iPhone 4 Antenna-gate – Get Over It!

Earlier I retweeted the following: Have you ever noticed 95% of the time: People who hate Macs have never owned one, People who hate PCs have owned one. (thanks @gracesmith @CMoz). Only problem with the observation is that over 95% of the world’s experiences with personal computers are Windows computers, so the default is to hate, versus the Apple Haters where their default is not based on experience with Apple products (except one guy in twitter who lost a project on a mac and we know it was the computer’s fault…). Then there are all of the tech journalists who hate Apple because Apple has been elitist and uncooperative. My thought: get over it. I’m perfectly happy and delighted with my experiences with my Apple products (and I own a lot!). So, get over it, haters.

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iPhone4 vs HTC Evo AND HTC vs iPhone4

No too surprising that these two videos have gone viral. There’s something very irrational about fans and haters. What’s even more illogical is that the video creator got fired from Best Buy because his First Amendments rights didn’t fit BB’s weak ass corporate culture. I bet he would have suffered the same plight had he been an educator. Oh yeah, BB decided to offer him back his job and he decided that this was a wake-up call to do something better with his life than passively tolerate said fan boys, haters and corporate bozos.

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Three Nostaglic iPad Mods

There are all kinds of mods popping up all over the Internets (like the kitchen cabinet mod), but this past week I’ve started to see mods that seem to harken to a different tech era (mostly courtesy engadget). The first one found the beautiful “magical” iPad implanted into what was called Apple’s Toilet Seat laptop when it was first introduced in 1999. In this updated version the modder replaced the LCD screen with the iPad and used the camera kit to attach the USB keyboard. In the spirit of the first iBook, the modder openly admitted that it’s a bit of kludge (because, for example, you cannot close the laptop without scratching the iPad’s screen), but it’s an ingenious mod nonetheless.

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iPad’s Achilles Heel: Moving Media Companies to the Current Century

It’s something that the computer geeks don’t get. It’s part of why Microsoft’s efforts to promote Tablet PCs for the past ten years has completely failed. It’s not about the hardware or the feature list. It’s about the books, magazines, newspapers, and movies I can connect to and my access to my stuff stored on the cloud. In typical Apple fashion they are at least a good five to ten years ahead of the curve and this is resulting in more than a few disconnects. The geeks are thinking GBs storage, USB ports and processor speeds and old media are thinking pay-walls and DRM. And both of them are so dead wrong, it’s embarrassing.

On the media end I should be able able to click on any book and get an electronic or audio version for less than the price of going to my local Borders for a dead tree version. But the publishers have got their heads so far up their asses that they want to charge me a hard cover price or more for a version that doesn’t cost them one physical cent to produce or ship. They would rather sell 1,000 copies for $25 than 1,000,000 copies for $5. Or worse, there’s no e-version available because they can’t figure out how to make a digital version (though I remember a Harry Potter fan copying a 500 page book in less time than it took for the dead tree version to make it to his country).

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Get A Mac Ad Tribute…

One More Thing pays a tribute to Apple’s Get a Mac TV ad campaign, performed by John Hodgman and Justin Long. Well one good thing about the PC v Mac ads ending is that I probably won’t spend whole afternoons watching the damn things that’ll replace the “I’m a Mac” ads. Ack. tear.

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The beginning of my lost weekend: Hello iPad

Before I got home my friends at Full Sail had already posted the above video. I love what they wrote too:

“It’s no secret that we’re all gadget geeks at Full Sail University so when EMDTMS Course Director Joe Bustillos brought in this jewel, the iPad 3g, which doesn’t even launch at stores until 5 pm today, he drew a crowd of onlookers. Bustillos pre-ordered his iPad to use as a media center for his music and movies at home, and all of us are really grateful he let us join in on the unveiling. Now you can join in, too, for a sneak peek of Apple’s newest product!

P.S. Bustillos is always up on the latest and greatest technology, and he helps others keep up with him at his blog.”

Media center? Well, maybe, but more likely trying to keep up with my students’ blogs, email and my own blog… At least that’s the theory.

Source:
video & text: Gadget Geek Joe Bustillos Unveils His Prereleased iPad 3G!, fso blogs. http://www.fsoblogs.com/community/2010/4/30/gadget-geek-joe-bustillos-unveils-his-prereleased-ipad-3g.html retrieved on 5/2/2010

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The Elements ebook for iPad

Let’s see you put this book on your iTouches, Zune HDs or Kindles

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iPad Encounter

I finally got a chance to spend some time at a couple local Apple Stores to handle an iPad. I don’t mean to be so Zen about it, but given all of the noise from the fan boys and haters, Reality is not either good or bad, Reality is just reality. Case in point, my first thought was that the iPad was much heavier than I first expected. The fan boys might look at that and say that this is because the iPad is so solidly constructed and mostly battery (to support the 10-hour run time!). The haters might say, it’s just too heavy. I have to say that it is difficult to hold it with one hand for any extended period. But then it isn’t any heavier than your basic hardcover book.

Next surprise I encountered during my maiden voyage to iPad-land was that when I pulled up my blog on the iPad all of the videos worked. Cool. Then when I went to my course blog none of the videos worked. Not cool. So YouTube works but Viddler doesn’t? A few weeks ago I checked out the HTML5 beta on YouTube but I don’t think that changed anything. I’m guessing that YouTube has the horsepower to detect that you are browsing on an iPad and transcode the feed so that it streams video that’s playable on the iPad (and iPhone). Viddler on the iPad I didn’t even get the broken media lego block. Fail. I might have to move my course videos back to YouTube. Ack. I was checking out Blip.tv because their pro-account offers an encoding option that’s iPhone-friendly. More research on this is is going to be needed. Archive.org?

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iPad Day

LA Times reporter Mark Milian covered the iPad lines in LA. Not nearly the craziness of the previous iPhone launches, but if you’ve had the occasion these are more social events than anything else, with most people in line just out for the geek-fest instead of getting the free delivery of the device.

Mashable’s Brenna Ehrlich interviews people waiting in line at New York’s 5th Avenue store, including infamous line sitter Greg Packer: Read more

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Just a Big iTouch – Questions Mere Days Til iPad D-Day

“Let me know how you like the ipad. It looks like a jumbo iphone to me ,” I’ve gotten this question more than a few times in the past few months. And most of us have seen variations of the following Doritos ad, punking the idea that the iPad is just a big iPod/iTouch. Funny AND stupid.

So on April 1st many of the A-List reviewers released their reviews of the iPad. WSJ’s Walt Mosberg mused, Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close. NY Times columnist David Pogue doubled downed his review for the geeks and the non-geeks. One of the best video reviews I’ve seen was by Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Andy Ihnatko (see below).

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