Doofus gets his iPad.

The company is huge. It dominates the globe in its sector. It has enormous annuity-like revenue streams from its products. It is massively arrogant, complacent and cocksure. It’s CEO is one of the worst in America. It is doomed to fail.

GM in 1960?

No, Microsoft in 2010.

No credible mobile OS. No cloud presence. No new ideas. Ever. Just a stream of tired re-releases of Office and Windows. That a company with no vision should name its marquee product Windows sort of redefines spin.

So, ever interested in sharing a scoop with readers, I am pleased to share a snap of MSFT’s CEO, the dunce who famously derided the iPhone as a toy on its launch three years ago, (sales 60 million and counting), enjoying his first encounter with an iPad.

MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer tries the iPad

A well connected friend at MSFT was there and has disclosed what Ballmer was saying as he repeatedly knocked on the iPad’s screen:

“Hullo? Hullo? Is there anyone in there? Can you hear me?”

Update – this just in:

Here’s a perfect example of why MSFT is doomed to failure. Any company which has such contempt for its customers in constantly putting out rumors about non-existent products deserves to fail. And this one actually had people excited, with good reason:

MSFT’s iPad killer …. is dead.

Guess the screen must have been too small for a good knuckling. DNA, my backside. They simply ran out of duct tape which they were using to stick two iPads together ….

Update April 30, 2010: The rumor mill is reporting that HP has decided to cancel the Slate. No surprise there. Windows and 5 hour battery lives just don’t cut it any more. Indeed, the main reason HP just bought the struggling Palm business is for its Web OS – a mobile OS that actually works reliably, unlike Windows Mobile.

Meh!

I got tired of waiting for independent reviews of matte screen films for the iPad, whose glossy screen is an abomination if you are trying to use it near light sources.

I simply fail to understand what the heck Steve Jobs has against matte screens except maybe that they do not display as well for impulse buyers in the showroom. As of now the only Apple screens available with a matte finish (even Apple refers to it as ‘anti glare’!) are on special order versions of the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro and on the very costly (and seriously dated) 30″ Cinema Display. Everything else comes in ghastly, glossy glass. It’s the reason I use two Dell IPS monitors with my HackPro.

A friend suggested the Zagg screen protector and while their site has all sorts of torture tests for the plastic film, it’s not scratch avoidance that is the issue here. As a long time user of the iPhone I can testify that the screen is extremely tough. No, the issues are glare and fingerprints.

For a small sheet of plastic, the $30 Zagg is extremely expensive which, I suppose, figures when their site uses the words “military grade”, an expression given to us by the Army with its $750 hammers and $5,000 toilet seats. Hey, it’s patriotic capitalism. Why not gouge the taxpayer?

The Zagg is shipped in a very stout cardboard tube (no indication whether it is military grade but it feels like it), with a small rubber squeegee and a bottle of solution. The packaging probably cost more than the piece of plastic sheet. You clean the iPad’s screen – I used a final swipe of isopropyl alcohol having soaked my hands in it first, and then moisten the adhesive side with the spray on solution. The instructions tell you to moisten both sides but that is wrong.

Now comes the part which is sheer, bloody hell. Zagg has a video which makes it seem simple. Trust me. It is not. I wonder how many times they made that video before they lucked out with perfect placement on the front. Their video also shows the rear protective film (I did not waste money on that) being slid around – possible because of the textured, low surface tension, aluminum surface. You cannot slide the film on the glass, another place where the included instructions err. Gee, considering it took me all of 2 minutes to realize this, Zaggers, why the heck couldn’t you spend 5 minutes typing the instructions correctly? No job in Apple design for you! Read on.

The instructions state that you should slide the film into place on the iPad but that’s impossible. It wants to stick. So after several efforts at rough positioning I got one corner and side just so and somehow managed to work the rest of the film into place without stretching. You really must not stretch it as the size is perfect, right down to a cut out for the iPad’s Home button, and I was careful to keep the moisture down in that area as it looks like moisture might migrate under the Home button. The center of the cut out and the annulus surrounding it have to be removed once in position but, once again, the instructions fail to point that out. If not removed the surrounding film is very reluctant to stick.

Having got the film in place you now moisten the front to allow the provided squeegee (an excellent design) to slide easily over the surface as you smooth out bubbles. The generic instructions go on to say that you can use a hair dryer to help set the film around uneven surfaces. Zagg makes a back cover also for fetishists who care how the rear of their iPad looks. The rear is not plane and may need some local heat to set it. However, all I can say on that inspired piece of advice is “Good luck with the class action suit, boys”.

No matter how hard I tried I was still left with a microscopic bubble or two especially visible in the black frame which surrounds the iPad’s screen. Zagg states “Micro-bubbles and imperfections will work themselves out over 2-3 days” so check back here and I’ll let you know if that is true. The vendor also goes on to say that the iPad should be left for 12-24 hours to allow any remaining solution to dry. This strikes me as pure rot. What is there to ‘dry’ when the plastic sheet is not porous?

So how does it work?

If you are looking for the reflection cutting effect of a good matte TV or computer screen, forget it. It’s a waste of money. The glare is cut a little bit but the film is still far too glossy.

As regards fingerprints – a purely cosmetic issue as they do not affect readability of a ‘naked’ iPad screen – the Zagg film is good. It is more fingerprint resistant than a naked screen but the fingerprints are also harder to clean off. The screen has a very slight texture, which probably explains this.

Finally, as regards the Zagg’s effect on touchscreen sensitivity, I can detect none. It’s just like using a naked iPad.

Unintended consequence: With all that squeegeeing and accidental button pressing, i did relearn an old iPhone trick with the iPad. Press the home button thrice on a sleeping iPhone or iPad and you get the iPod controls (volume, play/pause, fast forward and reverse) without having to unlock the device. Nice.

Conclusion: At $30 it’s hard to recommend the Zagg. It’s a solution for a non-existent problem when it comes to scratch-proofing the glass and does a poor job in cutting glare. It comes with flawed and possibly dangerous instructions, corrected in the video if you bother to find it (the iPad link on their web site is faulty and you have to hunt around). Get my drift? A pretty schlocky job by the fellow who decided that a generic instruction set would do. Not right. In Zagg’s defense they do not tout glare reduction but their published User Comments very much do. Pure BS. Would I recommend it at $30? Give me a couple of days but I’m pretty sure that the answer is “absolutely not” and that ye Zagger is destined for the recycling heap, lifetime replacement warranty notwithstanding.

Basically, I feel I have been …. Zagged.

Hopefully something better comes along that really does what I want, which is to cut glare, and shows a higher standard of care when it comes to written instructions.

Some oddness.

I delved a little deeper into the wifi signal strength in the iPad, following up on my earlier notes which disclose wildly varying broadband speeds as measured from the iPad.

I haven’t quite got to the bottom of it, but there is something fishy going on.

First, a note on my home wifi setup.

• Broadband is provided by an AT&T Uverse modem connected with Ethernet cable to an Airport Extreme (AE) running 802.11n at 2.4gHz. Mine is the version previous to the current dual band one.
• My Mac Mini for the TV sits right below the AE. It is connected to broadband wirelessly.
• My office is 30 feet and two walls away and houses my HackPro with a wireless card emulating Airport functionality.
• I have an Airport Express (AEX) set up as a range extender four feet from the HackPro, boosting the AE’s 802.11n at 2.4gHz. Mine is the current 802.11n version.
• The iPad is, of course, all over the place.

Now take a look at this signal strength chart generated using Airport Utility at the HackPro’s location:

Wifi signal strengths as seen from the HackPro

As you can see the Mac Mini (green line) has the strongest signal, as well it should as it sits right below the AE.

The HackPro gets a weak and fluctuating signal (red line) from the AE (32% of max) but once the AEX is added as a range extender the signal is strong and steady (55% of max – black line). The AEX is a fine complement to a device in a weak wifi location, broadcasting a powerful wifi signal.

But it’s the iPad’s behavior which is puzzling. The iPad’s wifi antenna sits right behind the radio-transparent apple logo in the center of the iPad’s otherwise aluminum back. Right around where I have placed the iPad arrow pointer on the graph, above, I had moved the iPad so that its Apple logo (antenna) was literally touching the AEX’s casing. The wifi signal seen by the iPad dropped some 12 dB (yellow line). By contrast, look at the signal at the iPad on the right hand side of the graph, when I had removed the iPad to a location where it was separated by a wall from both the AE and the AEX. The signal is much stronger and steadier.

This suggests that the iPad’s wifi reception is overloading its wifi circuitry.

By way of follow up I tested the iPad using the Speedtest.net app in three locations:

The three readings reflect:

• iPad on top of the AEX (2.48 down/1.40 up)
• iPad on top of the AE (3.61/1.40)
• iPad 10 feet and one wall away from the AE and 10 feet and one wall away from the AEX (4.69/1.40)

So the closer the iPad is to a wifi signal, the slower it gets! And it’s slowest on top of the AEX which seems to send a more powerful signal than the AE.

As one final test I took readings with the iPad 30 feet and one floor distant from both the AE and AEX. And guess what? I got the highest speeds of all, 5.31 down and 1.41 up, respectively!

So what is called for, it seems, is for Apple to revise its software to reduce the iPad’s antenna signal transmitted to its circuitry when the iPad is very close to a wifi source. The result will be higher speeds. Whether for surfing or sending photographs, you cannot have enough speed. And you can’t be too rich or too thin either, both challenges to the average American at the time of writing.