Microsoft Not Making Office for iPad

Despite previous talk about the possibility, Microsoft said that Office isn't coming to the iPad after all.

Apparently back in February there was some indication that Microsoft might bring its Office suite to Apple's iPad device. Mike Tedesco, Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for the Macintosh business unit, originally said that the company was looking into the possibility, calling the device "fresh." The Redmond, Washington-based company already planned to bring Office to the Mac in 2011-- an iPad version seemed inevitable.

But on Thursday Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, said that the company has no plans to make a version of Microsoft Office for the iPad. In fact, he told BusinessWeek that Microsoft is taking a "wait and see" approach in regards to tailoring any kind of new software for the Apple tablet. With that said, he didn't rule out the possibility of iPad owners using the web-based version of its Office suite.

As stated in previous reports, Microsoft Office 2010 is expected to hit store shelves on May 12. According to Elop, big corporate partners aren't interested in free Internet office solutions like Google Docs. Rather, they're more interested in cloud-based versions, and are pressing Microsoft to develop a version of Office to fill that need.

As for Google and its free, online office offering, Elop told BusinessWeek that the rival search engine giant hasn't made any headway against Microsoft in regards to the business software market. "We haven’t heard anything about Google making inroads against Office, because they’re not," Elop said.

Microsoft's decision to withdraw Office development for the iPad may stem from Apple's decision to bring its iWork suite to the new tablet.

Apple's iPad Gets a CPU Performance Review

iPad gets benchmarked.

By now, all major tier one publications have published their reviews of the iPad. All reviews seem to be generally positive, but so far none have put the iPad under any serious benchmarks and stress tests.

Our good friend Anand had his iPad delivered on Saturday, and has already run the unit through various tests. Although he's still working on an exhaustive review, the iPad, when compared to the iPhone 3GS and Google Nexus One seem to perform quite well.

The iPhone 3GS uses the ARM Cortex A8 CPU while Google's Nexus One uses Qualcomm's very speedy Snapdragon QSD8250 CPU. Both phones are fast by today's standards, but Apple's A4 CPU seems to stack up well against what's available.

"So how does Apple's A4 stack up against today's favorite smartphone brainchild? Extremely well. The A4 is particularly exciting because it combines Snapdragon-like CPU performance with a PowerVR SGX GPU. A much better option than the aging ATI core used in Qualcomm's QSD8x50 series," says Anand.

DISASSEMBLED: Apple's iPad Tablet

Today is iPad day and while many people are at home unwrapping their new toy and revelling in that fresh-out-of-the-box gadget smell, the folks at Rapid Repair are tearing their own iPad limb from limb.

They're still in the middle of the tear-down so while we're waiting to hear the final word on what's inside the tablet that has everybody talking, here's the first set of images from their tear-down. We'll add more images once Rapid Repair is done and hopefully we'll catch up with them for a little chat on what they found.

[UPDATE] Added all the extra images we could pull from Rapid Repair. If you want to check out the complete step-by-step disassembly, click here.

iPad hits is US

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-iEMW_5Ols

QOTD: How Much Would You Pay for an iPad?

How cheap would it have to be?
The iPad is hitting stores tomorrow and although many feel the product lacks in the features department, analysts are predicting Apple will sell between 6-10 million of these babies in 2010 alone. Still, 10 million isn't everyone on the planet so there are a lot of people who aren't buying an iPad for one reason or another. Some think it lacks obvious features that will likely be added to the next iteration (à la the iPhone); others don't like the fact that it doesn't run a full OS, can't multitask and doesn't have a camera. Though their reasons may be different, there are a lot of people who can't justify spending between $500 and $800 for the device. So today's Question of the Day is: How much do you think the iPad should be sold for? (feel free to break it down by storage and 3G too.)