Finally.

Winston waits in the Reservation line – only one person ahead of us!

Ouch!

The ulitimate Point Of Sale terminal – an adapted iPod Touch with card scanner.

Dad – I can’t wait to crash cars with it.

Happy campers. I’ve heard of capitalism, but cheering people for spending their net worth is a bit much ….

We now have two 32gB iPads ready for unboxing as the second computer revolution commences.

Coming attractions.

Eric Lafforgue, master French travel photographer, has confirmed he will be porting his superb iPhone app, which showcases his work, to the iPad – finally a mobile screen to do his splendid photography justice:

Equally exciting, subscribers to Netflix On Demand which streams movies directly to your TV or computer will be thrilled about this:

On Demand movies include a lot of Indie and foreign titles that would never otherwise be seen in the US, including much of the best of French, Italian, Spanish and English cinema. And the price – so long as you have a mail Netflix subscription (as low as $9/month) – is right! The streaming catalog now includes some 12,000 titles (many in H264 High Definition) compared to over 100,000 in the mail order one, but that ratio will change rapidly once the dunces at the studios get with the action and start licensing their movies for digital download.

Do this today!

As the iTunes store will likely get massively overloaded tomorrow when the iPad is released, I am downloading selected iPad apps to iTunes on my desktop today, and will simply do a local sync when the iPad is in my hot little hands (OK, our boy’s hot little sticky hands).

In addition to already having updated to the latest versions of iPhoto and iTunes, essential for the iPad to work, I have downloaded the following apps for installation tomorrow:

All of these are free except for NetNewsWire which is $10, but as that was my Application of the Year for 2009 it’s the best $10 I expect to spend this year. Also, Numbers costs $10 if you are into spreadsheets. iBooks does not come on the iPad, strangely, and it’s essential to read both purchased and public domain content. Apple has promised to upload almost** the whole 30,000 public domain book library from Project Gutenberg for free download to iBooks. Not bad for a company whose CEO not too long ago proclaimed “People don’t read anymore”. Click that link for an musing time.

The WSJ looks like a real newspaper on the iPad – here’s a screenshot:

I’m hoping that master French photographer Eric Lafforgue ports his fabulous photo app for the iPhone to the iPad ASAP. Eric – are you listening?

When Winston gets home from school I have a feeling we will be adding some games too, but to limit his spending he has to kick in 50%. We arrived at 50% as it’s the amount of my income which is stolen annually by the various criminal organizations in Washington and Sacramento, in the guise of tax collectors.

Evolution of the computer. Chauvinistic, but true.

As for my iPad holder, why, I have that already – mouse over to see (needs Safari or Chrome to render):

Hand made from the last of the rain forests by German craftsmen using hand tools only, these are available from me for $1,950 each or $3,000 a pair. Shipping is free worldwide, but allow 6 months for your order to be fulfilled. It’s tough finding the wood, even tougher getting the Germans off their vacations, let alone off their backsides. Picture not included. Using the latest construction technologies, the holder has fewer moving parts than the iPad itself, which is to say none.

** American prudishness will doubtless preclude the availability of such ‘dirty’ books as Vatsayana’s ‘Kama Sutra’. Next I expect they will be censoring Michelangelo’s nudes.

iPad day is tomorrow.

One ‘sleep’ to go. At any rate, that’s how our son computes time.

To say that the preparations our eight year old, Winston, and I have undertaken for a smooth pick-up of the iPad tomorrow make D-Day pale in comparison would be an understatement.

Our nails are neatly trimmed in anticipation of some heavy touchscreen activity.

We have been busily working out, to better fight our way through the crowds at the Apple Store where we will be cycling, enabling a high speed getaway through the crazy traffic. We will have one of these for protection:

We’re not talking Dirty Harry’s effete .357 here. No. This is the real thing – the .44 Magnum. The Most Powerful Handgun made.

Our timing is also carefully strategized.

Special line for those with reservations, note. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.

After much analysis we have concluded that the real loops will turn up at 6am and that the crowd will not dispel until sometime near noon. That’s when everyone is off to lunch at any one of the many chic eateries which constitute Burlingame Ave, CA, 94010, and it’s when we pounce. It takes us 5.5 minutes to cycle from home to store, so by departing at 11:39:30 PDT we time our arrival at 11:45:00 PDT. We contemplated an afternoon arrival but concluded that the store clerks (excuse me, Geniuses) would be so shagged out by then that customer service might not be all we expect. So AM it is.

We present our email to the chap at the head of the now empty ‘reservation’ line, breeze in, proffer plastic, and are out of there before the clock strikes noon.

And lest you think our planning horizon is a short one, let me refer you back to a piece I wrote in December, 2009 when profiling a Handy Bag for the G1 and two lenses. Well, naturally, I anticipated the iPad’s dimensions and can confirm that it will fit perfectly. Impressive, huh?

Well, here’s to the best business leader since Churchill. Maybe I should have named our boy Steve?

Disclosure: I neither own or have ever held a gun in my hands, a status I expect to take to the grave. On the other hand, I have pulled the trigger on Apple stock more times than I care to remember.

First reviews are in.

The first reviews from credible journalists – Walt Mossberg at the WSJ and David Pogue at the NYT – are in and the biggest surprise is that Apple did not lie about the battery life. Both journalists report nearly 12 hours on one charge compared to the “up to 10 hours” claimed.

Mossberg points out that the OS has no multitasking but that is coming for the iPhone so expect it on the iPad soon. And Pogue makes the good point that nerds will hate it because it’s simple and Just Works. These are the same people who adulate keyboards (over which they delight in eating pizza) and mice (they have two – one on their desktop and another eating their crumbs below) so we can move on.

From a personal perspective I have done a quick spot of upgrading to prepare for my iPad. Quick and free upgrades to iPhoto and iTunes on my MacPro get the desktop ready to ‘speak’ to the device. Then I blew some serious coin, meaning an additional $5 per month, to increase my AT&T Uverse broadband speed to something about half the speed available to the rest of the civilized world. The upgrade took all of 5 minutes before becoming available. You tune in Uverse using Safari, tell them you want more speed and it’s done without any need to wait a month for a technician. 5 minutes later.

As the 32gB iPad I am getting is wifi only I thought I might as well speed it up. A quick word about AT&T’s digital Uverse service. Every nerd likes to trash the Telephone Company for its many coverage and capacity issues caused by the wild popularity of the iPhone which, in America, runs on AT&T only. I do not think that is fair. First, as a little remarked piece of (rare) excellent journalism in the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, much of the bottleneck problem with the iPhone and AT&T was the cause of …. poor wireless application design by Apple! AT&T sent in a team to teach Apple how to do it right and expects improvements. Of course, they dare not admit to this for to question the sanctity of Apple’s programmers would doubtless incur the wrath of Mr. Jobs. And Apple’s market capitalization is, if you can believe this, larger than AT&T’s:

I have been using Uverse for a couple of months now and while the installation made a root canal seem like a fun time, the ability to change your service level for TV and broadband from your keyboard is pretty special. No more waiting all day for the technician who forgets to show up. And yes, you can simultaneously record several shows of the crap that passes for television in the US using the optional DVR (made by Motorola) whose integration into the remote and general reliability is as good as anything from TiVo. Oh! joy. The service works well and has only gone down once – compared to weekly failures I enjoyed from my former provider, Charter Cable. Uverse is available in civilization – meaning the big coastal cities and Chicago – but don’t expect it any time soon in your area if you think grits are a delicacy. And it you think the Telephone Company doesn’t know technology, how do you explain providing broadband and digital TV over copper cables designed and installed one hundred years ago? It’s no accident that the old Bell Labs boasted more Nobel laureates in its ranks than any other organization. Yes, the company is big and unwieldy, often frustratingly slow and bureaucratized (thanks to excessive regulation which constrains competition) but this sort of innovation makes you think well of America’s future.

Finally, the reviews published today confirm what the sneak videos taken on the day Jobs presented the device to the press a while back suggested. The device is ‘blindingly fast’ (Goatbeard’s words, not mine) – another pleasant surprise.

Tomorrow I shall disclose the carefully planned strategy our eight year old and I have devised to beat the crowds when we pick ours up on Saturday morning. And, of course, you can expect photo coverage from your intrepid reporter of the day that will change the way we use computers for ever. I don’t know about you, but I propose to be a part of that change. Stay tuned!

By the way, easily the best piece yet written on the iPad is by English humorist Stephen Fry in, of all things, the otherwise culturally arid desert known as Time magazine. And yes, he gets to meet God.

On a happy note for AAPL investors, you can expect MSFT and AAPL to swap places in this table of America’s largest companies by market capitalization within 12 months: