Strange but (mostly) effective.

I intensely dislike using a case with the iPad. It argues with the functionality of the device and can double the weight. You might as well carry a laptop.

However, I continue to insist on dropping my iPad whenever the occasion presents itself and my iPad 1 is off for a replacement back right now, all four corners badly bruised. One is so bad that the glass is sticking out and the rubber gasket is beginning to pull out. Concrete and iPads are not the best of friends.

The alternative is some sort of corner protection, as the iPad will insist on landing on a corner much as a piece of bread with marmalade will always land sticky side down, and statistical analysis be damned. We are talking Murphy’s Law here, not statistics. So I hunted around for stick-on corner rubber protectors and drew a blank.

The closest I could come is the unfortunately named iBallz, which place a hard rubber ball at each corner, held together with an ugly and dysfunctional looking elastic cord.

Bert with iBallz installed. On the iPad, that is.

Let’s get to the drawbacks first (an * indicates a fix or workaround exists):

• The whole becomes bulkier.
• The string and related lock are butt ugly and uncomfortable regardless of how placed.*
• The on-off switch at top right can only be worked with a fingernail on the left hand.*
• The rear facing camera is partly obscured.*
• The power cable port is a litttle trickier to access owing to the intrusive presence of the elastic cord.*
• Some 30% of the speaker grille at the lower left rear is obscured.*
• The headphone socket at top left is completely obscured.*
• The SIM card slot at the right (on iPads with 3G or 4G) is blocked.

Stated differently, the makers need to get off their rear ends and redesign these things to address the above issues, a trivial process. Don’t hold your breath, though – these problems apply equally to iPad 2 and iPad 1, though the latter has no camera to be obscured. It’s not like they haven’t had eons to fix the design errors. The complacency of the manufacturer is not a prescription for its survival.

Just about everything that is wrong with iBallz, here on iPad 3.
Arrow denotes almost buried on-off switch. Also note the partly obscured camera lens.

The redeeming qualities are significant, however. The balls – some sort of hard, matte plastic – are very light. They fit the corners on my iPad 3 tightly. And, most importantly, they provide real protection. I have not had the courage to drop test this on the driveway; be patient, Mother Nature will doubtless provide the data sooner rather than later. Place the iPad down on a flat surface and neither glass or back will touch anything. Further, the balls provide a surprisingly comfortable hold when using the iPad on your lap, meaningfully superior to using it without the balls. In fact, I would miss them were they to be removed. The elastic cord can be pulled pretty tight and lifting the iPad by it causes no concerns, but it remains ugly and out of keeping with the iPad’s design. With the balls fitted it is much easier to lift the iPad from a flat surface with one hand owing to the stand-off, otherwise a risk-fraught exercise made more so by the bevelled edges on iPad 2 and 3. iPad 1 is far superior in this regard. Even with the cord removed, picking up the iPad with just one hand is night-and-day better.

Solutions to the bad stuff: I have cut off the elastic cord, as it’s an awful kluge. They should have dispensed with the sliding lock and simply have spec’d the length of an endless cord correctly, redesigning the balls to bring the cord far closer to the edges of the iPad. I placed a dab of glue on each corner on the back of the iPad to install the balls, using a glue whose residue is easily removed when the date of sale comes.

I have also relieved the top right ball with a Dremel tool to restore the camera function, and to make the on-off switch more accessible. This one has to be glued very carefully as you do not want glue on the camera lens (unless you like Holga-quality images) or on the on-off switch.

The relatively large relief for the camera’s lens is dictated by its wide angle of view.
The on-off switch no longer needs a fingerail to operate. Fit remains tight.

Though the top left ball obscures the headphone socket, I’ll leave that alone as I use wireless, Bluetooth headphones. I’ll leave the lower left ball, the one which obscures the iPad’s speaker grille, unchanged, as that speaker is poor in any case. Headphones are the way to go for quality sound. The obstruction of the SIM card slot is a non issue for me as I do not change SIM cards.

Too bad the balls aren’t even smaller, but it’s a start. The maker claims these fit all three iPad generations. So far I have only tried them on iPad 3. The profile of the slot is clearly intended for the squarer iPad 1, another indicator of the maker’s sloth in not redesigning this for iPad 2 and 3 with their tapered edges. Mine ran $25 from Amazon and alternative colors are available, including pink for the girlie set.

Insurance: This is another alternative, and a costly one. Reckon on $100 for two years of drop, failure and theft coverage. There are two more drawbacks, over and above the cost. One is that the iPad is gone when out for repair – that’s an awful thought. The other is that insurers get rich by not paying claims, so good luck in recovering. The integrity of that business makes the people at the Vampire Squid seem short-listed for canonization, by comparison.

Conclusion: A poorly thought out, poorly engineered, sloppy product which needs a bit of work to make it decent looking and practical. Way overpriced at $25, shipped, but I can’t find an alternative for the $5 this is worth.

A disgusted Bert models the final thing. The Mickey Mouse iPad.

As for screen protectors, save your money. After two years of brutalizing iPad 1 with no case or screen protector, often as not tossed in a bag, the screen remains perfect and with not a scratch in sight. A screen protector, like the Zagg is not only a complete waste of money, the wonderful definition of the iPad 3′s screen will not benefit and chances are you will get bubbles when you install it. Like running a Ferrari on diesel.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Another quantum leap.

The New iPad – I call it iPad 3 for clarity.

When iPad 1 came out I bought it on the first day. This was unlike digital cameras which took many years before sensors were large/good/cheap enough to make err… sense and indeed, when the Canon 5D came along all my film gear – Leicas and Rolleis – was out the door soon after. Henceforth, film would be for people with time and nostalgia on their hands.

But the iPad was different. The technology had been thoroughly debugged in several generations of iPhones and the price was right. Most importantly, as I wrote in The Unfair Advantage, the iPad created a rift between those who got it and those who did not. It was a quantum leap in delivering information and it is now increasingly becoming a creative tool, in addition to being the outstanding consumption device of our time. To all those naysayers who said “It’s for consumption only” (This is a bad thing? Is not much of study and learning consumption?) I say that I’m glad I don’t have you managing my money.

Since iPad 1 came along two years ago the only paper books I have bought have been on art and photographers. The lamentable state of migration for the latter, and the absence of a 21″ iPad makes that a necessity. But a decade hence, I would expect art books to go the way of all others. Into the garbage. All my technical gadget manuals exist solely on the iPad.

So it’s no surprise to say that some time later today, the nice Fedex man will deliver my 64gB iPad 3, complete with Verizon LTE 4G capability. I have been using iPad 1 tethered to my iPhone using AT&T for 3G and it works well if not very fast when wifi is not available, which is far more often than the press would have you believe. And I’m talking in civilization, meaning the Bay Area, not Fly Over country. The switch to Verizon is rational – better service, better 4G, better coverage. I’ll drop the tethering option on the iPhone and the net will be cost neutral.

Why upgrade? Because the new display will be like moving to an HD TV from a CRT. And the iPad is mostly about the display. The machine will be noticeably faster than the iPad 1 and Verizon LTE is rumored to knock the socks off home broadband! With broadband being the slowest link in the chain, that’s not trivial. It depends on how crowded the airwaves are but I have read that 20mbs download and 22 mbs upload are common. Compare that to 11/1.4 which is the best AT&T can deliver over antiquated copper cables to our home. The display and LTE are revolutionary changes, not evolutionary. The iPad promises to be faster on some tasks than all but the most capable desktop machines and with an unchanged battery life of an amazing 10 hours. iPad 1 was revolutionary. So is iPad 3.

iPad 1? First it’s off to repair for a new back. I have dropped it on all four corners on concrete over the past 23 months and it’s pretty badly dented. That’s what happens when you ride your bike with cameras, iPad and a propensity to fall off. Once refurbished, it will become a home TV and sound controller, as well as a book reader lying around for anyone wanting to use it, and moving one step closer to the reality of a tablet in every room. And, for the life of me, I cannot think why any sane person would buy a tablet from any other maker at this time. So you don’t like Apple? Get over it. It’s just a tool which has nothing to do with brand loyalty and everything to do with fitness for purpose.

Arthur C. Clarke the great novelist and futurist, nailed it back in 1968 in his book which became Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001 – A Space Odyssey; it would seem that Apple is well ahead of NASA at this point:

Aaah! So that’s whence the “pad” moniker came ….

Update:

My New iPad is up and running and I just signed up for Verizon 4G service. This is all you need to know – as expected the upload speed is completely insane and the download speed compares to home broadband:

The New iPad on Verizon 4G.

Comparisons?

Home broadband – 11/1.4.
iPad1 on home wifi – 3.6/1.6
iPad1 tethered to AT&T 3G – you really do not want to know (OK, OK, it’s 1.4/0.3 if you really must know how much AT&T sucks)
iPhone 4S on home wifi – 2.9/1.8.

Like I said, the New iPad with Verizon 4G is a revolutionary development.

And finally, here is the iPhone 4S using the Verizon 4G hotspot from the New iPad – up to five devices are supported:

Can you say WOW!?

Unless 4G slows greatly with increasing adoption, Apple and Verizon have cut one of the biggest wires holding back true high speed mobile computing. And I promise this is the last time I will say anything nice about the US cellular oligopoly.

Recharging:

The iPad 3 uses a 43 watt Hour battery (iPad 2 – 25) so as both use the same charger, it will take 72% longer to fully charge. Based on my overnight measurement, iPad 3 will take 12.65 hours to fully charge from zero, compared with 7.4 hours for iPad 2. As there are only 24 hours in a day and the battery runs for 10 and needs 12 to recharge, you need to plug it in right away once fully drained, charging overnight, if you want to use the iPad 3 first thing in the morning. In practice, I find I rarely ran my iPad 1 down more than 50%, suggesting a recharge time of just over 6 hours to recharge fully.

Verizon 4G at peak hours – 3/20/2012 update.

Measured from a restaurant on Burlingame Broadway, at lunch. The diner has no wifi and I’m only getting 4 out of 5 bars signal strength:

What the good people of Seoul, South Korea have enjoyed for ages but will take a decade or two to come to the most powerful nation on earth ….

At 40+mbs download speeds everything is instantaneous, and faster than I can touch things on the screen.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!