Apple iPad Increases Traffic

I was checking my stats, for no good reason and saw a 50% increase in traffic over the last couple of days… mainly due to the Apple iPad Hits & Misses post. Wow! Thanks for visiting!

I was planning an article title Apple iPad… After the Storm. I was going to publish it in March on my regular site (did you read my predictions there on Jan 25?).

With all this hoopla I think I need to get some info out. I am going to break it down to a series of major tasks the iPad would be perfect for. Then you can decide how many of these tasks are task you do. If your task are the same task then you are a fit for the iPad. I will post an abbreviated list over the weekend. Pretty rough, but something to feed all your appetites.

Come back later this weekend, you won’t regret it.

Apple iPad – Hits and Misses

I am writing this at lunch… while the event is going on. So I will come back to finish editing it tonight. I did my own predictions for a slate style tablet computer back in November and on January 25th. Now we will go over the hit and misses. Not just mine, but Apples. Apple missed the mark on a few items, so let’s not let them off the hook. I will start off with the first couple of big misses (IMO):

Hit: $499-$829. I am really glad they did not hit the $1,000 mark fully optioned.
Miss: 3G component is $129 of price… not counting the monthly fees of $14,99 for 250 MB or $29.99 for unlimited data.

Miss: iPad OS, not OS X. It’s like a Ginourmous iPod Touch. Maybe Adobe with come out with a decent Photoshop Lite for the iPad… and at a reasonable price.

Miss: No Stylus Support. This is the biggest disappointment. Why would Adobe make a Photoshop Lite for the iPad without a stylus?

Miss: No USB Port. The iPad uses a dedicated 30-pin connector. So much for using an external hard drive or DVD or Blu-Ray drive. Also no SD slot… but there is a camera connection kit that will let you import pictures from an SD card.

Hit: Keyboard Dock! Pair this with built-in Bluetooth and you have a decent computer you can use at a desk. One of the pictures showed it on a plain stand which makes it a great picture frame when not being used.
Miss: iPad OS, not Mac OS X, so the keyboard and mouse are less useful… but still welcome.

Hit: Runs Apps from the App Store.
Miss: Runs them full screen (original size or pixel doubled, 2X size). No multitasking, no multiple apps side by side in a “window.” This looks silly with a 3.5″ app in the center of a 9.7″ screen.

Hit: New SDK for iPad devlopment… available today.
Miss: No OS X (see a trend here) or support for real applications.

Hit: 3G is unlocked and uses GSM microSIMs. Includes free WiFi hotspots (AT&T).
Miss: 3G plans are AT&T, so why not a way to tie to your iPhone plan? Maybe other carriers will offer better plans to entice you away from AT&T.

Hit: Movies & TV Shows. This was expected… and all from iTunes. Until I know more I will assume it can get content from your Mac or PC running iTunes. Hopefully that means it will run your own content as well as iTunes Store content.
Miss: Screen is 4:3, not 16:9. Oops! Black bars on all your movies.

Hit: Photos. Looks good. And it looks like it will make a great picture frame.

Hit: 10 Hour battery life.
Miss: Is this 10 hours of video on a plane?

Hit: e-Reader. Everyone expected this. Bonus the iBook Store, but again this was expected.

Hit: New York Times on iPad.
Miss: Does every periodical have to build their own app. Where’s the common platform application that publishers can feed with a subscription fee? This would have been better if Apple built an app to display newspaper and magazine content and let The Times and others create the content in a particular format. Then plug in subscriptions into the iTunes Store to get the content.

Hit: Brushes for graphic artists.
Miss: No OS X to run Photoshop.

Hit: Games. I was surprised at the Need For Speed Shift demo. I have it for the XBox 360. It looks like Apple wants more of the gaming market than just simple iPod games.
Miss: No OS X. If the iPad was running OS X wouldn’t game developers have it easier since they could develop for BOTH the Mac and iPad? That would bring a lot of game development to the Mac platform for people that have iMacs and MacBooks.

Hit: iWork? Is this really a hit?
Miss: Office for the Mac… running on OS X? Have I beat this to death yet… the iPad should really run OS X.

The screen is 9.7″ with a resolution of 1024 x 768. Not widescreen!

That’s all I can think of at the moment. They hit a lot of the marks I expected. However, the lack of a stylus and the lack of OS X means I will not be getting one until I can think of a use for it. I was considering it… if it ran OS X, but now I am not. Maybe I will change my mind. I think my oldest sone will love it since almost everything he does on his laptop is iTunes and Web. For him it will be perfect, but I want him to have more power for doing homework. We’ll see if it is good enough for a high school student’s only computer.

Honda CR-Z Misses The Mark

The new Honda CR-Z was shown in production form this week at the Detroit Auto Show. If you want more info read this article from Motor Trend.

The CR-Z is supposed to capture the spirit of the Honda CRX. The Motor Trend article mentions that they gave their Import Car Of The Year award to the first and second generation CRX. I owned a 1989 CRX Si. It was a wonderful little car.

The new CR-Z completely misses the mark on gas mileage. 31 city/37 highway mileage for the CR-Z. I remember my CRX Si (the least fuel efficient version of the CRX) was rated at 28/33 mpg. I regularly got 30 mpg in mixed driving and was rewarded with 38 mpg on a trip from Texas to New York (I was milking the mileage through the mountains of Tennessee, coasting downhill and minimally accelerating uphill… we now call this hypermiling).

Even if you correct for the changes in the EPA rating system over the years, the HF version of the CRX got 41/50 mpg. Even with hybrid technology today we are getting less mileage than was possible 20 years ago.

The CR-Z is a niche market vehicle. It is a two seater… like the CRX. However, the CRX was a cute, fun & affordable car. I don’t know how affordable the CR-Z is going to be with the expense of a hybrid drive-train, but it just doesn’t add up.

The original Insight got 60 mpg, but was too weird looking and didn’t have the fun factor of the CRX. Now we get mileage that is no better than a Mini Cooper. Why doesn’t this vehicle at least match the Toyota Prius in mileage?

When the CRX was cool SUVs were but a glimmer in the eyes of the automotive marketplace. Few two seat cars make it today. Add to that the low volume of hybrid cars and the CR-Z becomes a double niche vehicle. To make a statement this car should be getting the best gas mileage of any car on the market… not a small increase to its predecessor from 20 years ago.

I am puzzled to see how the new Honda CR-Z is going to succeed. Oh, and it doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as the concept.

Nexus One and the Future of Cell Phone Plans

If you are reading this then you did a search for the new Nexus One from Google. Hopefully the title of this post did not lead you to believe I was going to review this item. I am not.

I am here to talk briefly about the impact I hope this phone has on cell phone plans in the U.S. Google is doing something almost unheard of… selling the Nexus One as an unlocked (not locked to a carrier) phone without a cell phone service plan (You can also get it with a two year service contract through T-Mobile at the time of this writing).

I am hoping this is a really good thing. Apple should have done this with the iPhone, and I think they would still be getting $600 each for them if they did. Buyers of the Nexus One are going to want a cellular service plan that does not subsidize the cost of the phone, since they bought the phone outright without discounts.

Hopefully the Nexus One will prompt enough customers to demand cell phone plans that are cheaper when you are not subsidizing a phone purchase. And that is my hopes for the Nexus One.

Think about this… I have yet to hear of a cellular provider lowering the cost of a plan after the phone’s price has been covered. My current phone it 3 years old, long past its two year contract… but they did not lower my monthly bill by $15-20. Granted, I am on a family plan and at least two of the four phones in my home are still under their two year commitments. But if you could regularly buy phones outright and get plans that are appropriate, I would just assume buy everyone in my family a phone and get that cheaper plan. Then we can buy replacement phones any time a new, super cool phone comes out… or enjoy the savings of using a 3 year old phone that is good enough.

What do you think?

iPod or Zune

I have a Zune 80… that just died. I cannot blame anyone but myself. It may be repairable, but I don’t know if that would be cost effective. I dropped it. That’s my fault. It seemed fine. I even took it on a trip to Dallas during the holidays to watch some X-Files episodes during down time.

While watching an episode the battery indicator suddenly said full. Oh great, I thought, now I will not be able to tell when it is out of juice. I finished watching that episode and plugged it into the charger.

When I got home and wanted to update the Zune it started just fine, but kept flashing the low battery warning. No problem, I never did get to finish charging it in Dallas and it has been sitting alone for a while. So I plug it in and left it to charge. A couple days later I was getting it ready for coming back to work and the battery is dead.

I believe it has lost the ability to charge the battery. This might be something as simple as a loose connection inside the device. I may try to open it, but I am not very good with small electronics. I am not hopeful that it will come back to life.

So… the big question is to I get a new Zune HD or something else… meaning an iPod. I like the Zune 80. I have about 34-35 GB of music and I was able to keep all of it on the Zune 80. The Zune HD tops out at 32 GB. This means I will have to pick and choose what music I put on it. And don’t forget I need to leave room on it for those X-Files episodes (and Battlestar Galactica is after X-Files).

My two sons each have an iPod Touch. The youngest got his because my friend sold me his 16 GB 2nd gen Touch for $125 when he got an iPhone. My oldest son just got his 16 GB 2nd gen for Christmas (we bought a refurbished unit from the Apple web site).

I like the iPod Touch. I watch all my video podcasts on iTunes on my PC, but I don’t know if I would do that on an iPod. I never did like watching podcasts on my Zune. So podcasts are not part of this. I mention it because I have let iTunes see my music library, and it would not be hard to use it for syncing to an iPod.

However, I have all my music rated in the Zune software, and not in iTunes. And of course they are not compatible rating systems, so I can’t rate them in both. And I have all my playlists in the Zune as well.

The iPod Classic has too small a screen for the amount of video I watch on my player. The iPod Touch and Zune HD have very nice screens. I would require at least 32 GB, which puts me at $299 for the iPod Touch and $289 for the Zune HD in that capacity. I could go to the iPod Touch with 64 GB for $399, but that is just too much money. At least I could keep all my music on it.

There is no compelling reason to go with one or the other.

Oh yea… apps. I knew you were thinking of that. Well, my youngest son only payed for half of his iPod Touch, so we were supposed to share it. 9 out of 10 of any of the apps I ever looked at were worthless offline. I don’t have WiFi at work, and it is hit and miss out in the real world. I never could get into using the iPod Touch in the house. None of the apps I cared about were meaningful in the house. They really need the iPhone.

This would not be a problem if Apple would just let Sprint have a version of the iPhone.

Which do I get? I hate the idea of getting an iPod Touch for the hope someday of getting an iPhone. But the Zune HD costs $40 more and has less than half the capacity of my Zune 80 I bought two years ago.

Am I missing an affordable media player option?

Playing With Photoshop

I was goofing around and did this…