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Instapaper, the popular content-shifting mobile app for Web articles, has rolled out a major update to its apps for iPad and iPhone.

The most immediately noticeable enhancement in Instapaper 4.0 is that the app's interface has been redesigned. On the iPad, it offers a a more magazine-like layout in which articles sit side-by-side in a grid (rather than a list). The list view still remains on the iPhone, for obvious screen real estate reasons, but its contents have been restyled.

As millions of consumers line up outside of Apple's retail stores around the world this weekend to purchase the iPhone 4S, the rumor mill that feeds speculation over the company's next big product release is already churning forward. Next up is the iPad 3, which is expected to be released early next year.

The next iteration of Apple's hot-selling tablet is reportedly entering production, according to one analyst. Supply chain clues point to total of 600,000 iPad builds before the end of the year. Presumably, Apple will unveil the new device at some point in the first half of 2012. In the meantime, we can realistically expect endless speculation, leaked details and graphical mock-ups.

In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back to competitiveness against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools. These let admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients, even to tablets like Apple's iPad, without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?

The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop, the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.

Just in time to hit the new iOS 5 Newsstand, The Guardian has launched a swanky new iPad edition. The app delivers content mirroring The Guardian's Monday through Saturday papers, but the design is all digital. Pages swing smoothly between portrait and landscape modes, the ads are interactive, and photos and videos abound.

The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.

Among the many features rolled out to iOS device owners today is one that's pretty easy to lose sight of alongside things like iCloud, iMessage, Newsstand and many of the other 200 or so odd features Apple launched today.

The iPad's native Music app (essentially, a stripped down version of iTunes for the iPad) got a visual overhaul as part of iOS 5, complete with a new home screen icon. In terms of feature set, the app remains pretty basic. You can play back albums and podcasts, manage playlists and of course, jump over to the iTunes Store to download more music.

Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, released its biggest update in quite some time today. Now available for download via iTunes, iOS 5 comes with more than 200 new features for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.

Among the most significant of the enhancements is iCloud, Apple's new wireless content syncing feature, which Steve Jobs unveiled along with the rest of iOS 5 at the World Wide Developer's Conference in June. The new service allows users to sync contacts, photos, calendars, music, movies and other content across devices and back everything up safely online. The upgrade also eliminates the need to plug Apple's mobile devices into a computer to get software updates and sync content.

Enterprise IT may or may not be doing its best to stifle the end user adoption of iPads and other tablets in the workplace and on the road. Security, synching, and file format compatibility -- and a second dose of security -- are all legitimate IT concerns. Meanwhile, tablets devices can have a useful role to play within IT proper. Let's take a closer look.

Facebook is rolling out its first iPad today, though at press time it's not available in the iTunes app store where I live. Screenshots are available though and there's not much that's surprising in the design at least. Images are embedded below.

The app relies on big photos for most of its design strength. That makes sense. As the world's biggest photo sharing network, there's nothing Facebook could have built that would have pleased all of the people all of the time (hundreds of millions of people) more than a big, full-screen display of photos taken by our own friends. Newsfeed, including apps, and chat look similar to the way they look on the web. Facebook check-ins, displayed on a big map, look different and interesting. Images below, what do you think?

News360, a personalized news reader on the major mobile and tablet platforms, has added Google Plus integration using the newly released Google Plus API. News360 started off as a simple aggregator, but its 2.0 version launched in August added machine learning smarts to crawl users' feeds and learn what topics interest them.

News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user's interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don't have it yet.

It hasn't even been two years since the first widely popular consumer tablet hit the market, but the devices are already making a big impact.

Among people who own an iPad or other tablet computer, many of them are engaging with other, older forms of media less than they used to, according to a new study by GfK MRI. Unsurprisingly, printed books, newspapers and magazines are being read less by tablet owners, who now have a wealth of new digital sources of news, magazine content and eBooks.