Category Archives: Hardware

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iPad – one month later

iPad, Photography

Just get one.

As the ultimate early adopter, having got mine on iPad Day, April 3, 2010, there is always the risk that anything I write about the iPad is tainted by a refusal to admit that it has serious flaws. Egg-on-face is not a particular favorite here any more than it is in your home.

And yes, I have written almost as much about this device as I did about the 5D which rocked my world to the core. That’s because it is every bit as revolutionary as that now classic Canon camera.

But I have no need to lead you up the garden path of denial. Rather, I would prefer to guide you to the road of enlightenment and realization. What the full frame sensor did for DSLRs the iPad will do for photography and the graphic arts. There is no longer any need to excuse the silly little display on your phone or camera when showing someone your pictures or sharing you ideas. You display them, instead, in glorious, high definition color, with your choice of sound track to jolly things along.

Lest you continue to think I’m full of it, let me tell you the single worst thing about the iPad. First, I should explain that I manage money for a living. I cannot think of a more data intensive occupation and in a turbulent world where emotions and markets (the same thing) can turn on a dime, it’s truly a 7 by 24 business. The money manager is always hungry for information. That means that most sunny mornings you will find me walking the resident Border Terrier a couple of blocks down to Broadway where we hang out at one of the many street places happy to serve us a snack and a coffee. It’s natural therapy which does much to improve the workday. Naturally, almost all the snack places have wifi (this is Broadway, Burlingame, Northern California, not Broadway, Pig Heaven, Arkansas) and the first thing I do is start reading on the iPad while waiting for service. Well, it’s getting awfully difficult to do that as before you know it I am surrounded by fellow diners of all ages and have to go into demonstration mode. So my productivity drops while Apple’s sales soar. That is the very worst thing about the iPad experience.

Still, if that’s the very worst you can say about the iPad, you can bet that the shock of the new will pass quickly enough when everyone has one. And judging by this, that should be any day now:

I suspect that over the next year or two, taxpaying US households will have several iPads – one for each bedroom, one for the home theater, one in the workshop, one for the kitchen, one for the au pair, etc. Non-taxpaying ones will have one provided at no cost by working people. Any business dependent on record keeping, diagnosis, analysis, retrieval, sharing will have many. Medicine, law, manufacturing, sales, science, engineering, publishing, teaching, photography, architecture, real estate, the military, design and production – all will become dependent on these keyboard free, inexpensive tools to get things done better and faster than those without. As GPS models proliferate, a whole new range of location sensitive applications will appear as if by magic, leveraging the device’s power and utility. As speech recognition improves, the last vestiges of need for a keyboard will disappear. Have you ever thought how much productivity is destroyed by the simple act of typing? Libraries will disappear (we can develop the real estate for profitable use) and Weyerhaeuser‘s business will halve as the need for dead trees falls. It’s not just that we will not be making paper books anymore. The new frugality will see smaller homes and no bookcases. Both the homes and the bookcases are made from …. yes, you guessed it!

Make no mistake, the first mover advantage enjoyed by Apple with the iPad is non-trivial. Heavily patented, it has already seen two mediocre would be competitors fold – HP’s Slate and Microsoft’s Courier – both before a single one was sold. Of course the one great application MSFT had which would be a natural for the iPad, the Encarta encyclopedia with interactive content, was discontinued a few months back. Such is the Beast of Redmond.

So for those of you holding out because you have to pay the “Apple premium” or whatever silly reason you have come up with, good luck to you. I have no time to look over my shoulder while I do my job, and my clients thank me mightily for the unfair advantage which I enjoy over you.

Comments on this post are open unless, that is, you are in Arkansas, or ArrghCanSore as they pronounce it down there.

Disclosure: No AAPL position.

Beautiful Planet

iPad, Photographers

Gorgeous photography.

A newly released iPad app displays the globetrotting work of photographer Peter Guttman.

It’s called Beautiful Planet, will run you all of $1.99 and showcases Guttman’s work in the best way possible, using the full iPad screen in landscape format. It’s the first photo display app which does the iPad justice, mainly because the quality of photography is as good as it gets.

Tap the opening screen and you see a scrollable map of the world.

Touch a thumbnail and you are transported to a show of pictures from that region of the world. Rather than spoil the fun, I’ll just say that it’s the best $1.99 you can spend on pictures and shows what a transformative display device can do to showcase your work. A coffee table book in your shoulder bag, weighing 1.5 lbs.

Now just imagine how this will look on a future 21″ iPad!

Hullo? Hullo?

iPad

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.

iPad Zagg screen protector

iPad

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.

iPad wifi misbehavior

iPad

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.