MacRumors

Social game-maker Zynga has agreed to acquire OMGPOP, the development house behind the incredibly popular Draw Something. The acquisition price is reported to be $180 million plus $30 million in employee retention payments, according to Peter Kafka at All Things D, though Zynga isn't confirming that number.

OMGPOP brings to Zynga an incredible team of industry veterans and a community of highly engaged players. It’s a great industry example of creating games around the ethos of giving people a place to play, meet and make friends. OMGPOP’s existing mobile and platform games will not change. We fully support what they’ve built to date, and we’re going to work hard to give Draw Something and all of their games the resources and tools they need to grow and flourish.

Dan Porter has built an amazing team and culture at OMGPop, and I can’t wait to see what that team builds next. We think we can amplify their efforts, and we’re going to work together to make sure that more players love more of their games, both in the current stable of titles, and new IP we’ll see in the future.

Draw Something has shot to the top of the App Store charts since it was released six weeks ago, logging 35 million downloads. Last week alone, Draw Something recorded more than 1 billion drawings.

Draw Something is available as a universal app, in a free ad-supported edition and a $0.99 ad-free version. [Direct Links: $0.99/Free]

LoopInsight reports that Apple's new iPhoto for iOS has hit 1 million users in the 10 days from its launch:

Apple told me today that its newest iOS app, iPhoto, hit 1 million users in less than 10 days after its release. It’s important to note that figure is users, not downloads. It’s quite possible that one user downloaded the app multiple times, but Apple isn’t counting those, only the unique users.

At $4.99 per sale, that comes to $4,990,000 in revenue over that time.

Apple launched iPhoto in early March alongside the new iPad announcement. iPhoto for iOS runs on both iPad and iPhone and provides a Multi-Touch interface to browse, edit and share photos from your iOS device. [Direct Link]

Avatron, the makers of the popular Air Display app for iOS, revealed today that they will be updating their utility to fully support the 3rd Generation iPad.

Air Display allows you to use your iPad (or iPhone/iPod Touch) as an extra display for your Mac or Windows computer. This old video shows how the app works.

The iPad acts as a wireless second screen that can be used by OS X in the same manner as any other monitor.

The developers were able to get their screen-extending app working with the new iPad with good performance. But using a 2048x1536 iPad as a secondary screen computer screen would result in very small windows, text and user interface elements. So, the team has also included support for Lion's new HiDPI mode. We've covered HiDPI mode in the past. HiDPI mode allows OS X to support high resolution monitors while retaining the same relative size for user interface elements, such as windows and buttons.

HiDPI mode will let the new iPad act like a 1024x768 point screen where each point is made up of 4 pixels. Apple has already built in support for HiDPI and some of their Apps, such as Messages, already include Retina-sized artwork that work in this mode. Users simply have to choose "1024x768 (HiDPI)" mode in their System Preferences to take advantage of the new mode.

Air Display is a $9.99 Universal App in the App Store. [iTunes] The Retina-enabled version will be included in a forthcoming update.

Mobile analytics company Flurry reports that activation of new iOS and Android devices in China has surpassed the U.S. for the first time.

February, Flurry calculated that China surpassed the United States in monthly new iOS and Android device activations for the first time in history. China is now the world’s fastest growing smart device market.

While the data shows combined iOS and Android data, it reflects the same audience of smartphone buyers. Apple has been making efforts to expand their presence in China. They even included a number of China-specific features in their upcoming Mountain Lion release.

In addition, reflective of the increase in activations, China was also the fastest growing country in app usage as measured by app session growth.

A story that is getting some traction this morning is a Wall Street Journal article about how quickly new iPad users are consuming their monthly bandwidth allotments over LTE. We covered this story on our iOS Blog. While the conclusion may seem an obvious, carriers are beginning to consider other ways to help shift the bandwidth cost away from the consumer.

In particular, the Wall Street Journal notes that AT&T is considering a plan to do just that by allowing the content providers to pay for usage of their apps:

AT&T, for example, is studying a plan to give app developers and content providers the option to pay for the mobile data their products use, thereby keeping those apps and videos from counting against a user's allotment of data, kind of like an 800-number for apps.

If implemented, this would presumably allow bandwidth usage for certain apps to be free. For example, watching shows from a TV network app such as ABC Player might not count against your monthly bandwidth allotment. Instead, ABC would pay AT&T (or Verizon) for the mobile bandwidth consumed. In return, ABC would likely see increased usage of their app to watch shows and more revenue from in-show advertising.

Mobile carriers in the U.S. have been moving away from unlimited bandwidth plans over the past few years. Instead bandwidth is sold in specific allotments (2GB, 3GB) per month with additional fees for overages.

The Financial Times reports that Apple is up against rival smartphone makers over the next industry standard for miniaturized SIM cards. (via Engadget).

In May 2011, we reported that Apple had submitted a proposal for a standardized SIM Card design smaller than the micro-SIM currently used in the iPhone 4S and iPad. A smaller SIM card design would allow Apple to create smaller and thinner devices.

Other companies including Motorola, Research in Motion, and Nokia are pushing their own standards for these so-called "nano-SIM" cards.

Micro-Sims are already common in the latest generation of smart devices, such as Apple’s iPhone 4S and Nokia’s Lumia. The nano-Sim is thinner and about a third smaller than the micro-Sim, and would allow more space for other functions.

Apple is said to be already backed by "most of the European operators". Apple has reportedly taken some controversial steps to gain more votes in the final decision on proposals next week.

One of Nokia's objections to Apple's proposal is the use of a "drawer" to protect the nano-SIM card. The drawer design is seen on the iPhone 4S and iPad, allowing the user to eject the SIM from the side of the device.

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley reports that she has received an internal email regarding a new purchasing policy for Microsoft's Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group (SMSG).

According to the email, employees of that group at Microsoft are now prohibited from buying Apple products such as the Mac and iPad using company funds. From the email:

Within SMSG we are putting in place a new policy that says that Apple products (Mac & iPad) should not be purchased with company funds.

In the US we will be turning off the Apple products from the Zones Catalog next week, which is the standard purchasing mechanism for these products.

Outside of the US — we will work with your finance and procurement teams to send the right message and put the right processes in place.

The email from Alain Crozier, the chief financial officer of SMSG, claims that the current Apple product purchase levels are "low" but they recognize there will be a bit of transition work to implement it. The email was sent two days before the launch of the 3rd Generation iPad.

When asked for comment, Microsoft returned a "no comment" rather than a denial and Foley believes her source. Microsoft already prohibits the expensing of the iPhone or Blackberry, dating back to 2009. Microsoft has since provided Windows 7 phones to their employees as of 2010.

Microsoft still has a Mac development team known as the Macintosh Business Unit. This unit is responsible for the Mac Office products and was said at one time to be the largest 3rd party Mac software developer. This new Apple purchasing prohibition only seems limited to the SMSG group, according to the article. That group, however, encompasses 40,966 Microsoft employees worldwide. This represents about 45% of their their total workforce of 92,303 employees.

Following up on reports from earlier today that the outer shell of the iPad 3 gets warmer than the iPad 2, Consumer Reports found that their iPad 3 reached temperatures up to 116 degrees after running Infinity Blade II for 45 minutes.

The piece did note that the iPad felt "very warm but not especially uncomfortable if held for a brief period" during the testing process. In a statement earlier today, Apple said that the iPad was "operating well within our thermal specifications."

We ran our test while the new iPad was propped on the iPad Smart Cover, plugged in, and after it had run Infinity Blade II uninterrupted for about 45 minutes. The device's 4G connection was not turned on, though its Wi-fi link was. The ambient room temperature was about 72 degrees. (Apple recommends not using the iPad in environments over 95 degrees.)

When unplugged, the back of the new iPad reached temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit. It was only when plugged in that it hit 116 degrees. The hottest areas weren't evenly distributed throughout the iPad's back, but were concentrated near one corner of the display as shown in the images taken from the rear of the device above.

Potentially more interesting is Consumer Reports' note that their new iPad didn't charge at all when the game was running. In fact, the battery continued to drain slightly under the extremely heavy CPU and GPU load from Infinity Blade II.

It seems that under extremely heavy processor usage, the iPad is unable to draw sufficient power from its USB connection to both power the device and charge the battery simultaneously.

When the iPad was first introduced there weren't many iPad-specific apps yet available. As a solution, Apple allowed apps designed for the iPhone's smaller screen to run on the iPad in a form of emulation. The apps could be run as if they were on the iPhone, using only a fraction of the iPad's screen. Alternatively, those apps could also be run in a 2x mode, using a technique called pixel doubling to fill the iPad's screen. However, when in 2x mode, both artwork and text would look blocky and pixelated.

Since the original iPad's launch, both the iPhone and iPod Touch has been upgraded to high resolution Retina displays. While Apple could use the Retina graphics from apps that had been upgraded to work with the iPhone 4 and 4S's 960x640 display (nearly all iPhone apps nowadays), so far, they've chosen not to. Instead, the iPad 1 and 2 continue to just pixel double the 480x320 display from the original iPhone's screen. In fact, there is even a jailbreak app called Retinapad that enables the use of iPhone Retina graphics on the original iPad, filling this gap in functionality.

The new iPad, however, now displays the Retina graphics of apps designed for the iPhone in both 1x and 2x mode, resulting in a significantly improved visual experience, as pointed out by a user on the TouchArcade forums. The user experience issue still exists -- in 2x mode, interface elements are twice as large -- but it looks much better .

I just tested this with NBA Jam, which the iphone version looked like crap on my ipad 1, but looked great through retinapad when I had it jailbroken since it was tricked into loading the iphone 4's retina enable graphic assets. Now, on my brand spankin' new ipad third gen, it looks fantastic, without retinapad, just by enabling the 2X option at the bottom right of the screen.

In this image above, the graphics of the iPhone version of Cut the Rope have been compared side-by-side on an iPad 2 (left) and iPad 3 (right). Note that while there is an iPad-native version of the app available, we used the iPhone version to illustrate the differences. The iPad 3 version uses the iPhone Retina graphics found in Cut the Rope for iPhone, resulting in a much sharper image.

In fact, the iPhone version now looks nearly identical to the iPad native version of the game:

Note that Cut the Rope HD has not yet been updated to support the iPad Retina display, so of course, native Retina iPad apps will look even better on the new iPad. In the meanwhile, iPhone apps running on the new iPad will also see a notable visual improvement, approaching previous iPad native apps.

Apple issued a statement regarding the heat complaints about the new iPad. As reported by The Loop:

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications,” Apple representative Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

As we previously reported, the complaints about warmth or heat seem to vary from customer to customer and may be dependent on the mix of apps that are being used.

Several readers have noticed the appearance of 'iTunes Producer 2.6' in their OS X Software Update. iTunes Producer is Apple's submission tool for music (and books) to the Apple iTunes Store.

iTunes Producer: This free software application allows you to prepare your music for direct delivery to iTunes. Use it to encode your music in AAC format; enter album, song, and cover art information; and send your prepared files directly to Apple for consideration.

The appearance has generated some confusion amongst users who are unfamiliar with the software, suggesting it may have been inadvertently pushed to unintended users via Apple's OS X Software Update mechanism.

iTunes Producer is also the publishing software for iBooks Author books, so the update may be detecting users who have simply installed iBooks Author as well. When publishing books from iBooks Author, users are required to register for an iTunes Connect account in order to download the iTunes Producer software.

As noted on SlashGear, availability of the new iPad has improved on Apple's online store with shipment estimates down to 1-2 weeks from 2-3 weeks just yesterday.

Reports have indicated that retail stock of the new iPad has been plentiful in many locations. This seems to reflect a better job by Apple in producing enough iPads as the company announced record sales. If you are still looking for an iPad, trying a local retailer may be quicker than ordering online.