ePad – Rockin’ It Like It’s 1987

You know you have something going right when the spoofs are spectacular…

Then we have this dream sequence/history of Apple’s computer designs. Beautifully done, but I don’t see how they could have left out the evolution of the iMac or iPod, except maybe they couldn’t get the curves of their virtual rendition to look right…

Finally we have the latest iPad ad, that debuted during Sunday’s Oscar broadcast…

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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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Form Factor: 8×11

Nope, this isn’t about grading assignments while drinking beer, though that practice clearly deserves a blog entry/study of it’s own. This one is about a unexpected discovery I made last Sunday when I needed to get away from my domicile and plant myself at a local pub to watch a day of NFL goodness. Of course having 10-page student papers to grade wasn’t going to stop me. Now, because access to a power-outlet was in doubt and previously the wifi was iffy at best, I took the unusual precaution of actually printing out all of the assignments and choose to read through and make notes on these pages before uploading the comments onto my laptop. I’m pretty fanatical about NOT printing out things, so I can’t remember the last I graded something in the dead-tree version. But I have to tell you that it was remarkably convenient to quickly flip through the pages, mark them up and then move on. And from the perspective of my small table in the bar, it was a lot less conspicuous and I wasn’t looking over a screen to see the TV(s). Weird. It was just amazingly natural to work in an 8×11 form factor.

How much more efficient would it have been if I had some device, roughly 8×11, where I could have marked up the documents (in their native electronic form), that could run all day on a single charge and had access to the Internet even when there’s no nearby wifi. Hmm. No, I guess I could make the notes on the text with my finger, but a stylus works too. I doubt it’ll have a stylus, but I have to wonder if Apple’s upcoming announcement next Wednesday will include the announcement of a device that fulfills this content creation need. The announcement better not be just a rev of the iLife suite. Ack.

Sources:
image by Joe Bustillos

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Time Inc. Media Pad… Hints on Apple Tablet

In case you haven’t noticed, this is the year of the media pad/e-reader. And no, Mr. Ballmer, we don’t want to read/interact with our media on a big fat (hot!) laptop or, God forbid, desktop computer. We want something small (w/ a big screen), sexy and fast! Is this Time Inc. Pad the unicorn/Apple Tablet? Since I posted this video in my blog, rumors about the Apple unicorn/tablet have really taken off again. End of January announcement? Stay tuned.

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Verizon’s DROID Carpet Bombs the US

Continuing the WTF school of advertising, one of Verizon’s DROID commercials “features” incoming payloads reminiscent of the bombs flying in from the 80s movie “The Day After.” I guess they didn’t get the memo that people like little techy things with lights and smiley faces, but don’t like robots with threatening voices delivered by high-velocity aerial bombardment. (hint: in the movie referenced above, everyone dies). Oh yeah, and we appear to be bombing ourselves. WTF?

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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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Shaking Hands with EcceRobot

Seminal Sci-fi author William Gibson retweeted the link to the following video and the comments of @twiliteminotaur: “Creepy-cool in that old Gigerian sense of cyberpunk. Terminator’s in the anatomical details.” Fellow fan and skeptic of all things robotic, Lisa Smith, wondered why they’d go to such lengths to make the robot so human-like in function and construction when having a variety of anatomical structures would be more in keeping with the variety of requirements we’d need from future robots. Of course, the answer is that the more human-like they are the more likely we’ll accept these robots into our lives. And an added benefit is that all one would need would be a hot-glue gun to melt the robot’s skeletal system. Take that future robotic over-lords!

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Damn You, HD Nation!

Several months ago I was contemplating simplifying my home-theater thing by drafting my Nintendo Wii to take care of media server details. Only a couple problems with this plan: 1) No DVD support, 2) low-resolution screen, 3) No native iTunes support. Yeah. Not so great. Not being able to just play a DVD was bad enough, but the Wii has such a low resolution that it makes doing simple web browsing ridiculous and made it impossible to use the Wii to play my iTunes media (using the MyTunes software on the MacMini). Fail. Then I fell in love with the idea building a Hackintosh to do the media server role, especially because of how great the Apple app Front Row works with DVDs and videos stored on connected and networked hard drives. I was building a case against investing in BluRay, because, except for digital animations like Wall*E, the sharpness of the picture takes me out of the movie (I feel like I can tell we’re on a film set and fully expect to see a boom mic fall into the frame). Then I started watching Revision 3’s latest offering, HD Nation. Damn it, now I can’t imagine not doing BluRay. Argh!!!

I’m much closer to putting down the cash for a PS3… then I heard that Sony is going to do some upgrade/product roll-out sometime in August. Damn.

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Unexpected Restfulness in Moving

I’ve lived a great stretch of my adult life in one room studio apartments, so when I stepped up last year and moved to a one-bedroom apartment I didn’t think twice about putting my home office in my bedroom. The novelty was having the option to have a front room for entertaining. Of course I then discovered that I needed to buy a second TV for the bedroom because I like working with the TV going. No surprise there. So I just assumed that I was now going to have to buy a third TV as i tried to visualize how things were going to be when I moved to the two-bedroom townhouse. But as I prepped for the move I discovered something unexpected that made me change my mind about TV #3.

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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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