Today at a press conference in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the next generation iPad to an enthusiastic crowd. The new device, officially dubbed the iPad (not iPad HD), features a host of new improvements over the iPad 2 and looks to become a huge seller for the company.

As we predicted yesterday, the new device will feature the 9.7-inch Retina Display with 2,048 x 1,536-pixel resolution, Apple’s new Apple A5X processor with quad-core graphics and the camera from the iPhone 4S with 5-megapixel resolution.

In addition, the new iPad will feature 1080p HD video capture with built-in stabilization, no Siri but a new “Dictation” app and the one thing ww’re most excited about, 4G LTE support for both AT&T and Verizon Wireless here in the U.S.

So, a great bunch of new features that will surely lead to to millions of new iPad owners. It will retain the same pricing structure as the previous iPad, with 4G LTE coming at an average $129 premium. It is available for pre-order today and will ship on March 16.

However, that’s not all Apple revealed today.

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At the beginning of February, developer RC3 released an Android game inspired by pop star Justin Beaver entitles Joustin’ Beaver. The game plays off of Bieber’s real life celebrity woes and resembles his hairstyle and fashion sense in the form of a beaver. Bieber’s people responded to the game with a cease and desist order under the claims, not that they have a problem with Bieber being made fun of through the app, but that consumers may see Bieber’s trademarked likeness and feel the product is an officially licensed product from Bieber himself.

RC3 responded that there is no doubt that Joustin’ Beaver is inspired by the pop sensation. It is undeniable for them to even try to do so. They do contend however that the game is created as an act of parody which is legally protected by first amendment rights. RC3 filed suit against Bieber to protect their game (and most likely garner lots of press that the game would have never originally received to further push sales of it).

“In an effort to comment upon the Defendant’s life, the Plaintiff, RC3 developed the aforementioned App entitled ‘Joustin’ Beaver.’ The App, a video game, is a parody of the commercial success of the Defendant and any celebrity. The parody app portrays a beaver floating on a log down a river. The beaver presents with bangs, a lance, and a purple sweater. The beaver knocks ‘Phot-Hogs’ that are attempting to take his photograph into the river with his lance. The beaver also signs ‘Otter-graphs.’ The beaver also must dodge the ‘whirlpool of success,’ which will lead beaver out of control, while navigating the river.”

Joustin’ Beaver is currently on sale on the Android marketplace for .99.

Stay tuned to The Flickcast for all your gaming news, even Justin Beaver on occasion.

You knew it was coming. It was inevitable. Just like there’s going to be an iPhone 5 soon enough (think June), the iPad 3 is pretty much a certainty thanks to an invite that went out today from Apple for an event on March 7th.

The event will take place in San Francisco and will no doubt introduce the iPad 3 to the eager masses yearning to be free of the limitations of 3G and a single processor, among other things. Apple’s iPad 3 is expected to feature a high-definition 2,048 x 1,536-pixel Retina Display, quad-core Apple A6 processor, larger battery, 4G LTE, an 8-megapixel camera and similar case design.

In addition, expect some cool features tied to the next major release of Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X operating systems which will hopefully include, among other things, full integration of Pages, Numbers and Keynote with iCloud across all Apple devices. That would be very nice indeed.

We’ll keep you posted on all the iPad 3 news and more. Until then, it’s probably time to get those iPad 2′s ready for eBay before they really drop in value.

Angry Birds may be a simple game, but with over 12 million downloads on the App Store alone, it’s the biggest name in mobile gaming. Which is why I’m really excited to learn that the newest version of the high-flying poultry puzzle game will be in space.

That’s right, Angry Birds Space. SPACE. I LOVE space.

The game’s developer, Rovio, has posted a website for the game, with an image of a slingshot on the moon and the words “One small fling for a bird, one quantum leap for birdkind” underneath.

Thinking about it, Angry Birds is a game about physics and gravity. Knocking down different pieces of the environment is key to finishing levels and obtaining high scores. So introducing zero-gravity into a game based around gravity is going to put an entirely new spin on it, and I think it’s a great way to take this already fantastic game to new heights (literally).

Angry Birds Space launches March 22nd. While you wait, you can check out Rovio’s website where you can download a new wallpaper and watch the teaser trailer after the jump.

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Pretty much every guy has questioned their friends on who they would rather sleep with between Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. Just the same, every girl has probably questioned her friends if they’d rather marry Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Matt Damon.

But what about those times where you can’t say “I’d sleep with all of them” and had to decide to actually marry a hot mess like Spears, Lohan or Hilton instead of just kicking them to the hoe-side curb they deserve to be on? Or, what about choosing between killing off Batman, Superman or Spider-Man? Kill/Marry/Fuc by Sarah Huber combines all three.

The way it works, turn to a random page and you have decide one person / object / concept /etc. that you’d want to marry, one you’d want to kill and one you’d want to get down with. Some of these are easy decisions, but others really make you think. That’s right. A book about hooking up, marrying and killing really starts turning the gears for some people.

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Big day for Apple and the education market today as our favorite fruit-flavored tech company revealed at an event in New York City that it will, as we discussed last week, be getting into the textbook publishing business in a big way. Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller announced several new components of the initiative including iTunes U as a separate iOS app, which gives users of Apple’s new iBooks 2 iOS app access to textbooks from several top publishers to be read on the iPad.

The new textbooks are modern and interactive instead of plain old paper. They support multitouch gestures and also feature dictionary look-up integration and annotation. Students can even highlight text, take notes and create virtual note cards to reference later while studying. Wish this was around when I was in school.

At launch, high school-level textbooks are available in the iBookstore and priced at $14.99 or less. Expect more textbooks to come along in the near future. The first group of publishers with textbooks available for the iPad include Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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With the popularity of smartphones like the iPhone and myriad of Android-powered handsets, one of the things users love to do is take and share photos with friends and family. One of the best apps for doing this when using the iPhone is Instagram.

This app allows you to take a photo, manipulate it if you choose and then upload it to your photo stream for all to see. People can then subscribe to your photo stream and view your photos on their devices. Or, you can upload them to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

It’s extremely popular on the iPhone (many of us here use it, in fact) but so far, it’s only been available for iOS devices. Apparently, that’s not going to be the case much longer.

Speaking during the LeWeb conference in Paris this week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom confirmed that an Android version of the company’s popular iOS application is coming soon. ”We have two people working on Android now,” Systrom said.

I know what you’re thinking. Two people doesn’t sound like very many. However, keep in mind that the whole company probably isn’t that much bigger and has been exclusively an iOS app since launch.

No launch date was forthcoming from Systrom but we expect to see the Android version of Instagram sometime early next year.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of apps out there for the iPad and iPhone. Many of them are even useful and, on occasion, fun to use. You can add Flipboard to that list.

In case you haven’t tried it yet, Flipboard is a very popular magazine-style news application which, up until today, was available only for the iPad. Now, those of you who want the same experience on your iPhone or, for some reason, don’t have an iPad yet, can now enjoy Flipboard on your iPhone because it’s now available.

The app allows users to flip through a single feed of articles and photos that have been shared across various social networks. It can also display stories from a variety of news categories including technology, design, “Flipboard picks,” photography, business, sports, style, travel, food and more.

It’s a great app that really helps you digest a lot of information quickly and easily and does it inside a very user-friendly interface. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Flipboard for iPhone is free and available in the App Store now.

Reading comics digitally on a tablet is the future. The size of tablets, and their vibrant images, make it an almost perfect reading experience. Well, Marvel Comics has an app for that and it has just received a new face-lift!

Marvel Comics app 3.0 is available now and it offers a ton of upgrades, making the the digital comics reading experience all the better:

Even though they seem to, at times, be mostly in the business of making their customers angry, Netflix is still one of the best places to get your movie and TV content from. In fact, their streaming service is one of the most popular available.

One of the ways Netflix is going to keep that service popular, and growing, is with updates to it and the applications that make it possible. That’s just what they’ve done this week with the user interface for their Android application.

The company explained that the revamped UI now displays twice as many movie and TV titles, with larger cover art, and that users can easily swipe through titles to find additional content.

“In the last 12 months we have seen a threefold increase in how long Netflix members are watching on their tablets,” Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said. The company also said they wanted to introduce the redesigned UI in time for the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet.

Netflix said the update will be available for iPad users “in a few weeks.” The update is free and is available now in the Android Market.

Click through for the full press release from Netflix.

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Apple on Thursday (or today if you’re reading this, well, on Thursday) released iOS 5.0.1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. This update reportedly fixes a number of issues with the operating system.

According to Apple, the update fixes bugs affecting battery life, adds Multitasking Gestures for the original iPad, resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud and improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation. Actually, I’m pretty happy about that last one as the Australian Siri really had a hard time understanding me.

iOS 5.0.1 is compatible with iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad, iPod touch (4th generation) and iPod touch (3rd generation). To install the update, launch the Settings app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, tap General, and then open Software Update.

You can also update the old fashioned way by syncing your device with iTunes. Let us know how it goes if you do update.

Once the dominant player in the mobile and web content delivery space, Adobe’s Flash has seen quite a backlash against it in recent years. In truth, tt was always kind of a pain, at least for me, made websites look pretty ugly and often hogged system resources on my Macs to the point of crashing the entire system.

But the beginning of the end was probably Apple and then CEO Steve Jobs’ staunch refusal to include Flash on any of its iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad. At the time some commented that Apple was making a big mistake in not including Flash on its devices. Now it looks like those people may have to reconsider their opinions.

According to reports, Adobe says it will “no longer adapt” the once-dominant program for handling multimedia and animation on computers and mobile devices. In an email to developers Adobe added that it will “continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.”

Previously, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs led the opposition to the program, which he said in 2010 was “unreliable, vulnerable to hacking, a battery hog, and gave Adobe too much power over the services that could be offered on mobile devices.” Besides, power over mobile devices was his job, not Adobe’s. I kid, I kid. Much love to Steve.

At the time, Apple, Google, and Microsoft said they preferred an open system: the pretty cool and easy to use HTML5. However, in spite of this, Flash survived and was incorporated on Google Android and BlackBerry smartphones — until now. Although, having used a few Android phones with Flash enabled, it was still pretty much a POS.

However, now it looks like even Adobe has seen the proverbial writing on the wall and has decided to end mobile Flash and concentrate on HTML 5. Smart move. A bit late, but smart nonetheless. Now let’s hope they end up killing Flash altogether and we never, ever have to see it again.