Ipad

The success of Apple Inc.'s iPad isn't just drawing more competition to the tablet market. It is attracting thousands of counterfeit and knockoff products. On a single day in July, almost 18,000 fakes and clones resembling the iPad and Android devices were available for sale on 23 e-commerce sites, according to MarkMonitor Inc., a San Francisco-based firm that helps companies protect their brands. The tablets can be illegal - for instance, if they have a bogus Apple logo - and often they do not work well and have no warranty protection, said Fred Felman, chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor.

The breakfast bustle is in full swing at Conshohocken Cafe and the waitresses bounce from table to table - chatting, refilling coffee, clearing plates. When they step into the kitchen, it's only to fetch orders, not put them in. In fact, you won't even find pads and pens at the cafe. Staffers key in orders on iPods and iPads linked to the kitchen through the cafe's WiFi network. SEE VIDEO Meanwhile, from anywhere in the world, the owners use their iPads to monitor the operation - seeing which tables are turning over when, and noting that, say, cheese omelets are the day's best seller.

Call it the shot heard 'round the high-tech marketplace. In a single salvo Wednesday, Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, fired directly on the last big bookstore chain standing, Barnes & Noble; hurled a shot across the bow of Apple and every other technology company; and even gave old-fashioned retailers new reasons to worry. Amazon's ammunition is four new versions of its Kindle, a brand introduced just four years ago for an e-book reader that has already upended the world of book publishing.

Need to spice up your weekends? Think outside the box - and your own backyard. Adventure Weekends West, for iPhone and iPad, is an app that offers information on 99 adventure getaways in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Name: Adventure Weekends West Available for: iPhone and iPad What it does: Offers ideas, information, descriptions and photos for 99 adventure getaways in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska.

Attention, couch-surfers: The new Typillow from Accessory Workshop acts as either a dedicated lap pillow for an iPad 2 (the original iPad won't fit in the integrated iPad slot) or, reversed, a real pillow for you. The 17-inch-square micro-suede pillow is filled with featherweight beanbag- style beads that shift and adapt to the contour of your lap (or head, or back). Perhaps a bit galumphy to schlep onto an airplane as carry-on, the Typillow may be worth stashing in checked luggage and is certainly a boon for car travel (passengers only, please)

THE GIZMO: Multiple makers of notebook computers are singing the same sweet song at the big Germany electronics show IFA - hailing the arrival of the "Ultrabook. " Coming "soon" to these shores, too, the Ultrabook is a new class of ultrathin, fast and efficient Windows 7 laptops, all built around a reference design developed by Intel and thus having many features in common. WHAT'S THE POINT?: Tablet (a/k/a "slate") computers, especially the iPad, are eating laptop makers' lunch.

Police have arrested three West Philadelphia men who used a bogus Craigslist advertisement for a $300 iPad to lure victims into gunpoint robberies. Terrance Brown, 20, of the 600 block of Wynnewood Road, came up with the scheme, which duped two victims Sunday in Southwest Philadelphia, police said. About 10:20 p.m., Brown's cohorts, Malcolm Craig, 18, and Edward Brown, 19, who is no relation to Terrance Brown, met a 45-year-old Sharon Hill man at the Penrose Plaza Shopping Center who wanted to buy the iPad, said Police Lt. John Walker of Southwest Detectives.

Two taken in Craigslist iPad scheme * Island Avenue near Lindbergh Boulevard, Southwest Philadelphia Two men were robbed at gunpoint Sunday night after traveling from the suburbs to meet with men who posted ads on Craigslist claiming that they had iPads to sell for $300. A 45-year-old man met with two men at the Penrose Plaza Shopping Center about 10:20 p.m., thinking that he would return to Sharon Hill with an iPad, said Lt. John Walker, of the Southwest Detective Division.

NEW YORK - Should you buy or sell Apple? After the announcement that Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO, investors pushed Apple's stock down 2.5 percent on Thursday. Wall Street analysts who study the company have reacted with a deafening uniformity: Buy - a lot. So who is right? The pros or the investors? The short answer may be the pros, though the stock is probably not the bargain that many of them assume. One popular way to value a company's stock is to look at how high it is trading relative to its earnings per share.

T HE GIZMO: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with Verizon 4G LTE mobile access (if you want) brings the game. APPLE CORED? Steve and company have done good Jobs laughing away iPad competition. Just imagine the party they threw last week when HP exited the tablet computer biz after giving its TouchPad the best darned six-week retail run they could muster. Still, there's one rival product Apple sees as a serious threat - Samsung's new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. Enough so that Apple took Samsung to court in Düsseldorf, Germany, earlier this month and won a temporary injunction banning sales of the tablet in 26 European Union countries based on the physical resemblance of the device to the E.U.-design-patented iPad.