S

Image via Wikipedia

No I’m not surprised that Apple is making a 7″ iPad, after having wrangled the 10″ for a bit I know exactly why.

Look at your hand, now look at the hand of your average sixth grader. See?

The existing iPad, besides not having enough RAM and a camera, is heavy. It’s solid as a Sherman tank, but school kids wrangling them will get worn out. Enter the 7″ iPad with a back similar to the iPod Touch. Lighter, smaller and hopefully much cheaper. Can you say WiFi only for $299? Every school in the country, probably the world will order them and use them. Only one university adopted the current incarnation of the iPad. The next one will be truly disruptive.

So don’t scratch your head over it, just wait. It will be here as soon as the current supply of iPod Touches has been sold down a bit.

Related Articles

• The 7-inch iPad Rumor Rears its Sexy Head Again (crunchgear.com)
• iPad Supply Achieving Equilibrium; iPad 2 Remains Vaporous (nytimes.com)
• 7 Inch iPad Release Date Expected by Christmas (mwd.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Sold my iPhone4. Not because of problems. Just a good opportunity so I took it. Didn’t mind my cell phone bill dropping $50 a month ($80 if you include the iPad I sold to

o). Yeah I sold all my iStuff.

My wife has my old 3GS so she can still get her tap-tap fix. I got nothing.

I decided I didn’t really need 3G because just about everywhere I am has WiFi. All I really wanted was something like the old Palms that let you add something to your todo list, your calendar, or check an email and then sync when you got someplace that had netricity.

Then I remembered. What about the iPod Touch? It’s sort of like a Palm except it’s also designed for games. Check and it had all the productivity apps. So I ordered a reconditioned one from Apple. I got the 32G 3rd Generation (not 3G) for $249.

Came the next day (I must live near the warehouse).

Wow. It was perfect. Lighter than the phone. Seemed as fast as the iPhone4, and the screen looked pretty good. Synced it and put about 90% of my most used apps on it and I was back in the land of instant tapiness.

Word is next month there will be a new iPod Touch with camera, a front facing camera, and more RAM. I may have to put some money aside for one of those. With a decent camera and Skype my wified world will make it hard to feel iPhone envy.

Check out the Touch. It’s pretty damn sweet when you need a PDA these days.

Related Articles

• iOS 4.1b3 outs iPod touch hardware refresh (zdnet.com)
• iPod Touch 4 Preview (brighthub.com)

I realize that the Google-Apple war is a war between freinemies and most of the battles are sensationalistic blog posts by flamebaiters. In other words, the war is more about perception than reality.

For a second though let’s say it’s an all out war. A caged death match. At this point, right now, who would you mourn the hardest? I honestly don’t think Google can take Apple, they are too new in too many areas where Apple has YEARS and YEARS of experience – mainly hardware and operating systems. The Outlier rule says they have a bit to go before they can claim mastery.

So realistically, they stand much more to lose in a protracted battle with Apple. I love Google search but if I had to use Zoho, or iWork.com, or even Office Live for cloud documents – Google Docs wouldn’t be hard to replace. Google Voice is a handy novelty really since I have a phone with voicemail. As an iPad adopter I’ll probably never run Chrome OS on a platform. Wave? I can’t remember the last time I even logged in. Watching someone else type is interesting for about..um…3 minutes. Don’t want a Google phone.

So obviously if they announced tomorrow that Google was shuttering the building, I’d be amazed but unphased. Worst part would be maps.google.com. I would really miss maps.

I know how the other way feels since my iPhone had what turns out to be a minor malfunction and AT&T told me it was dead. I was devastated. I used it between 2 and 4 hours a day. It was integrated into my life. I’m pretty sure by this time next week I’ll feel the same way about my iPad. The weight of my bag has dropped to about 2 pounds. That feels great. I can create and share documents on iWork.com. There are some things it won’t do – ran into an odd hiccough on eBay but so far done a lot of stuff.

The bottom line is these bloggers who are fanning the flame of the imaginary war are doing us all a disservice. The perfect world would be Apple and Google continue to work together. Google stay in its space and Apple – well – Apple didn’t start this mess so they just need keep on keeping on. Most of their volleys have been responses not preemptive.

Bottom line is we all lose if we perpetuate this imaginary war in the blah-gosphere. Already developers have lost a revenue stream due to ad blocking.

Bloggers should write about the facts and not sensationalize or distort things.

We need everybody to get along.

There.

The iPad as a computer is of course underpowered when compared to my comparably priced 17″ HP laptop. But at it’s core the iPad is NOT really a computer. My buddy called it a giant iPhone which you could make a strong case for given all the similarities. But at it’s core the iPad is NOT a phone either.

What the iPad is is something different. It’s portability and it’s wide selection of free thinking creative applications makes it a unique device – one that serves well as a tool, a source of novelty, and a communication device.

For day-to-day knowledge use, it’s hard if not impossible to beat. Even the on screen keyboard in horizontal mode is very workable.

After a couple of days with it I feel pretty confident that it is destined for the same market penetration as the iPhone and possibly ubiquity. My wife paid $500 for textbooks last semester (can you say “racket”?). With 3 semesters to go, she would have been better off buying an iPad and buying downloadable texts. Unfortunately, that’s not an option yet. Also, when instructors realize they can construct their own books and distribute without finding a publisher – look out. I suspect you will hear by fall of a major university that has adopted iPad as a requirement for all students.

Businesses should flock to them too. Why? Geolocating and bricking. A stolen laptop is a liability, a stolen iPad will tell you where it is and Apple can remotely kill it for a fee. Minimize local storage and you have a major impediment to stealing vast quantities of corporate data.

The software for the iPad is different too. It’s quirky, more fun, and more intuitive. In minutes, I was outlining, mind mapping (Popplets is must have software), crunching numbers, as well as the standard email, calendar and contact management tango. Even made a phone call or two from it.

Look for a repeat of the iPhone phenomena here. Also if you are not considering building product for this digital ecosystem you are probably making a mistake.

I guess the best way to describe this is this. I took my iPad to my buddy Rhigel who is 8 years old to try. He drew on the screen in Sketchbook Pro with his finger. “Whaddya think?”

In a low soft voice he said “It’s awwwwwesome.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Let me do a little future think on what just happened.

Camera manufacturers just got hit over the head pretty hard. With HD video and 5MP, many casual users will now just shoot with their phone. I know I did a little downtown survey with my iPhone as camera because it geolocates. The shots were not bad at all. So I can imagine the iPhone4 is a point and shoot killer.

Hotspots just became that much hotter. With wifi needed for the cooler features having free wifi will be a much bigger draw than before. Video calling will become the norm in the near term. Especially since the screen seems quite capable of really great video performance.

The iPhone4 proves Jobs is not about to be dethroned because like rust..Apple never sleeps.

1. Keynote. Being able to pull out my iPad boot it up and present my idea is wildly exciting. One of the key things in just “telling” your story is you always remember a talking point you forgot. Mesh the instant on of the iPad with a speed dating style of presentation and the iPad will help you get your message out without missing critical points.
2. Numbers. I like the quirkiness of iWorks spreadsheet application. Since Google Docs apparently can’t yet distinguish between iPad and iPhone – I’ll use Apple’s sheet to crunch with.
3. Carbon Fin Outliner. I love Carbon Fin Outliner on my phone – can’t wait to see it on the big screen. I much prefer outlining over freeform writing.
4. iMockups – Yes! I have something I can sit with and work out my ideas. They day I am comfortable with this I will probably transition from making web apps to just designing them.
5. Sketchbook Pro. My Pogo stylus is on order too, so I look forward to being able to draw cartoons and diagrams on a bigger better surface.
6. Priority Matrix. Looks interesting and it’s on sale – so I’ll give this a shot at organizing my tasks for now.
7. Kindle for iPad. I already own some Kindle books so I’ll enjoy having “Rework” with me, to do my development mantras.

That’s my list. No games, If I find a decent, well reviewed HTML Editor/FTP combo I’ll add that but at this point I’m still looking.

It’s now possible to put the whole computer on a flash drive and carry it with you. Ubuntu 10.4 is sufficient. And as REWORK says “Good enough is good enough.” Literally 80% of what I do now runs inside a browser and Firefox is Firefox. Still not convinced? Okay, now imagine you have 200GB of Google storage ($50 a year) as well. Google now lets you upload any file to that storage space. The result? You can hang your computer around your neck and anyplace someone will let you boot up – you have access to your computer. Your desktop, your background image, your favorite apps, your bookmarks – you get the idea.

I’m going to continue to explore and write about Computer on a Stick, as well as look for stick deals you can take advantage of.

I guess Xacking is back on the stick. Pretty exciting, even if not cutting edge.

Obviously AT&T wants you to get the 200MB plan where data is $75 a GB. The original iPad deal was no contract and you could upgrade on a month-to-month basis but I imagine that is gone too. In other words in the deal iPad originally offered you could get the $14.95 plan and upgrade to the unlimited in any month and then downgrade. It actually made a lot of sense considering the data transfer over 3G would be slower than other methods anyway.

So I can’t help but wonder what iPad 3G sales would be like if this had been the deal from the beginning. I bought the iPad (yet to receive it) specifically to get this deal and now it will be going away. I imagine today will be a down day in iPad sales as cancellations roll in after hearing this. Also if they wonder why people jailbreak and tether their phones they might want to look at this.

$14.95 at our webhosting company Netfishbowl gets you unlimited bandwidth. Comcast does great high speed for $49 a month – unlimited. Can cell phone towers add enough cost to actually justify $75 a GB? Even $12.50 a GB?

It’s time to push your local area leaders to turn your community into a hotspot and end this deathgrip on access by telcos.

Also this whole flim flam makes the modest Peek start to look really, really good.

Then the not so fat lady sang.

Opera feels like a desktop app to me. It’s fast. the layout is supernice and the display looks great. I have run into a few things in an online program I use not working but I think Opera may end up my default browser on the PC. It’s a great experience. I use a hosted solution that resizes and bounces around in Firefox but in Opera it was smooth as a well written, well behaved desktop app.

Suggest you try it out at opera.com.