the music is meh, then people are not going to renew their subscriptions.

And that’s why this app is notable. Spin’s iPad magazine won’t live or die based on the quality of the writing or the photography or even the “behind the scenes” videos (who really cares about those anyway?). It will live or die based on the musical taste of its editors and how good or awful those playlists are. The main reason people read music magazines are for the recommendations anyway. With the iPad app, now you can just listen to the song recommendations and judge for yourself. It’s a music magazine in its purest form.