TechCrunch just reported it has received a video of the video game Crysis running on the iPad.

We knew the iPad was capable of some 3D graphics, but running the heavy game Crysis? The game doesn’t even run on most desktop systems! Well, that’s the thing, it’s not running on the iPad.

The game is reportedly played through the cloud-gaming service OTOY which makes it possible to off-load computer resources to the cloud and only stream the input of the device (such as touch or keyboard input) and the output of the cloud computer (the graphics) back to the iPad. In a sense, you’re just using the iPad to control a computer far away.

Is that a problem? No, not at all. As long as your connection speed is fast enough. However, you need a fast WiFi connection to run this, it’s not going to run on just a 3G connection unfortunately.

[Via TechCrunch]

Update: Read more on iPad’s launch weekend sales

It’s day two now of the iPad mania and like everyone we are very curious to know what the sales figures were of yesterday and what they will be for this year. Most iPad coverage by the press and voices from the public (just look ath the hashtag #ipad on Twitter) have been fairly positive. The backlash electronics manufacturers usually see after a hyped product is released, seems to be non-existant with the iPad. There are some bugs to be worked out as usual but overall the device seems to be what people expected it to be.

Now let’s look at those sales predictions for this week, this year and onward. There is many industry analysts who have an opinion about this flaky subject. Four analysts stick out from the crowd: Gene Munster from PiperJaffray, Mike Abramsky from RBC Capital Markets, Brian Marshall from Broadpoint-Amtech and research firm iSupply.

As all analysts have a different idea, we have averaged up their numbers to come to a rough idea of what we can expect. At the launch weekend (yes that is this weekend) we can expect an estimated 275,000 units to go over the counter and some 2.65 million units in the current quarter (that is from March 2010 to the end of May 2010, or Q2). In the whole of 2010 it is expected Apple will sell 8 million iPads. If we extrapolate that number from the rest of 2010 to the whole of 2011, we can expect over 10 million units to be sold next year. Again these are just averages but do give us an indication of what to expect.

The analysts are conclusive and what are the constraining factors for the iPad’s sales: a lack of supply and the missing of Adobe Flash on the device.

The lack of supply is why the iPad was previously delayed a few days in the U.S. and why it will be released later than planned in the rest of the world.

In addition, many mainstream users who want to use the device to consume content on the web choose to wait out to buy the device since it does not have Flash support. It’s a fair judgement and it will be challenging to see how Apple deals with this issue, which Steve Jobs himself created.

Joshua Topolsky from Engadget just came off Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night in which he presented the iPad to viewers all over the U.S. Of course most of us geeks have already seen the iPad in action through previews and reviews but it’s good to see the final product being presented to a more mainstream audience.

Watch the video

Joshua assures Windows users they can connect the iPad to their PCs through to iTunes. He shows us the amazing iPad Elements app which displays all the chemical elements of the standard table in a visual full-3D view and may be an example of how textbooks at schools and universities might look like in the foreseeable future.

He then talks us through the Marvel Comics application, which we previously showed you. It enables users to read comics by simply sliding through the pages with their fingers, from comic box to box. The quality of the imagery looks very high.

On to games! The air hockey game Touch Hockey and the racing game Asphalt 5 are played and especially the latter (shown in the video above) catched eyes with its control experience. The iPad becomes your steering wheel and you rotate it left and right to steer in the game. The response seemed close to real-time. We couldn’t see the graphics that well but it did look like the iPad was capable of at least some rapid 3D graphics rendering.

We did see some negative aspects; the fingerprints on the screen showed up pretty quickly after Joshua took it out. But we kinda already knew that was going to happen, didn’t we? Overall, it looked like a great presentation of the iPad. The device has the ability to move a product range like tablet computers from geeks to everyday people. Just like the iPhone made smartphones usable to everyday people. That is why these kinds of demonstrations on prime-time television, alongside with standard advertisement, can propel change.

The announcement of the iPad included Apple’s own proprietary iBookstore, an application through which users can buy, store and read fiction and non-fiction works. Apple struck deals with Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, MacMillan and Hachette publishers to fill the store with their book titles. So is this the only way we’re going to read books on our iPad? Not at all!

Here’s a question for you: which platform has the biggest repository of book content in the world, as of now? Google does. With over ten million titles, Google Books is the leader in digital book content now and no competitor has come close this amount.

Google Books is not an e-book store

Google Books has its qualities. It is integrated into Google’s search engine and when our search query matches one of its millions of books, Google shows us the page. However, Google is not leveraging its book platform as a digital e-book store, as you’d expect. It chooses instead to link to online stores where the physical books are sold.

Google’s tense relationship with publishers is one of the reasons for this; Last year, Google settled a court case with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers about its unlimited scanning of books from libraries without any permission from their authors or publishers. Google defended its usage as fair-use under copyright law but as it is a profitable business, the judge was not really going to recognize Google’s defense and a settlement was the result.

The in-court settlement stated that authors and publishers can opt-out of the Google Books program and have their content removed or instead opt-in which means they receive a lump sum for their book (about $40 to $100), a share of the revenue from advertising displayed next to their books and a share of the revenue from optional selling of their books. There you have it: Google says it would like to start selling books soon through Google Checkout and deliver them to customers as standard PDF files. This would mean you could buy and read these books on any mobile device with PDF support, including the iPad. Expected is that Google will develop a more integrated app for the iPad too, like Apple’s iBookstore.

Apple iBookstore vs. Google Books

Will Apple be able to come close to the amount of titles Google has? Possibly, yes. It has done extremely well with a similar concept: its iTunes store; of which the song catalogue now contains over eleven million tracks and which has sold over 10 billion tracks since its launch. Apple’s strategy of actually striking deals with music industry record labels and book publishers at the moment appears to be more effective than Google’s brute-force strategy of just scanning content and having authors and publishers opt-out later. The settlement will make it possible for Google to start selling books but it does not seem to be rushing to do this as I can’t find any title on the Google Books store which I can buy.

Running Google Books on your iPad

Until Google releases its own Books app for the iPad, you can already use a beta version of the service in which publicly licensed books, such as Sherlock Holmes, are available. Running it is as simple as opening up the browser on your iPad and pointing it to http://books.google.com/m.

Have you been using Google Books on your iPhone, iPad or other mobile device? Does it work well for you? How do you expect Google Books and the Apple iBookstore to develop? Can they co-exist on one device? Are they actually very different from each other? Tell me in the comments!

The highly-anticipated iPad tablet computer by Apple has hit US retail stores today! A worldwide release in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K. is scheduled for late April.

You will have to wait to catch the 3G-enabled iPads, they will become available in late April with an AT&T data subscription included. The WiFi-enabled iPads will already be sold in from April 3 on.

On the iPad….

To learn more about what all the fuss is about and what is inside the machine, check out the Apple iPad specifications or watch some videos.  The iPad has the potential change the way we consume content and for more on that check out our content revolution articles.

Pricing in US and Europe

Pricing will be $499, $599 or $699 for the WiFi-enabled iPads with respectively 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb of storage. For the 3G-enabled iPads the prices are $629, $729 or $829 with respectively 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb of storage. Based on previous pricing of the iPhone, iPod and MacBooks in Europe, the iPad is estimated to be priced at € 460, € 560, € 650. The US dollar to Euro exchange rate does not really apply here; Apple usually sets its prices different from exchange rates due to the differences in markets.

Current predictions estimate Apple will sell 1.2 million iPads until the end of 2010. Next year, sales are estimated at 3.5 million. These amounts are significantly lower than iPhone sales, and they are for a reason. Apple expects consumers needs to adapt and get used to the concept of a tablet device just like they did with the iPhone. This process will take a few years.

Will the sales predictions become true? Will the Apple iPad be a success or not? And why? Can we expect queues like we did with the iPhone in front of the Apple stores? I want to know what you think! Tell me in the comments!