iPhone in the Snow

Well, we had the Big One here this weekend, about thirty inches of snow. The iPhone is a great device for tramping around in a blizzard.

If you get trapped in a white out, the GPS and maps is sure handy.

Great way to document your adventures with photos uploaded to facebook.

Handy flashlight for power outages.

And if you run the CPU at 100 percent, it makes for a nice hand warmer!

iPhone 3G still rocks! Droid Rolls.

Okay, I'm being lured away to the Droid and Verizon. And I'm writing this on a mondo PC. My daughter and her husband recently switched from the iPhone to the Droid, because they live in The Big Flyover and they actually want to be able to make phone calls.

And they say the Droid takes it all off the iPhone...except for multi-touch.

You have to realize that they use their smart phones more like we use our laptops, as a generational difference--they're online all the time. And the Droid actually does that better for them with the apps they have and the coverage they get. I agree.

So, Droid update here soon.

Okay, it's the iPad....

Well, I watched Mr. Jobs do his iPad intro last week, and I have to admit that it looks like a fun little tech toy. But, as the father of four daughters, I had to wonder if he consulted with any female marketeers before settling on a name. I mean, I'm okay with the new moniker, but at least half the human race is going to form a mental image whenever they hear it uttered.

The "Pad" has a certain vernerable standing in science fiction, of course, on "Star Trek," in movies, and in several novels. Perhaps the best explication of this can be found over at Technovelgy.com, where there's a great quote from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Dr. Floyd casually downloads the daily papers into his NewsPad while he's transiting from LEO to the Moon on his way to see the Big Black Slab (also know as "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1"). You'll enjoy the description--written in the mid-1960s--of how this was the epitome of communications technology. Floyd taps on icons to save and open interesting stories while realizing that the information flow is so stupendous that no one could absorb it all. That Arthur C. Clarke...prescient.

And now we know what Steve Jobs reads when he stays up late at night.

Will I buy an iPad? Eventually. It's missing a few things that I'd like to have in it. Like a phone. And a camera. And a Skype camera. And Flash. And being on a decent 3G network. And maybe multi-tasking.

So, my advice? Let the fanboys buy the first few hundred thousand iPads, moan and groan, work out the bugs, and get a decent suite of hardware put together. Then go get one, maybe around next December.

I'm sure it will rock.

The iTablet, uhmm, iSlate, ahhh, Giant iPhone Lookalike?

Well, if you have half an ear to the ground on Apple or the tech press in general, you must have heard at least some of the rumors flying around for the last few weeks, months, years, about the mythological Apple tablet computer, tagged with various "i" names by hard-working tech journalists who love to track down copyright applications written in the name of Apple computers.

Frankly, I don't care what it's called, but it better knock my socks off if Apple wants to have any sort of chance of at moving into and dominating a new market niche. I mean, remember the Newton? If not, look it up on wikipedia.

Truth be told, I'd probably opt to pick one of these up if Apple can bring something home in the $600 range, particularly if it had a nine or ten inch touch screen and a little bit of horsepower to it.

In fact, I'd be happy to get a device that was just the iPhone times two: twice as big and twice as fast, maybe with multiprocessing, a 6 megapixel still/video came, a webcam for skype, and all sorts of built in networking capacity. Frankly, it would knock most netbooks into a cocked hat for 60 percent of my computing needs, and probably 96 percent of most people's email, websurfing, facebook, wikipedia, blogging, etc computing demands. It would be great to keep one lying around the house, and it'd be easy to carry it along anywhere.

In short, what I really need is something with a bigger screen and more horsepower than an iPhone, but smaller and less awkward then even a netbook. I'd probably use it 24/7.

But the dealbreaker question is...will it run Second Life?

Knock my socks off, Apple.

Genius Bar Horror Stories

Genius Bar Horror Stories--we've all had them, and I've written about a few of my own experiences with the Apple Jugend here in this blog. I guess mine are not an isolated set of experiences.

Is Apple Better? Hmmmm....

Marketing or hoax? Are Apple computers really better?

I think you could make the point that Apple marketing is akin to Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Sticking with the current iPhone....

Hey, this thing works, and all the ills of the earlier version seem to be cured.

More as it occurs.