Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

Then there’s this excellent example of the tech news analysis by Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman in CNET’s “Real Deal” podcast. The two put the iPad announcement into the historical context, looking at many of the previous, mostly failed, attempts to popularize the tablet/handheld class of computer. Make sure to visit the podcast website, these guys have excellent show notes and links to all of the gadgets mentioned in the video/podcast.

Then there’s this speculative editorial that wants to pass itself off as news reporting. Molly Wood is a smart, funny journalist, but she’s definitely from the media personality school of thought where snarky strong opinions are pushed to the front, generating huge positive or negative responses. I can’t watch this video without getting pissed-off. Ack. Moving on.

Discounting the noise being made by those who flat out hate all things Apple, iPhone or Steve Jobs, I’ve noted at least two trends between the fanboys and the haters. The first trend seems to be that pretty much none of the haters have actually touched the device and are making their vitriolic pronouncements based on the videos and the device spec sheet. This leads to the second observation: all of the haters are freaking out about all of the things the device doesn’t have. Oh my god, it doesn’t have a walk-in closet! Perhaps you missed that opening slide in the keynote where Jobs placed the device between a smart phone and a laptop. The idea is that the device will have things missing in the smart phone and won’t have things found on the laptop, like a three-car garage (crap, now I’m sounding like Molly Wood). Moving on.

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RollTop Laptop – Answering Yesterday’s Laptop Design Shortcomings

What could we do if we had flexible display materials? As advanced as the tech seems, it still might not fly because the rolled up size still seem too big when one thinks about how small and thin and light-weight the Apple Macbook Air, the Sony Vaio X- and P-series and the various netbooks already are. Flexible display materials are just beginning to show up, but there’s something in this design that’s answering problems from when the smallest usable laptops were the 15-inch/6-pound devices. Rolling up said 15-inch devices is still going to be at least 13-inches long and a rolled up girth of four-inches diameter. That’s awfully big when one considers that a lot of people are happy using an iPhone-sized device to do a lot of their communication/computer tasks.

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iPhone bsod

Given how much I rag on anything Microsoft, it only seems fair to note when things go very bad for Apple products. Here’s one that really doesn’t need a blog post, but I couldn’t help myself. Eileen Rivera, from Revision3, posted the above image of her faltering iPhone on her posterous blog with the explanatory note: ***FYI*** this is not a jailbroken 3GS, nor was I trying to jailbreak it. It had been acting funny all day and I turned it off. After an hour I attached it to the charger (still not turning the power on) and the screen on the pic immediately popped up. So even the beloved “Jesus phone” isn’t immune to black-screen-of-death messages. (Weren’t black BSODs an IBM thing in the distant past? Hmmm).

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Voice Mail to the World: AudioBoo

One of my earliest memories of podcasting, back in the days when there only was the Daily Source Code with Adam Curry and the Evil Genius Chronicles with Dave Slusher, was something Adam Curry liked to do called a Sound Scene tour. Just like early videographers, who discovered that it takes a lot of money to duplicate in a studio what one can do in a colorful alley with decent sun-coverage, early audio podcasters discovered that they could take their portable MP3 recorders and let the sounds of the environment become part of the “show.” Todd Cochrane in his book, Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide, noted that one great place to do a podcast is in one’s car. So quite a few took to recording on their commute to work.

What brings these memories to mind is that the current piped-piper of New Media, Leo Laporte, has ventured away from his beloved TWIT Cottage studio, going on a working vacation to China and because the man cannot stand to be away from his audience for longer than 24 hours he’s employed an iPhone app/portal called AudioBoo, to record short snippets from his travels, that gets automatically posted to a website and announced on his Twitter feed. The first recording that I caught, 26-seconds that he recorded during a in Japan, felt like he was leaving a voice-mail message to the world.

As with all things web, one can subscribe to Leo’s AudioBoos through iTunes, RSS and at his profile page. A much simpler “unproduced” audio podcast tool? Something worth looking into, I’m sure.
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After 3 Year They Still Line up for Their iPhones

… But not nearly as crazy as the previous two years. To recap, last year Apple released a faster iPhone to take advantage of AT&T’s faster network (3g) and mega-podcaster, Leo Laporte did a 24-hour marathon run-up to the phone’s release. Before that, in year one, it seemed like the whole world was lining up three or more days early to get what some were calling the “Jesus phone.” And even though I’d sworn myself to wait until version two I couldn’t resist the gravitational pull, walked in after the lines died down that night and bought my iPhone (see my iPhone Unbox! Pls Sign Me Up for a 12-Step Gadget Program blog post. Good times. Funny, I miss hanging out in the lines of happy apple-fanboys, even when I wasn’t intending on buying anything. It was just fun to be there, catching the happy vibe. Sigh.
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Palm Pre Launch… So What (UPDATED)

If it weren’t for the tech media to stir up the hype, the launch of the Palm Pre would probably go unnoticed. Of maybe more truthfully, even with the hype it’s going unnoticed. Sad.

UPDATE: Just when it was safe to ignore the little device, the nicest tech-journalist, Leo Laport, unplugged the ongoing “Gilmore Gang” podcast that he was hosting, when Tech Crunch founder, Mike Arrington, insinuated that Leo got his demo Pre because he was expected to give a positive review. Arrington said that his question was meant to be in the spirit of full disclosure, but in his follow-up Tech Crunch post, he hinted that he was “investigating” who was getting preview units when Tech Crunch didn’t get their promised demo Pre because Tech Crunch hadn’t been favorable to Palm in previous reviews. Wow. Roll video:



sources:
“Photo: iPhone Launch Versus Palm Pre” posted by Keander Kahney on Cult of Mac blog (http://cultofmac.com/photo-iphone-launch-versus-palm-pre/11437) retrieved 06-06-2009

image by Peter Yan (peteryan.net)

Thanks to iJustine for the heads-up on the Cult-of-Mac article via twitter (http://twitter.com/ijustine)

Thanks to Bwana (http://twitter.com/bwana) for the youtube link & leo statement, http://bwana.posterous.com/leo-laporte-responds-via-arringtons-statement retrieved 6/6/2009
Arrington follow-up comment: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/ouch/ retrieved 6/6/2009

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Apple’s RDF Hits Me at Full Sail Promo

I’m beginning to think that the famed “Reality Distortion Field” isn’t limited to Steve Jobs or Macworld Expo keynotes. One of the benefits of being at Full Sail is having access to almost monthly tech events and this morning the good folks from Apple, Inc. sent over Steven Hayman to show an auditorium full of Full Sailites how flipping easy it is to create apps for the iPhone or iTouch. And how funny is it that Hayman began the presentation by showing the following Onion News video parodying the craziness of Macworld and Apple product launch events:

The Onion News folks did a perfect job echoing the hype and often irrational fandom of all things Apple. Then Hayman spent the next hour making me want to be an iPhone/iTouch programmer. Yikes. I really got sucked up into thinking about how easy it is to program the little things and what I could possibly come up with that would be fun to do, and possibly lucrative for me. Even as I was walking out to the car, talking to Holly about the cool things that could be done, I remembered, “Oh yeah, I just restarted my doctorate program, I’m going to find it hard to find time to sleep…” Damn. I wonder how I could work this into a dissertation research question. Hmmm.

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Smaller but Available Everywhere: more DIY Netbook Thoughts

Clearly I have small netbooks on the brain. After writing the DIY blog entry I found the following entry about how to do “netbooks” with something like an iPhone that I wrote on my flight a week ago to LA:

Just spent several cramped hours in economy class writing on my mbp. My laptop and I need to lose some weight. I could type but it was difficult using the track-pad. A privacy screen on the LCD might have been nice, but I couldn’t fully open the laptop because the passenger in front of me was tipped all the way back, so the privacy screen would have backfired on me. Something XO-1 sized would have worked. Or maybe a foldable Bluetooth keyboard with a detachable stand to prop my iphone on. Or maybe something Kindle-sized but less “Soviet” era in the style department. I’m tempted but I don’t want to go back to Windows. And I want to have my Zinio magazine subscriptions and my documents on the thing. I guess I need to put more of my ongoing work up in the cloud. But what do I do about the fact that my workflow in everything except my blog goes through a mac app from Circus Ponies called Notebook. Stuff that I want to be able to edit across platforms and on multiple machines is done on Evernote. Damn. I’m spoiled. jbb

P.s. Next time I pack goodies for the flight I need to transfer the goodies to a pocket I can easily reach. I mean why wear cargo pants if I’m not going to fill all the pockets? Camera bag under the seat might as well be with the checked in luggage. Lesson learned. I’m really hungry right now.

All errrorrs courtesy my iPhone

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The Lie of the 4th Screen

The following video was brought to my attention by a coworker as we both love watching stuff being presented at the TED conference. Alas, this video continues what I believe is a false cultural perception about the increasing general dehumanizing nature of technology. Admittedly it needs to be a bit bias, it’s a Nokia ad. But there is something that the ad misses about why these technologies succeed.

From the big screen to the small, the ad would have us believe that what was once shared (the big screen), was lost in the next two steps (TV & computers) but wonderfully recaptured in this latest iteration, specifically the N-Series Nokia devices. Um… bullshit.

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Obama Saturday Morning & Beer Foggy Afternoon

Decided to get off my ass and do something about the world at large and volunteered to spend my Saturday helping the Obama campaign. In this case I went down to the local O office and then went out and knocked some doors. I was under the impression that I had twittered the whole time, but apparently some of those messages never got posted. Damn. Here are the tweets that made it onto the “Interwebs”:

• Knocking on doors 4 Obama/get out 2 vote. CFU Student housing nightmare, apt. # don’t march forms. Working w/ apt. staff. Sitting in lobby 11:52 AM Nov 1st from Twinkle
• @fasterkitty true, bad feelings from 2000. 2 bad parties can’t play fair after the election 2 deal w/ real problems vs. dirty tricks 12:04 PM Nov 1st from TwitterFon in reply to fasterkitty
• @therealterry I can appreciate libertarians representing responsible gov’t/anti-gov’t interference. Doubt umbrella-party will cooperate 12:32 PM Nov 1st from TwitterFon in reply to therealterry

Alas, by 2 pm I was ready for lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at my local Friendly Confines… mmmm, beer…. thoughts turned decidedly unpolitical. jbb

Love the great big dimples.

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