Apps

If you’ve had your iPad for about a year and a half, you’re pretty much carrying an antique in your pocket. With smartphone innovations coming at such a frantic pace, there’s a world of difference between the iPad 4 and 3GS, and their predecessors. One of the most dramatic differences is in camera capabilities – where the more recent phones have fancy video capabilities, owners of the earlier ones are stuck with 2.0-megapixel cameras, that just take pictures.

There’s nothing much you can do about that disparity, but there are a number of apps available that give older iPads video-capture features, such as Camera Plus Pro and Camera Genius. The makers of Camera Genius, CodeGoo, have also brought out Video Genius, a free standalone app that offers video-capture. With this, owners of older iPad and iPad 3G models can record video. The results don’t quite match what the iPad 4 and iPad 3GS can do, though.

Using Video Genius, you can shoot video in either landscape or portrait formats, although the controls don’t offer automatic orienting. When you launch Video Genius, you’ll see an interface similar to the camera app that’s built into the iPad – your viewfinder is the whole screen. To start recording, you tap the green button at the bottom of the screen – when video is being captured, this will flash and turn red. You film in either portrait or landscape by turning the phone appropriately, although the controls are static and don’t re-orient. (more…)