Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > April
April 2010
Becoming a location pro on Gowalla/Foursquare (Part 3)
On Wednesday, we started talking about why you’d want to use Foursquare or Gowalla, two popular location-based social networks. Yesterday, we tackled setting up an account and getting started with your first check-in.
Today, we’ll conclude by discussing privacy and safety — an area that may keep some people away from these kinds of services entirely. I’ll also list the best tips I got from people who use them. A version of this story (minus the expert tips) will be in Saturday’s Life & Arts section.
How safe is it?
The obvious question: Is using these services safe, and should you be worried about your privacy?
Not everyone is comfortable sharing their location with the world, and Gowalla and Foursquare certainly seem geared at the same kinds of users who don’t mind posting photos of themselves on Facebook or broadcasting personal details on public Web sites.
Gowalla and Foursquare have privacy controls over how much information you have in your online profile. With a few adjustments, only friends you’ve approved and people in your location can see where you’ve checked in. Though the technology is certainly available to do it, neither service checks you in to any location automatically: Gowalla and Foursquare users only check in when they choose to do so.
You can see Gowalla’s privacy policies here and learn about Foursquare’s policies at this link. In Gowalla, access the privacy setting under Edit Profile. In Foursquare, go to Settings and check or uncheck options for My Privacy.
What it looks like on Gowalla:
What it looks like on Foursquare:
Still, some users opt to protect their privacy over the opportunity to stick around and socialize in a location: Several women I spoke to during SXSW told me they like using Foursquare and Gowalla, but typically check in on their way out of a location just to be safe.
You should avoid making your home a check-in spot (unless you really want your online friends to know your home address), and don’t accept friend invites from strangers.
Check yourself
Like every social networking platform, Gowalla and Foursquare have their own nuances and sets of unwritten rules that users learn as they explore each service.
For instance, nobody cares if you check in at a gas station unless you give some context as to why you’re there (with, say, a photo or short message). You don’t need to check in every day at work.
If you want to learn more about etiquette on Gowalla and Foursquare, see what your friends are doing before jumping in whole hog.
You can also find other in-depth guides to using Foursquare on Mashable and for Gowalla on this unofficial guide.
Good luck and have fun exploring Austin!
And finally, some tips from power users:
- Be more social. In-line commenting is cool, but the value is only there if you talk to each other.
- Take pictures. Pics of spots are fun to flip through.
- Don’t auto-Tweet/Facebook everything you do. Only cross-post the good content, where you actually say something.
- Don’t check in to places just because you’re driving by.
- Don’t make your home address a spot.
- Search for a spot before creating a new one. There are a lot of duplicates out there.
- Friend only people you’d have dinner with.
- Use a photo as your avatar. Some of us have multiple “Dan B.”s on our lists. Learn how to turn off pings, auto-posting to Twitter.
- Check privacy settings, you might be giving out your phone number/e-mail. Relatedly: don’t accept complete strangers as friends.
- Download app updates often: both services add bug fixes and new features frequently, makes the experience better with every new update.
- Overall, “the suggested places” are only as good as where your phone thinks you are, which is often far from where you’re standing.
- If you’re going to spend the first 10 minutes of lunch checking in to all the services, please get there 10 minutes before me.
- Use Check.in to check in to both services at the same time.
- Have something interesting to say if you’re going to post your checkin to Twitter. We don’t care that you’re at the gas station.
- It is a tad dangerous. Have to be smart. Don’t need to let everyone know when I am not home, so they can rob it!
- To get new bonus items in Gowalla, visit different TYPES of locations, not just stores/restaurants. And keep nine or fewer items in pack.
- Don’t get too granular; it takes long enough for nearby locations to load w/out having entries for bathrooms & patios in the list.
- Check it more than you check in. I’ve found friends nearby or remembered places I wanted to visit just by looking at my friends list.
My thanks to Robert Quigley, Joy Maher, Kathryn Yu, Julie Gomoll, Jenn Deering Davis, Matt Reyes, Laura P. Thomas, John Shepherd, Marla Erwin, Michelle Greer, Elizabeth Stoddard and Alyssa Gardina for the great suggestions!
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Getting set up and checking in with Gowalla/Foursquare (Part 2)
Yesterday, we talked about why you’d want to use location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla and what they are. Today, we’ll look at the basics of setting up an account and starting to check in around town.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about safety, privacy and tips from power users on getting the most out of these networks in Part 3 of this set of blog posts. On Saturday, a version of this story will run in the American-Statesman’s Life & Arts section.
Feedback or questions? Please post them in the comments.
How do I get started?
First, you’ll want to download the Foursquare or Gowalla app for your cell phone and keep it updated. Updates often bring new features like search or improved GPS functionality, so check every week or two to make sure you have the latest version.
Foursquare and Gowalla apps are available for free download for the iPhone, Android-based smart phones and some BlackBerry and Palm phone models. You can find them at Foursquare.com or Gowalla.com or in the app store or marketplace for your phone.
Once it’s installed, you’ll want to set up a profile. A few tips: Use a real photo of yourself, not an animated icon or abstract image. People who accept you as a friend — especially those who don’t know you well — will want to know you’re a real person.
If you have Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can link them to your Gowalla or Foursquare account. Be mindful of your friends when you’re posting via these services, though: If you post every Gowalla or Foursquare update to your Twitter followers or Facebook friends, you’ll soon find yourself annoying everyone. Both allow you to choose when you’re broadcasting to these services, so pay attention when you use this option.
Using Foursquare and Gowalla is no fun if you do it alone. You can find friends who are using the services by searching for a name or e-mail address, connecting to your Gmail or Yahoo address book (don’t worry, the services won’t spam your e-mail contacts after your search), or by using your Twitter and Facebook contacts. You can also invite a friend to join with an e-mail. Foursquare has about 1 million users, while Gowalla has about 150,000.
Now that you’re all set up, you’re ready to go out and check in with the world.
Checking in
The “check-in” is the heart of both services. To use it, go to a bar or restaurant, launch the app and click on “Check In.” If your GPS is working right, you should see a list of nearby locations, topped by the one you’re closest to.
If the location doesn’t show up, you can type the name in the search bar. If the location is obscure or new, it’s possible it’s not listed yet. You can create a new spot, but you’ll want to double-check that the location hasn’t already been created.
Once you’ve got your location, confirm your check-in. You’ll be able to see who’s been there recently, how far away it is (in meters or kilometers) who’s mayor (in the case of Foursquare), specials that are available (if any) and decide whether you want your check-in shared publicly.
Checking in often enough can earn you badges or pins — some are based on visiting locations often; others are awarded for checking in at a pre-set list of locations (say, best barbecue spots in Texas).
On Foursquare, being the most frequent visitor of a spot over two months makes you “Mayor.” A mayorship can easily be lost, however, if someone else clocks more check-ins than you after that, and a popular location might have several people jockeying for the title.
Of course, if “Founder” designations, virtual items and mayorships mean nothing to you, don’t feel you have to participate in that part of the services. I mostly ignore virtual items in Gowalla (they’re nice to look at, but don’t have a lot of utility yet) and I’ve never been the mayor of anything on Foursquare.
The nice thing about the game elements of these apps is that they aren’t completely necessary to get use out Gowalla and Foursquare. If you’d rather use the services as communications and social tools and aren’t interested in gaming, that’s completely up to you.
Tomorrow: Safety, privacy and tips from local pros.
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Lost on Gowalla/Foursquare? Here’s help (Part 1)
On Saturday, I’ve got a story running in the American-Statesman about location-aware social networks Foursquare and Gowalla — the basics of how to use them and tips on how to get the most out of them.
I’ll be posting blog entries the rest of the week with info from the story as well as extra tidbits and some advice from power users who sent me their own helpful hints.
Here’s the first part on what they are and why you’d want to do it. Tomorrow, I’ll post information on getting started with a new account, protecting your privacy, and staying safe while using location-based social networks. Friday, I’ll post the best tips from users and links to resources and help on the Web to help you become an expert on Foursquare and Gowalla.
For eons, mankind struggled with the question, “Who am I?” That one was difficult to figure out until the invention of Facebook, the place to carefully craft the online identity you share with the world. But what of another question that can prove perplexing: “WHERE am I?”
Seems like an easy one to answer, but as a new wave of location-aware social networks are demonstrating, the answer opens up another series of questions: WHY are you there? Are friends nearby? Is there beer?
The explosion of smart phone adoption has fueled lots of online services that use your current location (usually assisted by a phone’s built-in GPS) to give you information. But at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, two competing services were talked about constantly as the next thing in mobile networking.
Austin-based Gowalla and its more-established cousin, Foursquare, allow you to “check in” to locations, making selected friends aware of where you are and what you’re up to. Checking in with these smart phone apps allows you to see special offers, compete in contests with other users and get an idea of what people around you are doing. Don’t have a smart phone?
You can also check in via text message, or on the Gowalla and Foursquare Web sites from a computer.
Why would I do that?
Three years ago, many discussions of Twitter — then a tiny start-up — led to the question, “Why would I want to do that?” But the short-form messaging network’s brevity and speed helped accelerate its growth to the mainstream. It now has more than 100 million users. In the case of Gowalla and Foursquare, you can communicate in short bursts, post photos and leave comments, but most of the appeal lies in the way both services have turned going out and exploring the town into a big game.
And that’s where it gets interesting: Both companies are working with businesses to offer discounts, coupons and special offers to players who become Mayor of a location or who pick up special virtual items by checking in.
For instance, the Foursquare Mayor of the flagship Whole Foods store on Sixth Street and Lamar Boulevard gets free coffee. During SXSW, Gowalla users who picked up a “Tiki Room” virtual wristband could use it to gain VIP access to the company’s party at The Belmont. If the idea of a city-wise, persistent online game doesn’t appeal to you,
Gowalla and Foursquare also have more practical uses: On a busy Friday night, it’s a good way to see what your friends are up to or to let your online contacts know where you are if you want to meet up.
Tomorrow: Getting an account set up, staying safe.
Videos:
What is Foursquare?
Gowalla CEO Josh Williams talks about Gowalla with TechCrunch:
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From the sidelines at the International Journalism Symposium
If you talked to a guy who has been making donuts for the last thirteen years of his life, sat down with him and tried to engage in a conversation that began, “So, what do you think the future of donuts will be?” it would probably be a shorter conversation than you might imagine.
While you’re asking, “So, more donut holes? Ordering donuts online? More donuts with exotic fillings?” the donut maker might just want to get back to making donuts or at least finishing work so he can go home and watch TV that has absolutely nothing to do with donuts.
I believe I’m in the minority of newspaper employees when I say that I identify more with the donut guy than the donut-industry-curious interviewer. For as much as I love working at a daily paper and as long as I’ve stayed, I’ve never been particularly interested in the industry navel-gazing that goes on at journalism conferences and at sites like Poynter and Romenesko. Don’t get me wrong, these are very useful to journalists who are job hunting or who are intensely interested in journalism as a sacred torch to carry, or even as a business.
Me, I’m usually thinking, “Again with the donut talk?” It’s just something that’s always interested me less than actually doing the job.
Which is the attitude I tried to shed when attending the International Symposium on Online Journalism on Friday and Saturday. It helped that I was there to attend and learn, not to cover as an event and write about. I Tweeted my thoughts frequently, but there was no deadline to worry about or blog entry due.
What I was really there to hear about were new technologies, what’s going on online at different news organizations, and what the future of social media, apps and computer-assisted reporting in news might look like.
When you start talking about tech and news, that’s when my ears perk up. In my newsroom, I’ve watched us go from green-text terminals to Macs and from a completely internal network to full-blown Internet access and an embrace of social media. The last part has so fundamentally changed the way we interact with readers (or, “Audience,” which is probably more accurate) that I’m not even sure we realize what an impact it’s having yet.
In that respect, I was happy to hear lots of talk on Friday about news apps from players at the New York Times, NPR and Skiff, among others. While Skiff is trying to create ways to create content once and use it on a variety of platforms (including Skiff hardware), The Times and NPR are largely betting on Apple and Android as their main platforms for mobile news.
I heard about how Demand Media has quietly taken over a big chunk of YouTube by figuring out a formula for content online that had some journalists in the room grumbling about news-as-ROI and a few students in the room Tweeting about how they’d rather be doing an expose for a citizen-funded non-profit project than working for a big company like Demand. (Naíve? You be the judge.)
The International part of the international symposium was best represented with presentations about news in South Africa (very mobile; news organizations find their readers through social media and instant messaging), Egypt (social media as a tool for protest and reform) and Latin America (in Mexico, Facebook and Twitter are exploding).
For as many great case studies there were about seismic changes in how the online world is shaping news coverage, there were a few off-the-mark presentations that were so baffling and inside-baseball that even seasoned donut makers (er, journalists) in the room were baffled. I’m not sure anyone in the room who wasn’t already familiar with the “Black Wheel” concept was any more enlightened after it was discussed at length as a presentation.
But the most exciting stuff seems to be happening in non-traditional journalism ventures — non-profits like the Texas Tribune, the citizen-funded Spot.Us and projects like NPR’s Project Argo (full disclosure: I freelance for NPR and drink the NPR Kool-Aid. I don’t have a tote bag yet, though).
Disturbingly, though, some of these presentations made it sound like newspaper journalism is already dead, broke and gone and ignored the fact that print ads still make up the bulk of a newspaper’s income. Not to say we don’t see the writing on the wall, but I kept wanting to hold my paycheck up and say, “Hey, we’re not quite dead yet!”
But I digress…
Journalism business model discussion tends to either bore me or outrage me and I felt a bit of both hearing about micropayments as a viable supplement to ads and subscriptions. I feel like we’ve been down this road before and that the time when we could wall off our content successfully and charge per article is long past. Maybe I’m wrong, but the idea a universal newspaper currency (unless it’s through, say, Facebook currency or Paypal) to buy article seems silly to me. Competing newspapers aren’t likely to sit down and figure out ways to make each other money. We can’t even figure out a universal way to display comics in newspapers or work out a decent way to bring down paper costs consistently across the industry.
Which brings me back to why I don’t typically attend events like this — I end up being the cranky (increasingly old) guy Tweeting disagreement to professors and journalism students who seem to take a lot of the research much more seriously than I do. (And, hey, they want our jobs, too!) I take a little bit of umbrage at having a 21-year-old present a research paper telling me why everyone in my industry is doing it wrong and offering a solution that obviously none of us have thought about before.
But then I remember what I was like in journalism school and particularly what I was like when I started at this newspaper. I remember how much I cared about things like whether the inverted pyramid was going out of vogue or about whether AP style was “Web site” or “website.” I cared about that stuff like my life depended on it.
And then I sit up and open my ears a little wider.
Maybe the kid (and all his fellow presenters) might have a good idea after all. I’d like to hear more and I’d like to come back next year.
I may not agree with it all or see the point of some of it, but there’s nothing like being in a room full of smart, passionate journalists who want desperately to not only make the donuts but to make the best, most important, world-saving donuts that have ever been made.
Despite what you’ve heard and what I sometimes fear, there’s still really good donuts being made, every day. Just because I don’t always want to talk about donuts doesn’t mean i don’t love and crave them. I still believe in donut-making.
I wouldn’t still be in this donut factory if I didn’t.
If you want a more in-depth look at the symposium, take a look at the Reportr.net blog and the write-ups and videos on the ISOJ site (or take a peek on Twitter at the #isoj hashtag, where lots of the backchannel discussion was happening).
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The Linkdown for Wednesday, April 21
The Linkdown is ready to hail our new Earth Overlords, the good folks at Facebook. Please rule benevolently and wisely, O leaders.
Here are some links for the good of our collective Open Graph:
- Open Graph? That’s what Facebook is calling the massive pile of information that will be collected as Facebook takes over the rest of the Web. Scary? Brilliant? Both?
- This week on NPR’s All Tech Considered, we talked about the death of the remote control, a topic we touched on around here last week.
- Our TV writer Dale Roe on how the iPad may change our TV viewing habits. I’ve watched the last two episodes of “Lost” on my wife’s iPad.
- RBFCU now has mobile banking apps (check deposits on the go!) for iPhone and Android.
- “Hubble 3-D” screening and panel at the Bob Bullock on Saturday! Free family activities from 12-4, the museum says.
- The Sony Online game “Free Realms” has an official music video for the song “It’s Your World” by The Dares.
- Helping the homeless meets social media/online video with “I Am Here” campaign.
- Austin Chamber of Commerce nominated for a Webby, which I recently said was an award slightly more prestigious than the World’s Best Butterscotch Awards (The ‘Scotchies). But still! Good for the Chamber.
- Monday’s Social Media Breakfast is all about the iPad for business.
- Not a great day to be a McAfee customer using Windows XP.
- Microsoft launches Docs.com, which sounds very familiar.
- AT&T earnings and Apple earnings seem to be going in slightly different directions despite the shared success of the iPhone.
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Reader questions: Sony e-book readers and netbook optical drives
Reader Alva writes in:
I have two tech questions.1. First will new Sony e-reader due out this year offer as extensive a catalog for recent book releases as Amazon? Or will it depend on public libraries for its content?
2. Will there be a reliable netbook developed that does not need an external drive?
Expressing appreciation in advance,
Alva
Thanks for your e-mail. Your answers:
Sony has already had several e-book readers out for a while and has its own store for downloading books. You can judge for yourself on the selection at this address: http://ebookstore.sony.com/ — it looks like they have a pretty decent selection of recent bestsellers.
I’m not sure if you mean external hard drive or external optical drive (CD/DVD). I’m going to assume you mean optical drives, which are very hard to come by on a 10” or smaller netbook. Last year, Asus announced a netbook that would have a DVD player included, but I can’t find any evidence that it actually is being sold stateside. Because of the small size of netbooks, they typically are not designed to include CD or DVD drives. Best bet for a laptop with an optical drive would be to step up to a 12- or 13-inch size, where you’ll find more options for laptops that include optical drives from Toshiba, HP and others.
Thanks! omar
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‘Red vs. Blue’: mixing home-brew CGI with machinima
On Friday, I got a chance to stop in at the downtown offices of Rooster Teeth, the gents who brought us the long-running “Red vs. Blue” machinima series, and who are now getting into live-action full-length movie making, 3-D animation and motion capture in addition to the Web series, commercials and comics they already do.
What they had to show me was pretty amazing — they’re now producing their own motion-captured CGI animation and inserting it into the familiar “Halo” worlds that “Red vs. Blue” fans already know and love. This allows the crew a great deal more freedom in putting their characters in positions that the “Halo” games don’t allow; the goal, they told me, is to not overdo the effect and ruin the illusion. In fact, they have to tone down the effect so it still blends in.
They’ve been previewing some of the footage at the Penny Arcade Expo and at a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse.
If you want to see the fruits of their labor, check out the episode below, “Upon Further Review,” which just went live last night. At about the 4-minute mark, you can see the technique employed spectacularly. (Warning: as with most “Red vs. Blue” episodes, this one has some salty language. Viewer discretion is advised.)
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This is probably the fourth-gen iPhone
Let’s give it up for Gizmodo.com: they seem to have gotten their hands on what appears to be a very-close-to-final version of the next iteration of the iPhone.
Check out the video below:
Highlights include a front-facing camera (finally, video chat?), a bigger battery, a different industrial design (flat on the back, metal around the sides, dedicated volume up/down buttons), camera flash and a higher-res display.
The story is that the phone was lost and Gizmodo recovered it (but at what cost?) and someone is probably getting yelled at in Cupertino, Calif. (unless it was somehow intentional that the phone was lost).
Make no mistake: mainstream media is taking this seriously and it doesn’t appear to be the usual PhotoShopped blurry screen shot or baseless rumor. This is very close to what we can likely expect in stores as early as June.
What do you think? Drool-worthy?
By the way, let’s not call it “iPhone 4G,” please, if it’s not going to be surfing on a 4G network. It’s fourth-generation, but calling it “4G” is only going to cause confusion since this phone will mostly likely be limited to 3G networks.
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Girlstart’s Digital Media and Learning competition video
Below is a video Austin’s Girlstart is submitting as part of the Digital Media and Learning competition, which is supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
In the video, Girlstart describes a mobile portal that would help girls find resources for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) projects and learning.
Winners of the DML competition are expected to be announced in May; right now, public commenting is open on their Web site.
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Is Dell going Streaking this summer?
Photo from Engadget.com
The above photo is purported to be 7-inch and 10-inch versions of a new line of devices from Dell Inc. called the “Streak,” the first of which are due out in June, according to the popular gadget blog Engadget. The devices would be part of a line that includes the Dell Mini 5 (now dubbed, according to the site, the “Streak 5). Presumably, these would all run the Android OS and share the same DNA as the Droid and HTC EVO phones. The bad news: the tablets wouldn’t be out until late this year (for the 7-inch version) and early next year (for the 10-inch version), according to Engadget.
According to the Statesman Business Blog, Dell has no comment, but it sure sounds real to me. The only question is how well it’ll work as compared to another device these little tablets may remind you of.
“Streak” is not a bad name, unless by some weird defect of manufacturing, the screen has a tendency to streak liquids. But, hey, the iPad could easily be called “The Smudgy” because of the way it collects fingerprints, and people weren’t exactly thrilled by the name “iPad” when it was announced.
Will they have cameras? (Maybe!) Will they be cheaper than iPads (I’d bet yet). Will Apple already have too big of a head start by the holidays for the Streak tablets catch up? My hunch is “Yes,” but Dell does very well offering cheaper alternative to Apple products, so I wouldn’t count these devices out at all.
Thoughts?
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All-in-one or one-for-some?
Photos from Associated Press
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Amazon Kindle, the iPad, the Nintendo Wii, Netflix, remote controls, GPS devices and Blu-ray players lately.
OK, maybe not A LOT. Maybe 30 percent of the time. Is that a lot? Hey, don’t judge!
What I’ve been thinking a lot about is whether it’s better to have devices that are really good at one thing (say, the Kindle), or devices that try to do it all (the iPad). And I’ve also been thinking lot about devices in the middle like the Wii and Blu-ray players whose capabilities are continually being expanded to provide more services from the same box: weather, online news, Netflix streaming, that sort of thing.
And then I think about devices that I think might be doomed by our increasing reliance on smartphones and (I predict) Internet tablets and built-in HDTV services. Disc-based media players, remote controllers and stand-alone GPS devices are among the kinds of devices I’ve already started to consider endangered species.
I find myself using our new iPad every night to plow through a 1,000+ page book that I hadn’t bothered to pick up from my bookshelf even though I’ve owned it in print for more than six months. It’s a little distracting to have an e-book reader that can also play “Plants vs. Zombies,” has a full Web browser and instant messaging. You feel like maybe you should check in instead of finishing the chapter you’re on. Would a Kindle be better? It certainly would have less glare and fewer opportunities for distraction.
But I never bought a Kindle because I was never able to justify spending $250 or more on a device that only does one thing, even if it does that thing superbly.
Despite its gorgeous interface for iBooks and Kindle apps, I wouldn’t go so far as to call the iPad the best e-book reader out there. It certainly has problems. But e-books are just one of dozens of things it does. Its higher pricetag seems much more justified when compared to the Kindle.
So which is a better buy — a Swiss Army Knife that can do lots of different things or one really sharp cooking knife that fillets at a professional level?
I know what my answer is, but curious to hear what some of you think. Post in the comments.
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iPad: The Apps
Last week, it was announced that there were 3,500 apps available for the new Apple iPad and every time I look it feels like hundreds more have been added. It’s impossible to take a look at them all, but here’s a quick rundown of some I like (both paid and free) and some I wasn’t as impressed with.
If you want to read my full write-up of the iPad, you can find that here.
Here we go!
News apps: I’m not as big a newshound as you might imagine. I have my RSS feeds to keep up with tech news and headlines, but I don’t go out of my way to visit news sites. But so far, I really like the “NPR” app, which has a lot of content but puts it on three easy-to-navigate horizontal rails and offers audio and photos for almost every piece of content. (Full disclosure: I’m a contributor on the network’s “All Tech Considered.”) The “BBC News” app is also fantastic with lots of iPad-compatible video. “USA Today” is also worth a look. Less impressive is the “New York Times Editor’s Choice” app which disappointingly is a very literal take on a newspaper app:
THIS is what you do on a new format? Shoehorn a centuries-old format into it, along with giant ads? I don’t get it, honestly. (All news apps mentioned above are free.)
Games: I can’t think of a better game I’d rather play on the iPad than “Plants vs. Zombies” ($9.99), which is even better than the desktop version I reviewed last year. Touch adds a lot to the game and it looks fantastic on an iPad screen.
I’m also addicted to “Diner Dash: Going Green” ($4.99) not because it’s a great game (it’s good, not great), but because it’s so hard I can’t beat it. Damn you, “Diner Dash!”
iPad versions of games I was already playing like “Word With Friends HD” ($2.99), but few of them top some of the premium apps like “Scrabble” ($9.99) which can be played locally, over Facebook or even with iPod Touch or iPhone devices serving as the Scrabble tile holders (with a free add-on app download).
And then there’s the out-of-nowhere, no-brainer games that are perfect for the format like “Glow Hockey 2 HD” ($1.99) which includes lots of themes and gameplay options for playing on one screen or over two iPads.
Info and entertainment: My current favorite news/entertainment app is Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” (free) which gives you their weekly rundown of what’s hot, but also gives you links to audio samples, in-app YouTube videos and direct links to buy or view books, movie trailers and lots of other media. It’s beautifully designed and makes me feel like this whole new-media thing is really going somewhere on the iPad:
“Epicurious” (free) was one of the first iPad apps I downloaded; I use their recipes frequently and have already started keeping the iPad in the kitchen when I cook for reference. You can use it to e-mail recipes, keep a list of favorites handy or to get nutritional info or reviews on a particular recipe. Indispensable.
My wife is a member of “Gilt,” a shopping network with short-duration sales of premium items. She hasn’t bought anything yet, but the app beautifully shows off the wares of many designers and boutique shops in a visually stunning way. You can get multiple views of the same item, view different colors and get push notification when sales start. (“Gilt” is free to download and browse.)
“Marvel Comics” (free) is another stunner to show off — you can browse comics you purchase online (or grab for free; there are a smattering of free titles in the shop). Comics look fantastic and you can have the app guide you panel to panel, fitting each one perfectly on the screen whether you’re viewing it in portrait or landscape mode.
And then there’s apps like “Netflix” and “ABC Player” that stream HD-quality video. Dale Roe will be rounding up TV-related apps in an upcoming piece. I’ll post a link as soon as it’s available. [Edited to add: Here is the link.]
There are also quite a few iPad apps available and on the way from Austin developers. I’ll be writing more about those in coming posts.
Other apps I recommend: “Labyrinth 2 HD” ($7.99) “Digits” (99 cents), “Voice Memo” (free), “WeatherBug” (free), “Google” (free, has voice-based search), “Pages” ($10), “iBooks” (free), “AOL Instant Messenger” (free) “Pandora” (free), “Twitteriffic” (free trial/$4.99 full edition), “Adobe Ideas” (free).
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Gadgets, Shopping
Dallas GeekBrief.TV couple announce divorce in blogs, on Twitter
Cali Lewis, who has been a Statesman Texas Social Media Award Winner two years in a row, and Neal Campbell, said in blog posts that they continue to work together.
In her blog post, Lewis described the end of their 11-year marriage as amicable and said she wouldn’t be discussing be addressing questions about it. In his blog post, Campbell said that Lewis had left home and filed for divorce. In a Twitter direct message, Campbell said that they continue to produce GeekBrief for now and didn’t indicate any plans to end the show’s run of more than 740 episodes. Today, Campbell posted a blog detailing how the two are producing the show from separate locations using Google Docs and by transferring large video files online.
GeekBrief has been a launching pad for Lewis and Campbell, who frequently speak at conferences and have become social media and tech culture fixtures. Lewis is a frequent guest on TV and radio shows, talking about everything from Android phones to the iPad. In a GeekBrief podcast late last year, Lewis hinted that big life changes were ahead in 2010.
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What’s going on (besides the iPad)
About once a week, I post a “Linkdown” entry with links to some of the things you should be checking out or reading online.
Today, I’ll do it a little bit differently: links, yes, but with a little more explanation as to why some of these things are on my mind.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Twitter ads: They’re on my mind, but way back in the corner and in danger of falling off. Truth is, I cared about Twitter’s ad platform a lot more when I thought they were going to be announcing it at South by Southwest Interactive. That didn’t happen. Instead of jumping in this week, Twitter is instead launching “Promoted Tweets,” which feels like a tentative step toward making money, almost as if the company is allergic to cash and is checking to see if its allergy meds are working.
After the underwhelming keynote at SXSW, I’m having a lot of doubts about Twitter, not as a platform, but as a business. I’m beginning to wonder if a lot of the company’s success might have been by accident, and fueled by the many app developers who are now feeling a little betrayed by Twitter’s recent moves.
More importantly, does the market really have room for another major smartphone player behind the iPhone, Android phones, BlackBerry and the struggling Palm platform? Windows Phone to me feels like it’s not going to be a mature enough platform for casual/social smartphone owners and not “Windows” enough for business customers who have been faithful Windows Mobile customers.
New Macbook Pros: I’ve had my eye on the 13” MacBook Pro for a while, and the hardware updates are nice, but except for a little more memory and a bigger hard drive for the same price, the 13-inch model seems to have been largely left alone while its 15” and 17” cousins got major Intel processor and nVidia graphic card updates. I’m inclined to wait a while (for what? Not sure.) as a new laptop is not high on my priority list.
“Opera” browser approved for iPhone: Good news, but to me less an indication that Apple is opening up the App Store platform than an indication that Opera was going to make a stink if its app was rejected and Apple wanted to avoid some drama. Seems like Steve Jobs would rather save his energy for head games with Google and Adobe.
“God of War 3”: Thinking about this game a lot because I’m having a hard time finding time to play it. I waited so long for this one to come out and I long to join Kratos on his quest for revenge. Tonight, perhaps, Kratos. Perhaps.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Applications, Austin, Internet, Phones, SXSW 2010, Shopping
The iPad
Every few days, a co-worker or online friend will ask whether they should get an iPhone, or some other phone like the Motorola Droid or a BlackBerry Bold. And now that Apple has released its latest potential game-changing device, I’m getting asked, “Should I get an iPad?”
It wouldn’t be hard to write a review telling you the good and the bad of each part of the iPad (screen: beautiful; keyboard: takes some getting used to; App Store, cluttered as ever), but more than just about any new device I’ve had my hands on in the last few years, this one feels like it’s going to be a completely subjective experience. The iPad’s beauty (or lack of it), I think, is going to be completely in the eye of whomever’s holding it.
So I’ll no more “review” it than I could review a current-gen iPhone. With 185,000 apps, it’s impossible to tell you how it all fits together or how useful it’ll be to you as a potential buyer. It would be as easy as reviewing a country.
Instead, I’ll give you my impressions so far and tell you how we’re already using the iPad 32 GB Wi-Fi model I bought on Saturday in my house and how I think it’ll fit into our lives (that is, me, my wife and our two very young daughters).
I’ll also post a separate entry early next week with some of my experiences with apps for the iPad. The apps I’ve seen were the biggest factor in forming my opinion of the device and where I think its biggest potential lies.
Naysayer to buyer
In January, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as a “Magical” device that would revolutionize computing, I had to hold back my stomach acid. I thought his ego was getting carried away this time and that he was overhyping what, to my mind, was an oversized iPod Touch that lacked even some of the basic features that make the iPhone great. (A camera, for instance.)
But by April, my mind started to change. My wife was in need of a computer to replace her aging iBook G4 (which doesn’t even have a functioning battery; it’s plugged in all the time it’s in use). We considered buying a MacBook Pro, but when Jobs announced the iPad, my wife was intrigued. She told me that as long as she could print documents from it, it might be all she’d need. At $499 for the base Wi-Fi model, it would be about $800 cheaper than the MacBook Pro we’d have bought. My wife decided to wait until after the launch and take it for a spin at the store before buying one.
Apple didn’t send us an iPad to review, and as launch day approached (and when we found out printing apps would be available), I decided to go stand in line at Best Buy on launch day and see if I could get one. I rationalized quite a bit: “I can write about it for work.” “I really need to be up to speed on it.” “We were gonna buy one later anyway!”
That’s how I found myself at Best Buy in San Marcos at 8:30 a.m. with five other guys who were waiting. There were plenty of iPads to go around (when the shipment arrived, there were 30 for the store, 10 of each size). I played around with the demo units in the store, then took mine home. The moment my wife held it in her hands, she smiled. (Not as much as when our kids were born, but pretty close). She was smitten instantly. As an iPhone user, she knew exactly how to use it. It spoke the same language.
I spent the next few hours loading up the device with apps from my iTunes account, putting music and videos on it and putting it through its paces.
Impressions
It has that Apple magic. I was a naysayer in January, but somewhere between that slightly disappointing launch presentation and the day it arrived in stores, the software and hardware have come together to form something that feels good in your hands and operates (about 80 to 90 percent of the time) exactly as you’d want it to.
It’s speedy, much faster than even an iPhone 3GS for opening most Web pages and it handles HD-quality video with no hesitation, even if you skip around to different parts of a movie or TV show.
Apps that are familiar to iPhone or iPod Touch users like Mail, Calendar, and Photos have gotten pleasing facelifts that take advantage of the bigger screen to offer more panels of information in a neat, organized way. The trade-off is that there are no Stocks, Weather or Calculator apps. Perhaps Apple hasn’t finished those yet or didn’t think they were that important for the iPad. (Come on, Apple. No calculator? Really?)
Luckily, there are lots of great weather apps for free in the App Store and several calculator apps for about 99 cents. (My recommendation for that: the lovely “Digits.”)
The hardware feels dense and a little weighty even though it’s only a pound and a half. It’s got a switch to keep the screen from rotating if you need it fixed in one orientation and the home, on/off and volume buttons are just like the iPhone’s.
Now, about that 9.7-inch screen. It’s not a next-generation OLED screen, but it’s bright, beautiful and displays photos, videos and colorful apps like “Epicurious” so beautifully that you want to share what you’re seeing with everyone around you. It’s not as big as most laptop screens, but it’s fine for watching a TV show or movie by yourself. Most people I’ve shown it to think the iPad as a whole is smaller than they were expecting. But certainly not too small to render video, Web pages and photos in ways the iPhone can’t. A photo frame feature that can be accessed from the lock screen works nicely and can be configured to zoom in on faces in your photos or display multiple photos and transition them with origami folds. It’s a great feature.
iBooks and the Amazon Kindle reader are both powerful, well implemented e-readers. I like the eye candy of iBooks, which even displays text from the next page as you’re turning a page with the slow swipe of a finger. It comes with a free copy of “Winnie-the-Pooh” and the color illustrations, book cover and map in it make a great case against the black-and-white approach of the Kindle app. However, the Kindle app allow you to change the background of the text (white, sepia or white-text-on-black) and seems more straight-forward.
The speaker on the iPad is surprisingly good and surprisingly loud. It took me five days to even bother plugging a pair of headphones into it. (The iPad, by the way, doesn’t come with a pair of earbuds, a dock or even a cloth to wipe the screen. The screen gets covered in smudgy fingerprints often. You’ll be wiping it off a lot if you buy one.)
Web pages mostly load quickly (although I’ve been told that pages that have a lot of Javascript programming take a huge performance hit on the iPad). There are a few navigation quirks in the iPod app that make it needlessly difficult to find videos. (There’s a separate app icon for “Videos.”) And it’s puzzling that there’s no Cover Flow anywhere I could find in the iPod app.
The apps
What turned me from a skeptic into a believer on the iPad is simply the apps. It took a year for the App Store to launch after the iPhone came out and months after that for it to really take off.
As of today, there already 3,500 iPad apps out of an ecosystem of 185,000. And even on the day the iPad launched, there were already great apps like “Epicurious,” the news/audio app from the people I freelance for, NPR, the beautifully designed “Gilt” shipping app, “Marvel Comics,” the $10 “Scrabble” and “Plants vs. Zombies” and the “ABC Player” and “Netflix” which both stream good-looking video to the iPad.
I was a bit taken aback by the quality of the apps so early in the game. Most developers had no access to the hardware before it launched, yet with only a few exceptions, these apps were polished, fairly free of bugs and well-designed. And they’ll only get better with software updates.
Using older iPhone/iPod Touch on the iPad, however, is a bit of a bummer. They either work in the center of the screen, the size of an iPhone screen (which only makes you realize how small they are in that format) or blown up to double their size, making text fuzzy. It’s nice that they all run on the iPad, but you quickly begin to neglect those apps in favor of the full-bodied iPad ones. And you wish there were “Facebook” “Tweetie 2” and “Flickr” apps available now for the iPad.
If I had to score the iPad, I’d give the hardware a B (simply because it’s a familiar form factor missing a camera and without lots of new innovation), but the App Store selection and the implementation of the OS and software easily is an A.
What we’ll do with it
This morning, I sat on my back porch and tried to do my work solely on the iPad. I check e-mails, posted to Twitter, did some Instant Messaging and read RSS feeds.
It slowed me down quite a bit. Gmail and Google Reader, which I rely on, are a bit of a mess in their iPad Web versions right now and need some serious tweaking.
There’s not a great Twitter app for the iPad yet (for the time being I’m using the good-not-great “Twitteriffic”). And not being able to listen to a Pandora station or keep an IM session going while I Web surf is simply too frustrating to keep me away from my Macbook.
Typing for me is mostly fine, but I don’t think I’d try to write a blog entry like this or an article for the newspaper on it just yet (at least not without a Bluetooth keyboard or a keyboard dock).
So it won’t be replacing my laptop and it won’t be my primary computer in its current form. I edit video on my Macbook, keep lots of browser windows and put a lot of demands on my computer every day.
On the other hand, my wife, who wil be the primary owner of the iPad, doesn’t do any of those things. She pays bills, shops, checks e-mail and views photos. I plan to buy her an SD adapter so she can import photos directly to the iPad (it’s a $20 add-on that also comes with a USB adapter to connect a digital camera).
I think in terms of having a portable, powerful screen to do these things, it’s going to change the way she gets online and how she manages all her digital information. I think it’s going to be a device that my daughter will begin to watch videos on instead of the TV in the living room or on long road trips. I anticipate that in some way, it’s going to be a tool that’s going to help our daughters learn to read. It probably won’t leave the house much; it’ll always be near the couch, the nightstand or the kitchen counter, ready to pull up TV listings, recipes, a video, photos or an e-book.
Soon after I took it home for Easter to show to my family, my mom decided she wants one.
My brother, who had previously had no interest in purchasing one, bought one on Monday.
An American-Statesman photographer who shot Austin iPad owners bought one the same evening he shot the photos.
The iPad isn’t for me (at least not right now; I may buy one of my own in a few months if these apps keep me hooked). It’s not for a lot of the power users, Windows 7 wizards and BlackBerry-wielding road warriors. It’s more suited to everybody else who doesn’t need a lot of the extraneous horsepower and software we mostly take for granted on our PCs and high-end Macs.
Or maybe it will be for those power-computing people; they just don’t know it yet. I’ve been surprised by the about-faces I’ve witnessed from people who didn’t understand why anybody would want an iPad. Then they picked one up, played around for a few minutes, and instantly grasped how the iPad functions, what its design is trying to communicate and how they might fit such a device into their daily life.
Some people will download dozens of apps, create sketches, edit photos, Tweet, be creative. Others will sit with it on the couch and watch Netflix for hours and hours. I think it’s a device that sheds a lot of the dead weight we’re still schlepping into the 2010s and need to get rid of: mice, taskbars, overstuffed drop-down menus.
Apple has somehow made a device that works, that responds to you in a way that feels intuitive and that seems powerful without being overwhelming.
I think it’s going to sell well in surprising ways, to people you would never expect to buy an iPad. I think many people won’t get it until they try one for themselves, but once they do, they’ll start to do some mental calculations on whether the price is worth it. Some will agonize over whether to get a Wi-Fi version or one that can do 3G (for $130 more, plus the cost of Internet service; it will be out in a few more weeks).
Will it change the way everybody uses computers? I honestly don’t know. It’s going to change the way we use computers in my house and a lot of others. The iPhone changed the way we use mobile phones and the iPod forever transformed our music listening. But Apple TV failed to catch fire in the living room and the Macbook Air still feels more like an overpriced curiosity than a laptop landmark.
I hesitate to feed into the hype machine, but I can’t think of another device since the iPhone itself that feels so much like a peek into the near future as the iPad. Other tablets will be out soon that will do many of the same things (probably running Windows 7 or Android; I can’t say I’m looking forward to Windows shoved into this kind of device). But they’ll have a hard time topping the elegance and functionality that is already on the iPad from day one.
I don’t know if that’s magical, mystical, or transformational.
But that it got here at all and works as well as it does… that has to be some kind of little miracle.
More: my story from Saturday’s paper on what five other Central Texas iPad buyers think of the device. (Video below.)
And if you want even more, we’ll be posting a 1.5 hour podcast review on Age of Lasers tonight or tomorrow.
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App multitasking announced for iPhone OS 4
Photo by Eric Risberg, Associated Press
Apple’s Steve Jobs today announced that apps like “Skype,” navigation apps, location-based services and games for the iPhone will be able to run in the background on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. (And, presumably, on the new iPad.)
As part of a press conference for Apple’s latest version of its iPhone operating system, OS 4, Jobs said that the company has held off on rolling out multitasking (where apps can continue to run in the background after you’ve exited them to do something else) because of battery drain and performance issues.
Those issues seem to have been fixed and now developers will be able to update their apps to take advantage of multitasking. If, say, you use Skype, you’d be able to get a notification of an incoming call even if you don’t have Skype on your current iPhone screen.
It’s been one of the most-wanted features of the iPhone, especially since other smartphones can already do this (namely the Palm Pre and Android phones).
Other new features: folders! You’ll be able to better organize your apps. You’ll also be able to change your background on an iPhone.
A unified inbox will make it easier to bring multiple e-mail accounts to the Mail app. And it looks like iBooks is coming to the iPhone/iPod Touch as well.
Apple also announced its mobile ad platform, iAd, and Game Center, which will bring Xbox Live-like features including leaderboards and game achievements to the OS.
The OS update is expected to roll out to non-developers (the rest of us) this summer. It was made available to developers today.
Jobs also detailed how the iPad is doing so far. He said 450,000 iPads have been sold since Saturday and that there are already 3,500 iPad apps in the App Store. Apps have been downloaded 3.5 million times for the device, he said, and there are 185,000 total apps in the store. 50 million iPhones have been sold and total app downloaded have reached 4 billion.
Whew!
We’ll update this blog entry with more info as it arrives.
BIG UPDATE: The multitasking feature will not be available for the iPhone 3G (or the first-gen iPhone), only the iPhone 3GS and the iPod Touch 3rd-gen. D’oh! That’s a bit of a stunner, but it says to me that Apple will introduce a new iPhone version by summer and will be phasing out the 3G iPhone. At least that’s my best guess.
Also, the iPad OS update will not arrive until fall. Steve Jobs saved those two bits of bad news for the end of the presentation. Sorry, iPhone 3G owners!
All info from Engadget’s excellent live blog of the event.
Edited to add my take: So, now that the dust has settled, here’s my quick take. Folders, multitasking, unified e-mail and a game service to Xbox Live are all welcome additions to the iPhone universe. But just as the press conference was ending, Jobs poured cold water on the Apple faithful by revealing that the iPad version of the OS update won’t be available until fall and that the iPhone 3G, which is still currently being sold for $99, won’t be able to do multitasking.
Sure, we know the iPhone 3G S is faster, but it’s not like the 3G is an obsolete model that’s no longer being sold.
What this says to me clearly is that a new iPhone is in the wings for summer and that the 3G will no longer be sold. If you own a 3G or even a first-gen iPhone or are thinking about buying an iPhone right now, DO NOT BUY A 3G. In fact, I’d hold off from getting a 3GS until we know what the next version of the iPhone will feature and how much it’ll cost.
If it turns out the new iPhone is overpriced or doesn’t have the features you want (like, say, the very sexy-looking Android-based HTC EVO), you can always get a used 3G if you still want it. Will the new iPhone model be on Verizon as well as AT&T? We shall see in the summer.
Otherwise, this is mostly good news. Folders are a welcome (and long overdue) addition to the tedious task of managing your apps across multiple screens. Multitasking will make apps like “Pandora Radio,” “Skype” and “AOL Instant Messenger” much more useful. “iBooks” for iPhone/iPod is a no-brainer and something anyone could have predicted as soon as it was announced for the iPad. Apple’s iAd platform, however, probably means we’ll see many more adds in our apps. That’s not something regular users will cheer, but app developers, businesses and ad agencies will benefit.
The biggest worry for me as someone who manages a house with different iPhones, iPods and now an iPad is that each one of them will operate apps differently. The first-gen iPhone my wife owns won’t multitask when 4.0 rolls out while my 3GS will. For some months, the iPad won’t be able to run apps the way the iPhone 3GS does (that is, with multitasking), but will run iPad apps that the iPhones can’t. Never mind the apps that only work on devices with cameras or those that requires Bluetooth (which the first-gen iPod Touch didn’t have). Apple’s line of Internet devices is getting more segmented than it needs to be.
Apple is supposed to be making our lives easier, but this is going to make things very confusing for a while. It’s going to frustrate their largest base of iPhone users, those who own 3G phones. And it’s going to be a headache for app developers to deal with different versions of the same app for these different versions of devices and to keep quality control consistent.
Get ready for a few months of chaos before things settle down.
That’s usually how it is with Apple: three steps forward, one big step back, even within its own supposedly unified product lines.
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The Linkdown for Wednesday, April 7
The Linkdown is trying to dig itself out of the titanic hole of time destruction caused by the release of the iPad. It’s a really deep hole.
Here are some links you should read:
- Addie Broyles on food apps. Two of my favorite things: apps and food!
- Not everyone is thrilled about AT&T’s plan to charge customers for its $150 microcell devices.
- Wi-Fi issues on the iPad. Turning up the brightness might fix it for some people? REALLY?
- Frog Design is holding a free Design for Impact Boot Camp on April 24.
- Another one from Engadget: the Logitech Squeezebox Touch, which we featured in our holiday gift guide way back in December (before it was delayed) is now shipping.
- Two amazing things I want you to love: 8-bit “Dr. Horrible” and 8-bit “Dark Side of the Moon.”
- Local Web humor fellows Rooster Teeth gets a write-up in Joystiq for its “Immersion” videos.
- This week is National Cell Phone Recycling Week!
- Austin’s Girlstart is a finalist for a Digital Media and Learning Award for Learning Labs, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
- HP’s got an iPad competitor in the wings.
- Lastly, there’s an April 16 deadline for submissions to the Digital Media Exchange competition for Austin-area high schoolers. Cash prizes will be awarded for film, video games, animation, art, social media and webcast journalism categories by Skillpoint Alliance’s Digital Media Council.
Here’s an example from last year’s competition:
Find more videos like this on Digital Media Exchange Competition
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Live Chat: Let’s Talk iPad!
We’ll be talking about the iPad today at 1:30 p.m. CDT.
Did you buy one? Do you think the hype is overblown and ridiculous?
I’ve got one here at my desk and can answer your questions about the iPad. Come chat with us.
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iPad Day is almost here
On Saturday, the clouds (if there are any) will part, the sun will shine and Texas fire ants will evacuate their mounds and run far away, afraid to toil too closely to the awesomeness of Apple’s new device, the iPad, which will hit stores (in its initial Wi-Fi-only version).
At least, that’s what I gathered will happen from Newsweek’s just-a-bit-hyperbolic cover story, “Why the iPad Will Change Everything,” written by Daniel Lyons (better known as “Fake Steve Jobs”).
But even if you don’t believe that the iPad is the holy grail of holy tablets (or the holy tablet of holy grails), you still might be curious about what’s in store for buyers on Saturday and whether you might want to be one of the people who will stand in line when Apple Stores open at 9 a.m.
Here’s some of what you might want to know:
The basics
The iPad version due out is the Wi-Fi version — the 3G-version that is compatible with AT&T’s network won’t be out until late April or early May. The Wi-Fi version comes in three denominations, 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB for $499, $599 and $699 respectively. Web surfers and light users will likely opt for the $499 model while people who plan to store lots of high-def movies (which can eat up as much as a gigabyte of space each) and their music libraries on the iPad may want to go for more storage.
The 3G version, when it goes on sale, will cost $629, $729 and $829. 3G service will cost $14.99 a month for 250 Megabytes of downloading or $29.99 for unlimited data per month. You won’t have to sign up for a long-term contract with AT&T to use the 3G service.
Online pre-orders have already sold out for the initial batch of Wi-Fi-only iPads (though if you order now, you could get it in the mail as early as April 12), but there will be devices for sale at both Austin Apple Stores as well as most Best Buy stores on Saturday.
There’s a slim chance that some Austin-area Apple Specialists may have some as well. They may not be able to give you a straight answer until Saturday.
An Apple rep told me today that Apple Store buyers will be offered a free one-on-one training session at the store to get set up on e-mail and to configure the iPad to their needs. There will also be workshops on the iPad throughout the day.
Here’s an NPR blog post I did about iPad news leading up to the launch and an on-air segment for All Things Considered about the device.
What it has, what it doesn’t
The iPad has a 9.7-inch multitouch screen and is structured like a large iPod Touch; it has a home button at the bottom, weighs 1.5 pounds, is half an inch thick and has a non-removeable battery.
It lacks a camera that you’d find on an iPhone and the Wi-Fi version has no true GPS (though it uses triangulation to figure out approximately where you are in apps that use location).
It has a small microphone and speakers that are said to be surprisingly robust.
The iPad is is expected to run all existing iPhone/iPod Touch apps (though augmented reality apps would be pretty useless without a built-in camera). They’ll run at their original size in the middle of the screen or can be zoomed in to twice their usual size to better fit the iPad screen.
About 1,000 iPad apps are expected to hit the App Store on Saturday and from what we’re hearing, they’ll be typically more expensive than iPhone apps (about $3.99-$4.99 compared to the usual 99 cents-$2.99 for many of them).
Apple’s “iWorks” software will be available as apps for $10 each. “Keynote,” “Pages” and “Numbers” will be out on Saturday. I don’t know a single person who’s been able to answer whether there will be a way to print from these apps. Edited to add: several printing apps are now available for the iPad in the App Store. You have to pay for them, though>
The iPad will include iBooks, an app for downloading and reading e-books, as well as Apple apps for e-mail, Web surfing, YouTube and others. Missing are the iPhone apps for stocks and weather. iPad apps are now live on the App Store.
The iPad does not come with earbuds, but does include a sync cable and power supply. Adapters to plug in an SD cards or USB cameras will be sold separately, as will a dock to sync and hold up the iPad, a protective leather case and a keyboard. You can expect a huge flood of other accessories and add-ons to be available from other companies.
The iPad, like the iPhone, can’t play Flash-based content on Web pages, but many content developers, media Web sites and entertainment providers (Hulu among them) are expected to offer iPad apps and iPad-friendly versions of their Web sites to get around that limitation.
The reviews
The embargo on reviews of the iPad seems to have lifted last night. The New York Times’ David Pogue and Walt Mossberg offered their expected takes on the device.
USA Today also reviewed the iPad as did Andy Ihnatko for the Chicago Sun-Times. Bob Levitus (“Dr. Mac”) offered his take as well. Ihnatko did a live video review of the iPad last night as well as an unboxing.
The reviews are mostly positive and you can get a gist of them in this roundup.
One odd bit: last night’s “Modern Family” episode was largely about Phil’s desire to get an iPad for his birthday. I thought it was brilliant at first (especially given that my own birthday is on Monday), but I found the show’s ending pretty cringeworthy. I wasn’t the only one, apparently.
Why aren’t we reviewing it?
We were not among the select few media outlets to get an iPad early enough to review it before launch (and we probably won’t get our hands on one for a few weeks for review).
My wife is interested in buying one for herself, but plans to wait until after the launch to see if there are any problems or bugs with the initial batch of iPads.
We do plan on following up the launch with reaction from Central Texans who pick one up. If you plan to get an iPad this weekend, let me know — I’d love to talk to you about it.
We’ll be doing a live chat on Monday, April 5 at 1:30 p.m. here on Digital Savant to talk about the iPad. Come join us with any questions or comments you have (especially if you plan to get one on Saturday).
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