The Top 5 Tech Winners of 2011

5) The Amazon Kindle Fire
4) The MacBook Air
3) The iPad 2
2) The iPhone 4S
1) Motorola Droid Razr

The Top 5 Tech Disappointments of 2011

5) Electric Cars
4) iCloud
3) Chrome Books
2) 3D TV
1) Non-iPad tablets

Read beyond the break for my thoughts on these items, as well as the embedded CNET Videos…

My Top 5

My Top 5 list would have been similar to CNET’s, although I might quibble with the ordering. 2011 will likely be remembered as the year tablets took off, and since the iPad 2 is by far the most popular tablet, I probably would have ranked it first on the list. I think it’s a little early to declare the Kindle Fire a “Tech Winner,” but it is fair to say that a big part of the reason that tablets took off in 2011 was that other companies filled in the lower-end of the market with affordable, functional devices. By this time next year, we’ll know if the dominant low-end tablet will be the Fire, the Nook, or something else that someone has in the works right now. Ironically, Apple doesn’t seem interested in playing in that market, likely because they’re worried about cannibalizing sales of their iPhones.

Which brings me to what I believe are #3 and #4 on the list – the iPhone 4S and the Droid Razr. Like the tablets above, I have to give the 4S the higher ranking, primarily because of the Siri functionality. Is it the best voice recognition out there? Maybe, maybe not. But, as Apple often does, it got the form factor just right, and successfully revolutionized the way I use my phone. When I’m holding my phone in my hand, I almost always put it to my ear to dictate a note or text message, set myself a reminder, ask for directions, play some music, etc.. The on-screen keyboard is relegated to correcting speech recognition errors or the hemming & hawing that comes with longer dictation. But more importantly, talking to Siri looks exactly like talking to someone on the phone, which means I can do it while walking down a hallway/street without worrying about background noise or getting strange looks for passersby. When the phone is in my pocket and I’m using earbuds and/or a Bluetooth connection, the effect is even more pronounced. Press a button, issue a command and Siri does your bidding. It’s hard not to think of the Star Trek characters and their “communicator” pins. In fact, Siri is so effective, that when it doesn’t do what I want it to do, I’m surprised and even slightly annoyed (that’s another blog post). So, kudos to Apple for making smart phones new again. And, just like the tablet discussion above, kudos to Motorola (and the other Tier 2 smart phone providers) for filling out the competition. They’re keeping Apple honest (especially in the app marketplace), and providing some lower cost alternatives that Apple has not (yet?) addressed.

That leaves the MacBook Air as my #5. A nod to “revolutionizing the laptop” is probably well-deserved, but 2011 wasn’t really about laptops. My guess is we’ll see most laptops move in this direction in future years, then settle down the way desktops did a few years back, and begin falling in price. Personally, I’m keeping an eye on the Bluetooth-enabled keyboards that pair with tablets. If those improve rapidly and become super-simple to use, they might mean the end of the laptop as a primary computing device for much of the market. Remember, you heard it here first…

My Bottom 5

On the “Disappointment” list, I think it’s a tad hypocritical to put a non-iPad tablet on your “best of” list and then call all non-iPad tablets the biggest disappointment of the year. If you watch the video (embedded below), thoughh, you’ll see that CNET is really giving that honor to all non-iPad high-end tablets (including the Xoom, the TouchPad and the Playbook). With that caveat, they have my agreement. Unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Android fan, I can’t see spending $800-$1,000 on a non-iPad tablet – at least for now.

That said, I think I’d have put 3D TV as my #1. The movie industry has made a big deal out of 3D lately, since 60+ Plasma screens, high-quality home theater systems, various streaming services, and the lack of teenagers texting & cellphone calling in your living room are starting to compete with the movie-going experience. The TV industry responded too quickly and put out a product that is high-cost and mediocre quality, resulting in a market dud. And, as Brian Cooley of CNET points out in the video, it’s affecting all TV buyers nowadays, since your new TV is likely to include 3D capability (and the added cost of 3D capability) whether you want it or not. At least I can still choose to watch a 2D movie if I want to save a few bucks…

As for the other three items on the list, I think the disappointment isn’t in the product, but in the speed to market. People have been talking seriously about electric cars for more than a decade now, and the fact that the first mass-market products weren’t smash hits is not surprising enough to be disappointing. If the majority of cars in 2016 aren’t electric, then I’ll be disappointed. Until then, I’m glad to see the progress. Same goes for Chrome Books. When Scott McNealy owned Sun (also more than a decade ago), he used to repeatedly say “the network is the computer.” Since then, consumers have clung to their local storage with surprising resiliency. I’m sure a portable “dumb terminal” will eventually succeed, but it’s been a long, uphill battle and pinning that disappointment on Google for its Chrome Book is a little unfair.

iCloud is more of a mixed bag. The concept, user interface, and functionality is decidedly “un-Apple” in its difficulty and degree of confusion. Once you get it working the way you want it, though, it can prove useful. It just takes some experimentation and some analysis of the pros and cons (also another blog post, I think…) In any case, like the electric car and the Chrome Book, I suspect we’ll see improvements in iCloud in the coming year(s), both from Apple and other vendors. But seeing as how iCloud is more software than hardware, and software is usually judged on its current release’s capabilities, I feel better about seeing it on the list than the other two. Call it my #3.

The CNET videos

Still reading? Wow…you are truly a tech-geek like I am. Here is Brian Cooley, Editor at Large for CNET, with the videos that spawned this lengthy diatribe:

If you are a home delivery subscriber of The Times, you will continue to have full and free access to our news, information, opinion and other features on your computer, smartphone and tablet. International Herald Tribune subscribers will also receive free access to NYTimes.com.

If you are not a home delivery subscriber, you will have free access to 20 articles (including slide shows, videos and other features) each month. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. On our smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge. For access to the other sections within the apps, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.

So, twenty articles per month for free, after which you have to pay to read. But wait, there are a couple of small caveats:

• Readers who come to Times articles through links from search engines, blogs and social media will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. This allows new and casual readers to continue to discover our content on the open Web. On all major search engines, users will have a daily limit on free links to Times articles.

• The home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times.

This is because the New York Times sells advertising on its web pages, and if people can’t link through to their articles, then they can’t charge as much for their advertising. And since the vast majority of people who read the news online link to individual articles, either through social media sites, news aggregators or search engine results (as opposed to clicking on every article on the Times’ homepage like it were a physical newspaper), preventing users from reading NYTimes articles when they click on those links would drastically reduce the articles’ pageviews.

So, why do I mention this? Well, as I did before when the Wall Street Journal tried this ridiculous scheme, I figured I’d offer, as a public service, a very quick and easy way to read New York Times articles online for free, even if you go over their prescribed monthly limit. To wit:

• Go to the New York Times website.
• Click on an article. Say this one: Job Growth Alters Playbook for Obama and His Critics
• If the link works, enjoy the article. If it asks you to pay, don’t. Instead, read on…
• Select the title of the article and copy it into your computer’s (tablet’s?) clipboard.
• Go to your favorite search engine – let’s say Google, for this example.
• Paste the article title into the search box (in quotes) followed by the text ‘site:nytimes.com’ (no quotes). So the search query for the above article would be: “Job Growth Alters Playbook for Obama and His Critics” site:nytimes.com
• The first link in the search results will be the article you’re trying to read. Click on it. Note that now, since you’re coming from a search engine and not the NYTimes home page, you can read the article for free
• If you reach the daily limit (unspecified on the NYTimes’ site) for the search engine, just use another search engine.

A couple of other points:

When I tested this just now, I noticed that the URL for the original article was:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/business/02obama.html?hp

and the URL provided by Google was:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/business/02obama.html

Can it be as simple as removing the “?hp” from the URL to get to the article in the first place? I doubt it, but since I haven’t passed my monthly limit on NYTimes articles this month yet, I can’t test it. If anyone out there can confirm or deny this, post it in the comments of this post, OK?

Also, the NYTimes’ FAQ site for digital subscriptions boasts that if you read the same article twice in a given month, it won’t count against your limit of twenty. That would suggest that the NYTimes is tracking your individual reading habits, so it knows which articles you’ve read on a monthly basis. This is probably not a new practice, and is probably not used for anything other than enforcing their subscription rules, but given how sensitive the NYTimes is about topics like online privacy, I’m surprised they buried this information so deep in their FAQ file.

Anyway, I hope this little tutorial helps you to continue enjoying NYTimes content, right up until the point where their desperate attempts to cling to the old world of “news via subscription” ends with their dramatic and ultimate demise.

First of all, if you’re here visiting from TidBITS, welcome! Have a look around. Stay awhile. I’ve got this really cool Photoshop celebrity contest going on called Brain Celebri-teasers which could always use some fresh faces. And while it hasn’t appeared that way lately, I do occasionally write, you know, WORDS.

Now that we’ve taken care of the formalities, on to Jeff’s topic about top-level domains (TLD’s). He speaks of the .nxt conference, at which various marketing people are trying to convince the world that hershey.candy would sell more chocolate bars than hershey.com. He then asserts that most people surf the web with Google these days anyway (even finding www.google.com using their Google search bar), making the TLD an anachronism of that ancient animal known as the “90′s Web.”

I don’t disagree with him. Owning familygreenberg.com instead of the more grammatically correct greenbergfamily.com or the more narcissistic briangreenberg.com has not hurt my web traffic in the least. There are roughly 10-20 people who check this site regularly because they know me, either personally or through online interactions over the years. The rest of my ~1,000 visits per month come from Google, Bing or Facebook, and are almost always focused on the <10 posts I’ve done over the years that have proven to be very Google friendly (sometimes for completely inexplicable reasons). None of this would be any different if I owned either of those other two domains, and people that aren’t coming through a search engine or social network have probably bookmarked me so long ago that they don’t even remember the actual URL anyway.

All of that said, I think the true value in new TLD’s is missing from Jeff’s article, as well as from the .nxt conference itself (and, by the way, how funny is it that the conference isn’t called .next? Clearly, these guys are still living in the three-character limited past, no? Maybe someone else should be owning this problem? Just sayin…).

Anyway, given, as Jeff rightly suggests, that most of the web runs on search engine traffic, I believe the real power in TLD’s is the extent to which they can improve search results. We don’t think about that much anymore, principally because Google thinks about it for us. If you’re looking for Britney Spears’ music (Jeff’s example, not mine!), as opposed to, say, pictures of Britney Spears, you just search for Britney Spears music, instead of Britney Spears pictures, and the Google search engine limits your result set. Granted, it does a pretty good job, but even so, the former query still includes “News about Britney Spears Music,” which isn’t what I (Jeff?) wanted. If Britney’s music was located at britneyspears.music, and her pictures/twitter feed/blog/rap sheet was at britneyspears.com, then search engines could be much more specific about the results you received.

Granted, this involves not only creating the TLD’s, but enforcing the proper categorization of content into them. To my thinking, that is not an ICANN responsibility, but rather the collective responsibility of the world’s Google users, who will not click on or link to sites that don’t follow the rules (much like a page with a misleading URL gets a lower PageRank and hence, less traffic today).

There are other technical advantages to more specific TLD’s as well. Take parental controls, for example. The same incentives that would drive the porn industry to put all of their content in the .sex TLD, would make it easier for parents, libraries and schools to filter out the .sex sites from their children’s web browsers. Of course, as Jeff correctly points out, this coin has two sides as well – if parents can filter out .sex sites to maintain their kids’ innocence, then governments can filter out .news sites to quell the latest protests.

On balance, though, I think more specific data-typing is better for everybody. Unfortunately for the .nxt crowd, they appear to be talking to the marketing department, not engineering, and so they’re hearing the weaker of the two arguments.

Turns out, a small, little-known phone manufacturer called “Apple” still hasn’t gotten it quite right:

Apple iPhone users in the United States must . . . remember to delete and then reset their phone’s alarm clock — otherwise they may be an hour late for work on Monday morning.

A glitch in the iPhone’s operating system will cause recurring weekday alarms not to ring on time on Monday morning because of the end of Daylight Saving Time, which occurs at 2 a.m. on Sunday in the United States. The phone’s alarm app doesn’t recognize the time change and will ring an hour late if users don’t go into the program and manually reset the alarms.

Users who depend on the iPhone to wake them up should create one-time alarms specifically for Monday morning, said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison. “We suggest customers set non-repeating alarms for now and reset after November 7 to resolve the issue,” she told CNN.

Later this month, Apple will release an updated version of its mobile software, iOS 4.2, which will permanently fix the problem, Harrison said.

I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing – getting Daylight Saving Time wrong in your operating system, or releasing a fix for it a couple weeks after it’s needed.

Maybe the guy in charge of Daylight Saving Time was the same guy in charge of keeping the iPhone 4 prototype under wraps…

The warning message that Microsoft PowerPoint gives you when you open a presentation from a SharePoint site:

Woah, dude…. Check out that PowerPoint deck. Like….totally awesome, man……

As things stand today, if someone were to buy me one as a gift, I’d gladly give it a permanent home in my laptop bag, where it would replace my (old and aging) iPod and probably also my Kindle.

I also linked to this nifty flow chart, which made the (rather satirical) point that while the device is super cool, there’s no real reason to own one, and that this sticking point, along with the high price tag, was going to keep all but the uber-fanboys away.

In the ensuing seven months, I found myself a good rationale reason to own one, bought it, and have been cataloging its pluses and minuses in anticipation of writing this review. For the ADHD crowd, I’ll start with the conclusion, and then we’ll get into the details below the fold.

Conclusion

Overall, I’ll give the iPad an A-. It lives up to the hype in almost every way that matters – coolness factor, ease of use, convenience, functionality, and its ability to integrate itself into one’s daily life. Like any device, it has its downsides, but most of them are relatively minor, and almost all of them are software based, which means they will likely be solved in the coming months. The “why do I need one?” problem still exists, and many people will reach the opposite conclusion that I reached, opting instead for a netbook, an iPhone/iPod Touch, a Kindle/Nook/Sony Reader, or some other combination of gadgetry that checks off the list of iPad enabled functionality. If you get past that question, though, I can almost guarantee that you’ll be satisfied with your purchase.

For those who would like to know more, proceed below with reckless abandon. For everyone else, here’s a video of a man with no arms who plays the piano with his feet.

Why Do I Need One?

My commute to work is roughly 90 minutes each way. During that time, I would typically read something (on the Kindle), watch a video (on my laptop), or sleep. When I got home from work, I’d eat dinner, spend some time with my wife and kids, put the kids to bed, and then sit down to 50-100 personal e-mails, a hundred or so Facebook posts, and a few blogs I like to stay current with. Before I knew it, it was somewhere between 10pm and midnight. From there, it was 30-60 minutes of DVR’ed television, and then off to bed to start all over again. Heck – there’s a reason why this blog is called I Should Be Sleeping.

Not that I’m complaining. The 2-3 hours of computing each night involved catching up with friends and family in a way that wasn’t possible just a few years ago, and I certainly wouldn’t trade it for a world which offered more free time in exchange for being completely disconnected from so many people. That said, there are things missing from the above-described routine. Down time, for example. A full day of staring at a computer screen, followed by most of the night staring at a computer screen, can wear on anybody. Another is exercise. I’ve been promising myself I’d spend more time in my basement workout room than I have been, with the treadmill almost always losing out to the siren’s call of e-mails and Facebook status updates.

So, I decided to buy an iPad to quite literally add three more hours to my day. When I get home from work now, my personal e-mail inbox is basically clear and I’m all caught up with everyone on Facebook. Sometimes, I’ve watched some video or read that (e-)book I’ve been meaning to get to. And, occasionally, if the mood strikes me, I’ve indulged in a video game or two. I have more time with my kids, more time with my wife, more time to exercise, and yes – even more time to sit on my butt and watch some television.

As I said in my intro, this could theoretically have been accomplished without an iPad, but it would have involved a series of devices, all of which I’d have to lug around each day. And now that I have the iPad, I’ve got functionality I wouldn’t have had otherwise, in the form of apps I’ve discovered or apps that have been recommended by AppStore-aware friends and colleagues.

Is this enough of a reason for you to buy an iPad? Maybe not. But it worked for me, and that’s what counts here.

The “Pros”

As I said above, the iPad lives up to the hype. First, there’s the stuff you’ve already read about: the super-slick touch screen interface, where you interact with objects not by pointing an arrow at them and clicking on a mouse button, but by grabbing them with your fingers and moving them around; the “pinch and spread” motions, which quickly become so intuitive that you don’t even realize you’re doing it; and the big, high resolution screen which makes everything from e-mail to pictures & video to the web comfortable to read.

But there are also things that people don’t mention as much. For instance, the gyroscope functionality is hugely under-appreciated. When I hand the iPad to somebody, it literally doesn’t matter how I do it. However they look at it first – portrait or landscape – the image is right-side up and formatted to the screen. If I want to use the device while charging it, I’ll often use it upside-down, so the charger plug is on top and doesn’t press against whatever surface I’m leaning on. The sleek exterior design (just one button and a completely clean bezel) make these actions completely transparent to the user. For those who have been reading my blog for a very long time (and that might literally be just one or two people), it’s the first Internet device in history to register a perfect score on the Mom & Dad Test. If you don’t know what I mean by that, click on the link and read my wisdom from twelve years ago… ;-)

One other thought: the iPad makes the Internet always available, as opposed to an iPhone or Blackberry, which makes the Internet always there. Some may see this as a negative, but having spent time with people who own iPhones, I consider it a major positive. With an iPhone or Blackberry, if one receives an e-mail or an alert message of some kind, there’s a strong temptation to respond immediately, even if you are, let’s say, engaged in conversation with an actual human being at the time. This has quite literally changed our culture. It is now somehow permissible to ignore the person in front of you, or at least divide your attention between him/her and the message you just received on your phone. Heck, some people even think it’s OK to do it while driving a car!

An iPad isn’t like that. If I need to Google something, or write something down, or send an e-mail, I can always pull it out of my bag and do so. If I’m waiting on line, or for a train, or just bored for a while, I can always check my e-mail, read a book, or play a video game. But its size and bulk make it less readily accessible if the e-mail “Bing!” goes off during a conversation. Again, this comes down to personal taste. I like the social behavior the iPad encourages for me. You, of course, may disagree. Excuse me! I’m TALKING HERE!!! WOULD YOU PUT THAT DAMN PHONE DOWN AND LISTEN TO ME?!?!? Sorry, I digress…

The “Cons”

Yes, Mr. Apple Fanboy, there are downsides. I know, I know – it’s sacrilege to even say such a thing, but it’s true. First and foremost, it’s a little heavier than it looks. If I’m using it for a long time, the wrist I’m holding it with starts to hurt a bit and I have to shift positions. A good cover/case, most of which come with some method of propping it up for ease of use, can help in this regard (on the recommendation of a friend, I got this one, which I heartily endorse).

Next is typing. Someone once told me that the typical computer is used for 60% media consumption and 40% media creation, and the iPad is more geared for 90% media consumption and 10% media creation. I have no idea if those numbers are based in any scientific fact, but I can tell you that, as a user of both, they feel about right to me. Don’t get me wrong – Apple did a fine job with the on-screen keyboard. It’s much bigger than the iPhone’s, obviously, and in landscape mode, I can actually touch-type with it (an online typing test scored me at roughly 100 words per minute on a PC and roughly 45 words per minute on the iPad). The thing is, because there is literally zero tactile response on the iPad, you are forced to look at the keyboard the entire time you’re typing. That means two things: first, you’re entirely too dependent on the iPad’s (rather impressive) auto-correct feature, and second (and somewhat related), you really need to re-read everything you type before you send it to someone else. To say I make more typos on the iPad than I do on a regular keyboard is a large understatement, and while auto-correct catches a lot of them, it will miss a few or, worse yet, substitute a word that is either non-sensical or downright embarrassing. So when you factor in the time to proofread everything you’ve typed, the actual speed drops significantly. Bottom line: iPhones encourage Twitter-like messages. iPads allow for longer e-mails, assuming the user is a little patient and willing to proofread. Something like this review, though, still requires a PC.

My third criticism is the reliance on iTunes. The iPad is, simply put, not a thumb drive. Unlike the Kindle, which opened a file folder on my screen when I plugged it into my PC, allowing me to simply drag and drop files onto the device, the iPad consumes media purely through synchronization with iTunes. So, for example, if I wanted to transfer a PDF file to my Kindle, I would just drag it to the Kindle’s file folder. To get it onto my iPad, I have to launch iTunes, click on “Books” in the Library menu, drag the file into iTunes, click on the iPad icon, and press “Sync.” Then I have to wait until iTunes backs up all my iPad files, installs any new applications I bought in the app store, and synchronizes all the files I’ve changed since my last synch (including the PDF I’m interested in). Worse yet, if I want to transfer a file that’s not natively supported by iTunes (say a simple text file – filename.txt), I need to go find an app in the app store that supports .txt files (I chose Quick PDF+), install it, and then drag the file to the special area that iTunes creates for the new app to receive files.

To be fair, if I wanted to synch a file that the Kindle didn’t natively support, I’d be out of luck entirely, so while the iPad is more complex, it’s also much more flexible. Also, Apple offers (for a monthly fee) a service called MobileMe, which is basically a glorified FTP site. With MobileMe, I’d be able to post files to a website on my PC, and then access them through a MobileMe app on the iPad. There are competing products (Evernote, for example) that offer a free (though limited) version of this functionality as well. So there are workarounds, but it’s still not as simple as a regular old thumb drive.

There are other complaints as well, but they’re all software-based. The e-mail client, for example, has multiple problems. It doesn’t allow you to sort your messages in any way other than Order Received, Descending. Nor does it allow you to select a group of e-mails and act on them together (i.e., delete a whole series of e-mails with one tap). It has a search feature, which can simulate e-mail threading, but when you read the mails in a search result, you can’t file them, delete them, or even mark them unread! Finally, you can’t apply any text attributes to your e-mails (i.e., no underlining, no bold or italic text, and no in-line hyperlinks assigned to your text). These problems are surprising, but also very temporary. I’m already told that the mail client in iOS4.0 allows for threading, and I’m patiently waiting for an upgrade to magically appear one day which will solve all of the other problems as well. As a constantly connected device, bug fixes and software updates can happen at any time and in any place. This removes all buyer’s remorse, even in an app as poorly designed as the iPad mail client.

The eBook Reader

Many people have asked me how the iPad compares to the Kindle as an eBook reader. My answer is, “Very poorly.” I say this not because the screen resolution isn’t as good (it isn’t, but not enough to really matter – at least not to me), or because the eReader application, iBooks, is not intuitive (it is), but because on the iPad, the book I sat down to read is always, at best, the third most interesting thing the device has to offer at that moment (behind my e-mail, and whatever web pages/Facebook updates I suddenly realize I need to read). With the Kindle, I’d pick it up to read a book and, without fail, would read the book. For my first couple weeks of iPad ownereship, every time I sat down to read a book, I wound up having to put the iPad away before I even opened iBooks, because I got distracted by everything else it offers.

Now, obviously, this says a lot more about me than it does about the iPad. But, if you’re like me and are easily distracted by shiny new toys (and let’s face it, if you’re considering buying the iPad, you’ve got to be at least a little like that), then it’s definitely a factor you’ll want to consider. The Kindle is very good at what it does, but it doesn’t do much else. The iPad is fine book reader (not as fine as the Kindle, but when I did get around to reading that book, I never once had “tired eyes,” issues with ambient light, etc. that I thought I might have), but it does SO much else, that it just might lure you away from your book. Buyer, as they say, beware.

The “Life Stories”

So, there you have it – the pros and the cons. But no review of the iPad would be complete without a few of the “jeez, I couldn’t have done that before I got my iPad” stories. I suspect that every iPad owner (and probably a lot of iPhone owners) have a few of these. Here are some of mine:

1) Driving around the traffic
I was driving to my home in North Jersey from Atlantic City, and became stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. I turned to the Maps application on the iPad, and enabled the “traffic” feature. The resulting map told me where the traffic started and where it ended (amazingly accurately, I might add). It also put a pulsing, blue dot on the map, which indicated my current location. So, I was free to get off the Turnpike at the next exit, drive on whatever road presented itself to me, confident that as long as I could track the blue dot on the map, I knew where I was going. Eventually, I wound up driving around the traffic, and then guiding the blue dot back to the Turnpike for the remainder of my trip. To this day, I have no idea what route I took, nor do I care. I won’t be taking it again. If another trip involves traffic, I’ll simply take the most efficient route as is called for at the time.

2) Remote Control DVR
I went to a Yankee game on July 23, 2010 – the day after Alex Rodriguez hit his 599th career homerun. Everyone was very excited to see #600 which, alas, did not happen that night. On the way home, I searched for and downloaded the Verizon FIOS application, authorized it with a code from their website, and within minutes was staring at my home DVR’s current recording schedule and the FIOS program guide, just like on my TV. I was able to record the next day’s game without going home. And, when he didn’t hit #600 the next day, I was able to delete the recording of that game, and set the DVR to record the next game. I realize that for many Cable TV services, this is possible on the web, but most portable internet devices make it difficult or impossible to navigate those websites remotely. In this case, I went from no capability to downloading, installing and using a fully-functional application in a matter of minutes.

3) Flickr
At a family discussion over one weekend, someone mentioned a trip we had taken some time ago. I knew I had posted pictures of the trip to my Flickr account, but didn’t have the pictures with me. Out comes the iPad: app store, search for Flickr app, download, login, click on photo album, pass the iPad around for “flick & view” viewing by all family members. Flickr just became a whole lot more useful…

4) What’s the Name of that Song?
My younger son was the lead in his camp play this summer. He had four songs he had to learn by show night, which they had given to him on a CD. I offered to put them on his iPod for him, but to upload them into iTunes, I wanted to properly categorize them by Artist, Album, Year, etc. (I’m a bit obsessive about my iTunes library, by the way). Some of these songs, though, were completely unrecognizable to me. Once again, out comes the iPad: download Shazam (which, by the way, allows full functionality for free on the iPad, even though iPhone users only get 5 songs per month for free and have to pay for the rest. I don’t know why, but I’m not arguing). Anyway, I cue up my son’s CD, put my iPad to the speakers, and in a few seconds, the iPad is telling me everything I needed to know about each song. My iTunes catalog remains pristine…

5) Buying a Webcam
My in-laws asked me to buy them a webcam, so they can Skype with their grandchildren. I went in search of a cheap, but decent quality, webcam and found myself staring at two Logitech products in a store display. One was $10 cheaper than the other. I asked the store worker what the difference was, and he told me that one provided a 640×480 display and the other provided a 720×480 display. In his opinion, he told me, the extra $10 was not worth it for such a small increase in resolution. Still, 720×480 seemed very odd to me. Out comes the iPad: Google search “Logitech webcam specs,” select the one in question and, sure enough, the more expensive one provided 1280×720 resolution. The store worker, upon seeing this, apologized for being “confused.”

Conclusion (again)

As I said at the top of this piece (remember the top? All those hours ago?), I give the iPad an A-. It does everything I hoped it would do, plus a bunch of things I didn’t expect it to do, and while there are a few things I wish were better, they are either livable and/or fixable with the next software upgrade. Bravo, Apple. Job (Jobs?) well done…

1) Bizarre Billy Joel Queries

I’ve written about Billy Joel a fair amount in these pages, so I attract an eclectic array of search strings. For example:

From a famous New Yorker to queries about the city itself:

2) New York, New York

…and if you thought New York was big enough to generate some strange queries, wait ’till you see what happens when we expand to Life, The Universe, and Everything:

3) Seeking a Higher Power…

Bringing it down a few (hundred) notches now, let’s look at some more personal queries (as in, queries about me):

4) Getting Personal

..and now, some fun with technology:

5) Technically Speaking…

With a list like this, some items are just too bizarre to categorize. Enjoy…

6) Funny You Should Ask…

…and finally, what installment of How People Found Me would be complete without the “adults only” section (the faint of heart should stop reading here):

7) A Dirty Mind…

Well, folks, this concludes another edition of How People Found Me. I hope you had a good time. See you again in a few months. Until then, keep those queries coming!

Now that’s some solid logic. ;-)

If you’re going to send me fake e-mail claiming to be from Citibank’s customer service department, you may want to note that Citibank doesn’t capitalize the “b” in their name. Also, you may want to spell words like “security” and “upon” correctly.

Sincerely,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spam Recipient

It’s hard to imagine that people open these files at all (even though I know they do), but if you think your bank misspelled its own name and the word “security” in their security e-mail and you still open the file? Well, then, enjoy your virus. You are beyond help…

In posting this now, I am throwing myself on the mercy of the courts, in hopes of earning myself some time off for good behavior.

Now, where were we? Ah yes, the iPad. First of all: Wow. Wicked cool. Seriously. I mean, DAMN! You don’t get more Star Trek than that. Come on! Check out the picture to the right – those Personal Access Display Devices (or P.A.D.D.’s) they used on the show might as well have been iPads, and that was back in the early 90′s. As always, Apple gets props for turning science fiction into retail electronics. If the Blackberry was the Tricorder, than this thing is the P.A.D.D..

I suspect a lot of people will spend a lot of time (and a considerable amount of money) gawking at how cool it looks. But eventually, you need to turn it on and actually, you know, use it for something. On that score, at least for now, I’m still impressed. After all, who are we kidding? It’s a 10-inch iPhone/iPod Touch. All those people who insisted they were comfortable watching a full-length feature film on a 4.5″ x 2.5″ screen can finally admit that yes, a 9.6″ x 7.8″ is much, much nicer, thank you very much. Same goes for viewing pictures, playing video games and browsing the web. After all, that “pinch and spread” technology is very cool and all, but reading a content-rich web page would be much nicer if we didn’t have to do quite so much pinching.

There is a new wrinkle here in iBooks, and while the interface is Apple-style cool, there’s the little sticking point of eInk vs. LCD screen. As pretty as the iPad’s screen is, it can’t be as easy on the eyes as eInk, putting iPad at a disadvantage in the eReader category. I don’t think this is insurmountable, though. If people like what the iPad can do, they might accept a slightly inferior eBook reader to avoid buying (and carrying around) two devices. And, as I said in my review of the Amazon Kindle, the other eBook readers don’t even attempt to do what the iPad can do.

That said, if iBooks is the new wrinkle, then the new crease is the presence of content-entry apps, specifically the iWork suite and Mail. That keyboard that would pop up for texting/e-mailing on your iPhone is almost full-size now, and so Apple is placing a (small) bet that people will use the iPad to create content, not just to consume it. Here, I think they wade into dangerous territory. The “wow” factor will fade quickly when you have to get your presentation done, and if Keynote is much easier to use on the MacBook than it is on the iPad, people will revert back awfully quickly. Also, and I know I speak blasphemy here, there’s still the small problem of Microsoft Office’s 80% market share in this space. Those of us who haven’t entered Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field can still plug our iPods, iPod Touches, and iPhones into our Windows PC’s, but there’s no way we’re doing the budget spreadsheet in Numbers, and then sending it to our boss who expects Excel. If they want the iPad to truly replace the laptop, they’re going to need to reach out with the olive branch and get Microsoft to write iPad specific versions of those programs. (No, I’m not holding my breath).

Then there is the matter of what isn’t there. I’m surprised, for instance, that the iPad cannot function as a phone. If you’ve got 3G capability (optional), the iPhone OS, a microphone and speakers/a headphone jack, isn’t phone functionality just another app? Or is Apple suggesting that we buy (and carry around) an iPad and an iPhone? Dubious. Also, I’m reading where Safari for iPad doesn’t support Adobe Flash? Didn’t Steve Jobs tell us we’d have the “whole web in the palm of our hands?” This is kind of like the semi-secret “no, it doesn’t do cut & paste yet” thing with the original iPhones. I’m looking for a flash-enabled browser in the very near future. I’m sure other gotcha’s like this will dribble out once the iPad actually gets in the hands of users, but for now, those are the two that surprised me the most.

Conclusions?

As things stand today, if someone were to buy me one as a gift, I’d gladly give it a permanent home in my laptop bag, where it would replace my (old and aging) iPod and probably also my Kindle. It would provide me with a good portable photo frame, video player and web browser, none of which I have today. I don’t think I’d use it for e-mail (except maybe an occasional one-off, blackberry style) and I’m pretty sure I’d never use the iWork apps. For those reasons, if I’m spending my own money, I’d probably save the $300 and buy an iPod Touch, which does OK as a photo frame, video player and web browser, and doesn’t make me pay for all that extra stuff I’d never use.

But that’s today. In the near future, I fully expect someone (be it Apple or a competitor) to take the ball from here and run with it. And if a similar device were to become available for less money, running the apps I’m used to using, and making it just as easy to create on a tablet as it is on a laptop, then I am so there.

One last thing: the name. There are two problems with it. The first is somewhat localized in the American northeast (specifically, Boston) where the word “iPad” and the word “iPod” sound way too similar for everyone’s liking. More globally, though, I join pretty much everyone in the world in wondering if there are any women who work in Apple’s marketing department. Or at least any men who might have remembered this from back in 2006: