Dear Mario,

Reading your blog today (garciamedia.com), I spotted a June post I had missed: what your dream tablet conference in 2012 would look like. We have just finished the programming for the coming 5th Tablet and Apps Summit (October 30 in Frankfurt).

So I ran a checklist hoping you might agree with our topics and take “your dancing shoes” to our summit…

- We seem to agree that it’s necessary to “Rethink Media Apps on Mobile and Tablets”. What you call the next generation of news apps.

- We did not call it an iPad conference. The iPad is still the best. Our speakers from Stern magazine and GQ magazine will probably be with you on that. But from a publisher’s point of view, you need to stimulate the competition. So we have invited a Microsoft evangelist and two European publishers who have started to explore Windows 8 possibilities and tablets.

- We are looking at the wider meaning of mobile platforms. You would probably not recommend that. But we do think it’s important to understand usage in order to better serve tablets AND smartphones.

- We focus on two things that are of importance to you:

The first noticeable aspect of the release of Apple’s new iPad, announced yesterday at a launch event in San Francisco, is the fact that it’s called just that: “the new iPad,” rather than the iPad 3 or iPad HD. Why this is, is unclear – is it not sufficiently different to be an iPad3? Or has a decision on a name just not been taken?

The new device, to go on sale on March 16, has:

• a ‘retina display’ of the type seen on the iPhone 4. For the iPad this means 3.1m pixels, 2048 x 1536 – double the resolution of previous versions.
• a dual-core ‘A5X’ chip with quad-core graphics
• 4G/LTE wireless, which is much faster than 3G but currently only available in the US
• an upgraded iSight camera which has a 5 megapixel sensor and HD video recording capability.
• voice dictation (in English, French, German and Japanese)
• updated iWork applications, and iPhoto with more advanced editing options

It does not have haptic feedback, as commentators had predicted, notes the Guardian, or anything in particular that seems to justify the emphasis put on ‘touch’ in the invitation to the event.

This is a big week for Flipboard. After launching in China on Monday, today the social news reader app has finally released a version for the iPhone.

The new iPhone app does just what Flipboard on the iPad did; collect stories from social media accounts as well as other sources and present them to readers in a visually pleasing format.

But there are significant differences. For one thing, the iPhone app works by swiping up and down, rather than the old format of turning pages from right to left. More importantly, the phone app introduces "cover stories". This new section learns from your interaction with content so that it can deliver stories that are most interesting and relevant to you.

The differences are part of a drive to distinguish between the lean-back platform of the iPad, which most people use before bed, and the lean-forward platform of the iPhone, which users are more likely to access on the go or standing in queues.

Taking a bite of the Apple... Are there more rewards or dangers?

Apple certainly has a lot of offer new publishers, as Editor & Publisher notes in an article published today about Apple Newsstand.

The article by Tim Sohn reports that newspaper publishers are "raving" about the new portal, launched in October this year, which has given app download numbers a huge boost. According to Sohn, The New York Times has experienced a 429% increase in iPad app downloads and a 5,596% increase in iPhone app downloads since becoming part of Newsstand. The Metro UK app, available on Newsstand, has been downloaded 180,000 times since October 31, compared to an earlier app that was not part of Newsstand, which has been downloaded just 240,000 times since its launch in April 2010. The new app has also generated over 65,000 unique daily visitors and between 800,000 and 1 million page views for Metro UK's website.