Andy Gapin

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s entry into the tablet world. To date, the “tablet world” has been more of an “iPad world,” it’s been utter domination. Tablets are the new netbook, they’re hot and every company wants a piece of the action, but the problem is, people aren’t buying tables, they’re buying iPads (on the large scale). I’m not here to talk about the reasons for that, but there are many. The Kindle Fire has now come along with hopes of changing that, at least to a degree. Amazon, who has already had a lot of success in the eReader market, thinks that with an almost impulse-buy price of $200, they can undercut the iPad and gain traction where others have been stuck in the mud.

Introducing the Kindle Fire as I just have implies that it competes with the iPad, but I would say with some level of confidence that I don’t think it does. And that’s an odd thing because the Kindle Fire does compete with other Android tablets who, in turn, do compete with the iPad. Apple’s iPad represents an end-to-end ecosystem. You buy your hardware from Apple and then Apple continues to be your one-stop shop for music, movies, books, games, magazines, and apps (they are not the only source for music, movies, books, or magazines, but they want to be and they have the ecosystem to pull it off). This is an experience very different from Android tablets where you buy the hardware from one company and get your content from a smattering of other vendors. And this is where the Kindle Fire comes in and bests other Android tablets in a way that only Amazon can pull off right now. It provides the same kind of end-to-end ecosystem that users can get from Apple. This and a $200 price tag are what will make the Amazon Kindle Fire the first truly successful Android tablet (unless you want to include the Nook Color as a true Android tablet).

So yes, on that front, it seems like the Kindle Fire is an iPad competitor, but the difference comes from company philosophy. Amazon is a retailer. They sell you the Kindle Fire very cheaply because they don’t see it as their product, they see it as a conduit through which they can sell you the content and items they already love to sell you. Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company, they use software and content as selling points to get their hardware into your hands. These different approaches are what really set the two devices apart.

If you keep up with technology at all or read any tech blogs or sites, you already know this and have read it over and over again. But if that’s not you, then this may be the kind of thing you don’t think about. In terms of what I’m going to go on to say, I’m not sure how much it matters, but it is something that’s been in the back of my mind for the past week and a half and it creeps to the foreground almost every time I pick up the Fire.

What good is a Kindle Fire for an iPad user?

Before I go into the device further, frequent readers of this blog may wonder why I would want a Kindle Fire if I have an iPad already. It may appear that I’m an Apple fanboy, as they say. I have an iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro. I love these devices and right now, for my money, Apple delivers what I want from a device that I’m going to rely on day in and day out. However, I’m not an Apple fanboy, I’m just an all-around gadget-nerd. As such, I’ve been feeling, for a long time, like it’s ridiculous that there hasn’t been anything Android in my home. I’ve been keeping my eyes on Craigslist for a while, looking for something that was just right to pick up. That something had to be cheap enough that I could justify spending the money since it would be nothing more than a toy for me. The Kindle Fire has been the first good (and not generations old) Android product that has come along with a price tag reasonable enough to justify its purchase.

Additionally, my wife and I share our iPad, but usually I just hog it. She is the one that really wanted it in the first place and I justified our purchase of it by figuring we’d use it enough between the two of us. I never thought that I’d use it for a couple hours a day myself. A second iPad seems like overkill for us, but the Kindle Fire is, again, cheap enough that it makes for a nice complement to our iPad. I can use the Kindle Fire when my wife wants to read on the iPad or bring it into the kitchen with her to read recipes from.

*Note: This thing was a bitch to photograph because of its glossiness, otherwise I would have taken a lot more photos of both the hardware and software. I had to choose between just posting this with what I had or waiting until next weekend when I’d be able to photograph with natural light.

Hardware

For the most part, I like the hardware. It looks like a BlackBerry Playbook and is uninspired in design, but it’s simple all black exterior is aesthetically pleasing. The Kindle Fire feels solid, but isn’t heavy. The weight is nice for holding in one hand and your arm doesn’t tire out as quickly as it does with the iPad.

The 7″ size makes for a completely different physical experience than the 9.7″ iPad. Holding the Kindle Fire feels more like holding a big phone, you can wrap your hand around it. Sometimes, this is really nice and kind of preferred to the larger iPad. Over the last week and a half, I’ve found myself reaching for the Kindle Fire for looking things up while watching TV. It seems well suited to being used as a secondary point of focus while you’re doing something else. In other words, the 7″ size makes it much less of an immersive experience than a 10″ table can offer. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it’s not what you want.

The quality of the Kindle Fire display was surprisingly good to me. It’s decently bright and sharp enough that you shouldn’t have any problems. The colors and viewing angles are good enough that I didn’t take special notice to either one. The only knock against it is its crazy level of glossiness. You can get some serious glare coming off the screen. Plus, it’s a big fingerprint magnet.

Unfortunately, there is no physical volume control, but volume is just a single tap away so it’s tolerable.

While the hardware and design are mostly a positive, there is one insanely stupid aspect to the Kindle Fire. The power button is on the bottom of the device, right where you’ll often have a finger while you’re holding it. Or right where the weight of the device is going to fall when you’re resting it on your chest while laying in bed. I knew this going in, but I had no idea how annoying this would turn out to be. Even after a week and a half, I still find myself hitting this by accident all the time. Sometimes, my finger even holds the button down long enough that I get prompted with the device shut-down dialog. For apps that rotate a full 180°, I turn the device so the button is on the top, but not all apps rotate like that. This was such a stupid design decision that it almost feels as though the person responsible for it should be fighting to keep their job at Amazon.

Software

There are two things worth noting right off the bat before I go on about the software. One, the latest update that Amazon pushed out to fix the big complaints came down automatically for me on the first day and seems to do a decent job of fixing the complaints others have had. The second thing of note, is that I rooted my Kindle Fire two days after opening it. I installed the Android Market and GO Launcher EX. With that being said, my software experience is a little different than most would have, but I bought the Kindle Fire with every intention of rooting it and, when it becomes available in a stable form, installing CyanogenMod on it.

As is very plain to see, Amazon has heavily skinned Android on the Kindle Fire. In fact, they’ve actually completely forked Android, from what I understand. The Amazon skin creates an experience that ties you right into Amazon’s ecosystem. You’ve got all your media front and center and purchasing new content from Amazon is right there. It’s so easy to buy new content that you can almost accidentally do it.

The Amazon skin looks decent enough, but if you want to do anything more than reading or some casual browsing, you may be left wanting more from it.

Amazon’s app store has a decent selection of apps, but I quickly found that many of the apps I immediately wanted to install weren’t there. The Kindle Fire allows sideloading of apps, but I find the process to be a pain in the ass. However, once I rooted the Fire and installed the Android Market, most of the apps I wanted were there and ready to go for me. Unfortunately though, I found some of the apps I wanted were incompatible and could not be installed through the Android Market. Annoyingly, many of them were apps that should be able to run on the Kindle Fire (i.e. they aren’t apps that require hardware the Fire doesn’t have). This was annoying. To this day, I still can’t get the Facebook app to run without crashing at login. Being a primarily iOS user, this whole experience seemed bonkers to me.

The apps themselves are mostly lacking in feel to me. There are many good apps, but it seems that for every app I’ve installed on the Kindle Fire, a better alternative exists for iOS. It may be that I need to spend more time with the Android Market to figure out how to better find the apps I need, but in reality, the big issue seems to be…

The overwhelming majority of Android apps for the Kindle Fire just feel like over-sized smartphone apps. Mainly, that’s because they are just smartphone apps since the Kindle Fire runs off Android 2.3 instead of 3.x or 4.0. This feels like a major problem to me, but again, I come at this with an iOS perspective. The extra physical size over a phone feels wasted without tablet-class apps. On the iPad, developers tailor their apps to make use of the extra screen real estate and it makes the experience substantially better. It’s more engaging and more productive. iPad apps have multiple panes and feel natural to use, these apps just blow everything up as if I’m a senior citizen with crappy eyesight. This is something you will want to keep in mind if you are thinking about a Kindle Fire, you won’t get tablet apps, you’ll get glorified smartphone apps. If that’s not okay with you, you’ll want to look elsewhere, either a Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich Android tablet or the iPad.

I actually almost forgot to even mention the Silk Browser which is designed to offload the heavily lifting of web browsing onto Amazon’s servers. Ideally, this should help pages load faster. In practice, I found page loads to be painfully slow. I’m going to leave it at that.

Performance

For the most part, I’ve found that the Kindle Fire is slightly snappier than I expected. Scrolling isn’t smooth, but it keeps up with your finger and touch response is usually good. That doesn’t come without some caveats though. Zooming in the browser works, but is very jerky and jarring. I’ve also found that clicking URLs, more of than not, takes many taps before doing anything. This goes for all links, even results from a Google search or those from apps other than the browser. I don’t find this same issue when tapping buttons or other elements on the screen. What exacerbates this is that Android and its apps often provide no immediate acknowledgement of your actions. If your action is registered and quickly carried out (in say, less than .5 seconds) , you don’t really notice that much, but when the system takes longer to process what it needs to, you’re left there wondering if your tap was recognized or if the system is just taking a while to work on it. When this happens once in a while, it’s not that big of a deal, but constantly having to guess if my taps are being recognize can be maddening. Some simple indication that your interaction was registered would go a long way.

Overall, the Kindle Fire feels like a car that has plenty of horsepower, but is being slowed down by not having enough air in the tires. If the software cared more about the user experience, the Kindle Fire could be a significantly better device.

Battery life is fine. I can’t say I’ve done any scientific tests, but I’ve only had to charge it three times since I’ve gotten it. It’s not quite as good as the iPad 2, but you won’t have to worry about taking it with you for a weekend trip while leaving your charger at home.

Wrap up

As a whole, the Kindle Fire isn’t a bad gadget, especially for $200. In some ways, the device feels like a low-end product, but for the most part, the Kindle Fire feels like a steal at $200.

The Kindle Fire isn’t an iPad-killer or anything of the sort. As I mentioned in the beginning, it doesn’t really feel like it competes with the iPad. Even though I made many comparisons to the iPad throughout this review, it was mostly to drive home the point that this isn’t iPad competition.

What it comes down to is this, if you want an eReader that you can check email on and occasionally browse the web here and there or read some tweets, this is a must-buy. If you are sure that you only want to consume content, the Kindle Fire is worth a serious look. However, if you at all think you might want to use a tablet to get work done or even use it as your primary browsing/tweeting/Facebooking device, the Kindle Fire is not the right purchase for you. The end result would be a $200 purchase that talks you into a future $500 purchase of a 10″ tablet. If you have been telling yourself that you really “want an iPad,” don’t cheap out and get a Kindle Fire.

I’m happy with my Kindle Fire, but only because I have an iPad 2 for the big boy stuff.

Just like I said I probably would, I went ahead and bought an iPhone 4S on day one. However, it did cost me quite a bit more than the $100 that I figured it would cost since I decided to go all out and get the 64GB model. That much storage can’t even come laughably close to storing all of my music, but it can store enough that I can ditch the iPod and stream the what doesn’t fit via AudioGalaxy. The music I listen to regularly will fit and everything else will stay easily accessible. It’ll be good enough and to be able to go from three gadgets to one was a pretty good proposition for me.

I’m not going to go into a full review of the iPhone 4S since I did a full iPhone 4 review last year and this is mostly a spec bump, but after a few days with the device, I thought I’d post my thoughts.

The phone still looks the same (though I went with white this time around), but that doesn’t change the fact that there is still nothing else on the market that can touch it as far as design and build quality goes. That’s actually kind of crazy when you think about it considering that this design has been in the wild for 16 months. That being said, the phone still has two slabs of glass making up most of the surface so it remains as breakable as ever.

While there was a lot of disappointment in the iPhone 4S’s announcement, after using this thing for a few days, it seems that much of that disappointment is missing the point. The iPhone 4S is mostly just a spec bump, but its bump is just enough to finally put it over the top. Where the iPhone 4 was very good, the iPhone 4S is great.

The iPhone 4S finally reaches a point where the device and the software melt away and you’re just left with content and things you want to do. Nothing stands in your way now.

Most of the time, the added speed of the A5 processor isn’t a night and day difference, but sometimes it is. Apps open significantly faster and while the iPhone 4 was snappy and definitely no slouch, the iPhone 4S makes moving around in apps a much improved experience. There is no lag, even in places where I could always count on my iPhone 4 to hang up for a second or so. Everything is much smoother and snappier in a tangible way.

The data speeds are supposed to be faster on the iPhone 4S (for AT&T at least), but in a few rounds of Speed Test, there was no change. However, in practice, data seems to come down insanely faster. Much of it is probably due to the A5 processing things faster, but websites load tons faster (and Javascript executes much quicker). Twitter pulls the latest tweets down almost instantly. Facebook too. Every app, really. The content you’re trying to get to is put up on the screen almost as fast as you ask for it. Considering that LTE is not on board, this is impressive. Impressive enough that not having LTE (which any sane person shouldn’t have expected from Apple this year anyway) doesn’t feel like a problem right now.

All of this added speed means iOS now keeps up with you. You’re no longer waiting for it, it’s waiting for you. Simply put, where iPhone 4 was close, but the iPhone 4S is there.

The iPhone 4 camera was still the best camera you could get on a phone up until just recently. Hell, some probably still consider it to be the best. But it was just barely not enough to justify ditching a point-and-shoot altogether. More than half the time, yes, it was enough, but I always kept my point-and-shoot near the door. The iPhone 4S changes that. It is sharper, has better dynamic range, better color, more pixels, and significantly better low-light performance. My DSLR won’t see any decrease in usage, but my point-and-shoot is going in the desk drawer upstairs and may never come out again. The photos and videos that iPhone 4S can take are stunning. Unless you need a superzoom, you won’t need a point-and-shoot while you have an iPhone 4S in your pocket.

I’ve posted some very quick sample shots at the bottom of the post. These were taken quickly without any attention paid to composition, but they should give you an idea of what the camera is capable of. None of them have been processed in any way except to reduce their size.

Siri has been the most talked about feature of the iPhone 4S since it was announced and for good reason. Before using it or seeing a demo, it’s easy to dismiss it as another voice control feature that you’ll never use. I almost did myself. But when you actually use this, you realize it’s so much more. This is the start of the future. This is the point where we’ll look back and pinpoint as the beginning of being able to truly have conversations with your technology and have it do things for you.

If you’ve been on the internet at all since Friday, you’ve probably already seen much of the fun people have been having with Siri. I’ve had a lot of fun testing her out and seeing how she’ll respond to things. She’s fun, but I’m not going to add another post on the internet about how if you keep bugging her about the meaning of life, she’ll say “42, are you happy now?” She’s full of countless snark and provides a lot of fun. She has an attitude and that’s important. She responds almost like a person would and that makes it feel real. It makes it feel like she’s a real person and that she can truly understand you. It’s unlike anything else you’ve ever used because it’s unlike anything else that has ever existed. This is the real thing.

That attitude is coupled with the fact that she can hold a conversation. She is smart enough to understand what you say even if you say it differently. She gets context. I can say “remind me to email John Smith about the concert this weekend when I get home” and she will create a reminder that will go off as soon as I get to my house. The reminder will say “Email John Smith about the concert this weekend” because she understands that that was what I wanted the reminder to say. I can say “tell my wife that I’ll be late” and she’ll text my wife telling her that I’m going to be late. “Take me to the mall” gets me the same thing as if I say “I need directions to the mall.” She just gets it.

You can tell her to do things the way you would tell a real person. And that’s why she works. That’s why Siri will actually get used. Because she can understand you so well, she can actually do things faster than you can on your own. It’s not a gimmick. You probably won’t use her too much in public, but thanks to the ability to have her automatically kick on when you put your phone up to your ear, you might actually use her while walking down the street or in the store. It’ll look just like you’re having a conversation with someone on the phone.

I’ve noticed that because she has to send everything to Apple’s servers, sometimes she takes a few seconds to respond, but it’s generally not bad. Everything going to Apple’s servers is a good thing though. Apple says she’ll learn from you and from the user base as a whole. With Apple knowing how people are using it, they can adapt it even more to the real world. This is the beginning, but she will get so much better. It won’t be long before you can say “how are the Eagles doing” and she’ll give you the score of the game.

Is Siri enough to justify buying an iPhone 4S if you already have an iPhone 4? I don’t know, that’s tough, maybe not. But if you’re on the fence already, she should push you over.

That about covers the big changes from that the iPhone 4S brings to the table. There are smaller ones like a better antenna design which seems to work as advertised, but I never had much of a problem with my iPhone 4 in most places. There’s also a new vibration motor which sounds like a silly thing to mention, but you can feel (and hear) the difference. This one is smoother and actually feels a little more luxurious. It’s an added thing that helps to make the device feel high-end.

The iPhone 4S isn’t perfect for what it is though. The battery life is noticeably worse than my iPhone 4. It’s not terrible, I can still get close to two days from a charge, but it is less. However, the battery life feels similar to what I was getting from my iPhone 4 after upgrading to iOS 5, so that may be part of it. I have the notifications set to display my email on the lockscreen so every email I receive turns on the display for a few seconds. That probably accounts for a large chunk of it. It also seems like the battery depletes faster when using Siri. Either way, the battery life is still good enough that it won’t be a problem. That’s the major complaint though, I still have some issues with iOS and I’m hoping that iOS 6 will fix much of them, but we’ll see. For now, the iPhone 4S doesn’t fix them, but Siri does actually make a few of them easier to live with. Any other hardware complaints would simply be highlighting choices that Apple made (e.g. not doing a larger screen), not design flaws.

As you’ll hear everywhere else, if you have an iPhone 3G or 3GS, upgrade now. Just do it. If you have an iPhone 4, it’s tough, but this device is good enough to reduce three gadgets you may already use down to one and the speed will save you a lot of time throughout the day. If those things mean something to you, upgrade. If not, hold out another year. If you aren’t currently an iPhone user and are thinking about becoming one, this is the phone to get. And if you don’t have a smartphone at all yet and are looking to get one, I’d recommend this over anything else. I’m not going to say iOS is better than Android, I think they are both great in their own ways, but if you don’t already have a smartphone at this point, you’re likely to fall into the camp of people who will enjoy iOS’s way of doing things more.

For me personally, I’m finding the iPhone 4S to be a worthy upgrade. I’m happy with my decision so far.

Yes, there’s a good chance that I’ll get an iPhone 4s. And I don’t mean that I’ll probably buy it months down the line, I’ll pre-order it on Friday to get it at launch. The short answer as to why I’ll do this is because I’m a sucker, but there’s a bit of a longer answer if you care to read on.

Disappointment

I guess the first thing to clear up here is why I, like so many other tech nerds, are so disappointed with yesterday’s Apple keynote. There’s a lot that goes into it and on the surface you can say that it was because Apple took four months longer than usual to refresh the iPhone or that it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4. You’d be right to a certain degree. We’d been expecting a true iPhone 5 all year, one that was radically redesigned and with a larger display. If you’re not interested in tech in any way, this probably doesn’t matter to you, but some of us like shiny new toys. Some of us are basically children.

For me personally, the one thing I really cared about getting was a bigger screen, say 4″. I didn’t care that much if the device looked the same, but over on the left here, you’ll see the design that I was really pulling for. It’s a beautiful design and does away with the excess bezel at the top (which is the only part of the iPhone 4 design I’m not crazy about). Most importantly, it’s got a huge screen that takes up most of the front. It’s slick and a piece of art, just like the iPhone 4 was.

I didn’t care about real 4G (read: LTE) because I didn’t expect it in a million years. Apple wouldn’t put LTE into an iPhone with the current chipsets available and completely kill the battery life (or make the device thicker). That’s fine, I’m an AT&T customer and they barely have an LTE network right now. I wouldn’t even be able to use an LTE iPhone right now. No disappointment here for me.

Finally, throw in NFC and you’ve got everything we thought we might get in an iPhone 5 this year. NFC (mobile payments via your cellphone) would be really nice, but like LTE, the infrastructure to use it isn’t really in place yet so this isn’t a huge surprise either. Hopefully when Apple finally does do NFC, I’d bet on this for next year, they piggyback off what’s currently being deployed. But since we didn’t get it, that’s not important now.

Okay, so a larger display, a new physical design, NFC, and LTE. That’s all that we didn’t get on the hardware side. LTE wasn’t even expected, so we can cut that down to just the first three. That doesn’t really sound like a lot and, of the three, I really cared most about that display, I’d like something bigger for reading and typing on. Still, since we all like shiny new things, a physical redesign would have gone a long way all on its own…for everyone, not just me.

All of that is just the surface of why we’re disappointed though, the real disappointment isn’t really the absence of these three (or four) features.  The real disappointment is…

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Apple is one of the biggest names in tech and they’re a leader in the industry. Everyone looks to Apple to see what they’re going to do, the proof is right there in the amount of coverage that they get on tech (and even non-tech) sites. It’s pretty insane how much attention Apple gets just for rumors, let alone actual products. We look to Apple to constantly innovate, wow, and set the bar higher. Apple leapfrogs the competition and sits back and lets everyone catch up until they’ve inched just past them, then they leapfrog again. You can debate this anyway you want, but the iPhone itself is a great example of this. Look at smartphones before the iPhone 2G and look at them now. Every smartphone now is more like the iPhone than it is like any smartphone before the iPhone, at least in terms of how we use and interact with it. You may think Android does it better, and that’s fine, Android is great, but Android wouldn’t be what or where it is today without the iPhone.

So we expect a lot from Apple, usually too much, but they deliver to some level and make the products to beat. If you’re going to make the products to beat, you’ve got to be the best or be damn near close to the top. To date, Apple has done a great job with that.

But, and here’s where the letdown is, the Android competition right now is fierce. The iPhone 4 managed to stay competitive because it provides an amazing user experience and a solid ecosystem, but with the exception of the display, it’s out-specced in almost every way by Android phones that have already been on the market for months. We expected Apple to leapfrog and say “here’s where the bar is now, beat this.” They didn’t. They caught up and stopped. This isn’t like Apple on the mobile front. We had expectations based on the way Apple typically behaves and they didn’t follow through on that. We need to come to terms with that.

The iPhone 4S is a good phone, but it competes with what’s already on the market and Apple has long product cycles. Even assuming that Apple goes back to a 12-month cycle for the iPhone (or even drops the iPhone 5 in June 2012), most Android handset makers will put out two generations of products in that time and that’s on top of the fact that they each make many different models.

Apple doesn’t play the spec war game and only talks about specs when they enhance the user experience. They also only add features when they think they’ve done the right and better than everyone else. Normally, that works fine for them, but in the face of what Android has coming, they should be doing a little more this time around. Even if Android still won’t be able to match the overall user experience with its upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich build of Android, Apple’s “magic” is starting to stretch very thin.

Next week, it is likely that the Nexus Prime (or something with a similar name by Samsung) will be announced. This phone will be the one that sets the bar higher. The same bar that Apple just yesterday reached. And they’ll not just set it higher, they’ll set it much higher. Apple will be left with nothing to match it until at least 2Q 2012, most likely Q3. That’s a long time in the fast-moving smartphone game.

Essentially, the disappointment is that Apple didn’t announce next year’s specs yesterday, they simply delivered this year’s. They chose not to lead the pack this time around.

We can all speculate about why this is, but my true feelings are that Apple had an iPhone 5 in the works, one that was what we wanted (minus LTE). But they went too aggressive and couldn’t get it up to their standards. Rather than releasing a product they weren’t fully happy with, they did a simple update to the iPhone 4 and called it a cycle. I think this is why there was an extra four months before a refresh. Apple was either trying to work it out or they needed time to switch gears to the iPhone 4S. And with all of the software changes and iCloud, they embraced the extra time and decided to make the software the star. The software gave them an out and a way to put spin on this, even if we may see right through it.

Even though our expectations were lowered leading up to the event as more information leaked and there was no sign of an iPhone 5, many of us had a glimmer of hope that Apple would pull out a surprise. That would be very Apple-like. In the end, we got what we knew was coming, but nothing more. That disappointed us like a child Christmas morning when they don’t get that impossible-to-get, must-have toy of the year even after his parents told them not to expect it.

What makes this decision perfectly acceptable to Apple is that they’re still going to sell a ton of these things. The iPhone 4 has been on the market for 15 months and is still the number one selling smartphone. Apple is cleaning up, maybe not in mobile OS market share, but in device market share (no one sells more smartphones than Apple). Apple knows this. And Apple knows that this isn’t going to stop. The kind of people that write blog posts and articles like this aren’t the people Apple cares about for the iPhone. The people they care about are the millions who will actually buy the iPhone 4S. In that regard, the iPhone 4S will be massive success.

Tim Cook stepped out on the stage yesterday with ability to essentially say, “you people keep buying these things and we know you won’t stop even if we let up for a cycle, so we’re going to just give you this iPhone 4S and collect your money.” Those of us that are criticizing Apple for not releasing an iPhone 5 yesterday are wrong and completely missing the point. The iPhone 4S will sell even more than the iPhone 4. As insane as it is, it’s true.

Why I’ll still buy

Despite being this year’s technology and not next year’s, I’m still likely to rush out and buy the iPhone 4S. Yes, I’m a sucker. And yes, next year, I’ll upgrade again. Since I got the iPhone 3G, I’ve upgraded each year. I’m just a gadget nerd like that. I like new toys…even if they look the same.

Also, I’ll state right now that I’m eating the words I posted on Google+ two days ago when I said I wouldn’t upgrade without a larger screen.

I’ve looked online and I can sell my iPhone 4 for around $250 and, if I get the 32GB model, the cost of the iPhone 4S should be $350 according to what AT&T says. That’s $100 out of pocket and I’m stock with AT&T for another 2 years. $100 is practically nothing (in this context) and I’m not leaving AT&T any time soon anyway — not because I love them, but because I’m grandfathered into an unlimited data plan.

So for $100, yeah, I’ll upgrade. For me, the camera improvements alone are worth it. I take a lot of photos, if you haven’t noticed. Starting with my iPhone 4, I’ve stopped carrying my point-and-shoot as often as I used to. I either have my DSLR with me or I use my phone. But the iPhone 4 isn’t a complete point-and-shoot replacement. It’s close and its low-light capabilities are very good for a phone, even by this year’s standards, but it’s not quite enough. The camera improvements (still and video) in the iPhone 4S will be enough to put it over the top to make it enough. My point-and-shoot will go in a drawer and never come out again.

The camera leads into my next point, I screwed up by getting a 16GB iPhone 4. I felt that way from day one. I wish I had more space for photos/video and music. I have an iPod Classic that I keep a large chunk of my music on (less than a third actually fits), but I’m getting sick of carrying that around and having to update that. With iTunes Match and AudioGalaxy, I can ditch the iPod Classic and just stream/download what I need. But since streaming can suck a lot of the time and downloading is annoying, I’ll still find the desire to keep much of the “essentials” on me at all times. A 64GB or 32GB iPhone will provide enough space that I can keep enough of my favorite music on there at all times so I can ditch the iPod Classic. And, I’ll have space to keep more photos and videos. As it is now, I have to delete most videos as soon as I dump them to my computer. On more than one occasion, I’ve had my phone stop recording a video mid-way through because it ran out of space.

In a way, I’m going to be paying for my mistake from last year on this front and I could continue to live with 16Gb with the help of the new iCloud features, but being given an opportunity to upgrade to more space is worth considering. Again, for $100, why not?

The iPhone 4 is no slouch in terms of speed and I don’t play any graphically intense games, but the boost from the A5 processor will be a nice perk to come along with that camera. I wouldn’t upgrade for this alone, but it’ll be nice. We don’t know if the phone has been upgraded to 1GB of memory or not, but with 1080p video recording and iMovie, I’d imagine that it has been. We’ll find out on this one. Again, this would be a nice perk, but I never felt limited by 512MB of RAM in my iPhone 4.

Siri is cool and I might even use it based on the hands on reports from yesterday. It appears to be very good. It won’t be a lot, I still think this kind of thing is gimmicky, but if it’s really that good, I could see using it to pull up directions while driving or for checking the weather while I’m getting ready in the morning. Those kinds of simple things. I definitely can’t see using it in public. We’ll see about this one, but again, not nearly enough on its own.

I’m not putting much weight in the 14.4Mbps data speeds, from what I’ve read, I probably won’t see them much on AT&T (Sprint and Verizon won’t see them at all). But if I see them even a third of the time, that will be yet another perk that I’ll gladly take.

As I’ve said many times, I’m a gadget nerd and I like new toys. Even though the iPhone 4S is mostly just an iPhone 4, I can get it in white and it’ll at least feel like a different gadget to me. Somewhat. Despite being little more than a bunch of minor upgrades to the same thing I already have, the iPhone 4S actually pushes itself up just enough to fully replace two gadgets that I have long since grown tired of carrying around. The added convenience and minor simplification of my life (I’ll come right out and say it’s simplifying first world problems that I have created for myself) is compelling to me. Plus, I’ll get a fresh battery.

I keep saying it, but if I can upgrade for a total cost of $100 (for 32GB), it’s not a bad deal. For simplification, a slightly snappier user experience, and a bunch of perks, it’s worth it…for $100. If I were to drop $400 or $500 out of pocket just for this upgrade, hell no.

PS: I’m not a fanboy

This isn’t a fanboy thing. Really, it isn’t. I’m a big Apple fan, but I’m not a fanboy. I buy Apple products and I love them because I think they’re the best products out there right now. When someone else starts doing better, including design, user experience, and build quality (the three aspects that no one else can yet match all at the same time), I’ll buy their product. For a long time, I wouldn’t touch an Apple product, but that changed when Apple started providing better answers to what I wanted than anyone else could. They won’t be the best answer forever though and when they’re not, I’m going to fair-weather friend the hell out of them and jump ship.

By now, you know all about Google+ and you might even be using it already. Cool, right? It’s funny how this thing is pretty much like Facebook, but not quite. It’s very similar to Facebook early on when many of today’s features hadn’t been implemented yet, but that’s kind of okay because they’ve seemed to have launched with the basics and the important stuff.

At first, the question is how does this stand a chance and how is it not exactly the same as Facebook. While it seems like that’s hard to answer, it’s not, there’s actually a very important distinction in ideology. Facebook is all about sharing stuff with everyone you know and opting out specific people that you may not want to see things. Google+ changes that and focuses on sharing specific things with the specific people that you feel are interested in that. This is Circles. If I want to share a bunch of nerdy links, I can just post those for one circle. If I want to post some stuff about music, I can post that only to the people that are going to be interested in it and not fill up the streams of people who don’t care. This is the way it should be. This is better. A lot better. And not only is this better, but this is the default. It definitely has the potential to make for a much better signal-to-noise ratio.

To me, that’s the one main distinction between the two besides features (which will come with time for Google+). And that distinction means a lot to me as someone that has a lot of groups of friends that all have different interests. My music related friends don’t care about tech stuff or running or snowboarding. Meanwhile, my tech friends may not listen to the same music as me. I don’t clog their streams and they won’t clog mine with stuff about…knitting…or whatever.

Google has failed with social before for a number of reasons. Either they launched with small limited betas that don’t allow enough people in to actually make it useful (e.g. Wave) or it’s too niche (e.g. Wave again) or it’s just a straight clone of something else with nothing new to offer and poor implementation (e.g. Buzz). This may only not be a straight clone of Facebook because of a single ideological difference, but I think enough was done right already to give Google+ a real future.

The big question is whether or not people will actually end up using it. Facebook has something like 700 million users right now. That’s a lot, but they lost a few million the US last month. That’s not a trend, but it could become one and it could be because Facebook isn’t doing it for a lot of people. Google+ could present a reason for more users to leave and I think Google+ could actually snag some of those users that have left Facebook already. One thing that helps is that the Google+ bar is just there whenever you’re on any Google site, right at the top. And you can share from it. Millions of people have Gmail open at all times, so they’ll just always have Google+ right there ready to use without going to a new site or opening a new tab/window. I always have Google Reader open (always…on EVERY computer) and it’s there too. I can super quickly share a link from Google Reader without even changing tabs. It’s wonderful. I can also see comments and such from right there as well. I don’t even have to open Google+ to use it or read entire comment threads. This is a huge advantage over Facebook. Plus, I can mute individual comment threads without turning off all notifications. That’s one thing that kills me on Facebook, I comment on something and then I’m stuck getting emails for comments from people I don’t know for days. Now that I’ve typed it out, this might actually be my second favorite thing about Google+ thus far.

I don’t really see Sparks taking off or being of use to me. I don’t need a machine picking out articles for me when I’ve got 300+ sites added to my Google Reader. I have more than enough to read already. But the hang outs thing is pretty neat. I like the idea of just saying “yo, I’m sitting here, who wants to chill?” It works pretty well in my limited use of it. It could already be the best group video chat out there. And it’s got a great feature that shows the person talking as a larger video and everyone else as smaller ones. When someone else starts to talk, it moves them to the big one. Automatically. In a three person chat last night, it worked almost flawlessly. Very impressive. It doesn’t sound like much, but it actually helps a lot and makes it feel more like you’re actually talking with a group of people and turning your head to face the person that is speaking. I never ever use video chat, but I might actually use this.

Another thing that’s going to help Google’s chances here is that they’re actually making apps for mobile OSes besides Android and not just relying on delivering via the browser. This killed Buzz for me. I don’t want to load an app, go to a page, and then start using something. It works, but it’s not a good user experience. On my phone, I don’t want to always have to be waiting for UI stuff to download, it’s much more efficient to only download the content. I also don’t want two steps before seeing content when I could have just one.

Only time will tell if Google+ takes off. There are a lot of features that Google needs to build out still and who knows how they’ll handle things like fan pages and music (a tie-in to Google Music could go along way against iCloud). I’d like to see people start using this and I hope Google builds and adds features quickly. I’ve only been using it for about 12 hours, but I already like it a lot and feel like it’s got a lot of potential to best Facebook.

I want to do a full review of Google Music Beta, but I’m not there yet. I just got my invite the other day and kicked off the upload a little more than 36 hours ago. About 4500 songs have been uploaded so far.

The upload process is kind of annoying if you have a lot of music. I installed the music manager program on the Windows virtual machine I already keep running on my Linux server (I need the VM for Audiogalaxy [which apparently relaunched last year as a site that streams your music from your computer to any device. It's solid] and AirVideo). Once installed and pointed to my music, the application started scanning through to see what I have. The music manager found about 66,000 songs and immediately started uploading. The uploads seem to go fairly quick and songs immediately appear in Google Music for your listening pleasure. The problem is that the music manager made no indication of the 20,000 song limit at this point, it just started uploading.

After a while (and after the application crashed and I restarted it), the music manager eventually said that all my songs would not be uploaded because there were too many. That wouldn’t really be a problem considering that Google is very upfront about the 20,000 song limit. The problem is that you don’t get any control over what doesn’t get uploaded. It seems as though the folders are being chosen somewhat at random.

So what it seems like happens is that Google will upload 20k songs and then stop. In Google Music, you can delete stuff, so I would presume I could do that and then it would upload more. But this means I’m uploading stuff I don’t want and working against my Comcast data cap for music that I don’t really want in the cloud (if it means I can’t have other things; I would put it all there if I could).

The music manager does let you add multiple folders to upload and watch, so I could just go through and pick out the artists/albums I want and add them, but that would be an ungodly tedious affair and annoying to do. To be honest, the way Google should handle this is to have the music manager application first upload a list of songs available to be uploaded and let me choose what to upload. If I have less than 20,000 songs, I could just tell it to upload everything in one click, but if I have more, I would be presented with my entire library and I could choose what I wanted. And the I would be able to change this at any time (on the fly). If I decide that I don’t want a certain album and do want something else, I could go in, uncheck that album and check the other one. Then the manager would upload the new album and the old one would be deleted (from Google Music). This could all be done from the browser without me needing to choose specific folders on my computer.

As far as playing music goes, I haven’t done much yet. I have an iPhone, so there’s no app to use for it, but it seems that Google Music does work in mobile Safari on both my iPhone and iPad which is neat. I won’t get to take advantage of the caching, but I can still control the music using the controls in the multitasking tray thing.

I’ll post more about it later.

Just a little while ago, Google announced that Chrome OS will finally be coming to devices that users can buy. Starting in the middle of next month, Acer and Samsung will have Chromebooks, as they’re called, on the market for between $350 and $500. You can read all about it, if you care.

If you’ve read my Google Cr-48 review from a few months back, you’d remember that I actually kind of liked it at the time. Since then, the novelty wore off…a lot. The notebook has become very good at collecting dust except for some occasional times when I needed to look up some stuff while working on my Amahi server and my MacBook Pro and iPad were downstairs. The problem became that the computer was just too sluggish and cumbersome to use for anything more than some web browsing. Even when it came down to typing up some blog entries, I preferred my MacBook Pro because of the better keyboard, more responsive user experience, and better trackpad.

I still consider it to be a sleek little machine and it has come in handy a couple times, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t present anything to compete against my iPad or a full-blown laptop. It’s really only worth owning because it was free and is sort of a collector’s item. The iPad, or any tablet, I would presume, provides a much better browsing and reading experience. I can get more comfortable while browsing and reading on my iPad. I can lay in bed, get comfortable on the couch, you name it. It’s more like reading a magazine or book. Just great. The iPad is also smoother and faster. The iPad only loses to the Cr-48 on the typing front. Typing on an iPad is not really as bad as you would think, but a “real” keyboard is always better. But that brings us to something else, if I want to type something longer than a few sentences, I’m going to grab my MacBook Pro. It’s got a better keyboard and having different applications and sites on the screen at the same time in windows makes it easier to reference other things. The Cr-48 simply can’t compete here. And unfortunately for the Cr-48, there’s no room in between, for me at least. I don’t want anything between a tablet and a notebook. And that is very different from where the iPad comes into play. I did want something between my iPhone and my notebook.

And to just drive one more stake into the Cr-48, it’s not even that useful as a cheap computer that I can bring on the go. For some, it will be, but not me. People who blog a lot or just do any kind of writing a lot may find a Chromebook better than a laptop because it’s lighter and still offers a decent typing experience. But for me, when I’m on the go and away from home and not wanting to bring a full-blown laptop, I want my iPad. I can dump RAW files from my DSLR to an iPad. At 22mb each and numbering in the hundreds or thousands (depending on how long of a time-frame we’re talking about), the RAW files are too much for a Chromebook with limited local storage and it’s not very realistic to be instantly uploading gigabytes of data to the cloud. Not only does this take too long, but any mobile datacaps would be destroyed before I finished. At home, when I want to work with my photos and edit them, a Cr-48 is useless. I need my MacBook Pro’s power. Hell, even the iPad can get me started with the use of Photosmith or Filterstorm Pro. An iPad 2 can actually edit RAW files, you can’t do that in the cloud yet. It’s just not feasible. Even my cheap netbook beats the Cr-48 here, it’s got local storage and costs the same as one of these Chromebooks will.  But, computers are for way more than photography stuff so this whole paragraph doesn’t apply to everyone, I’ll admit that.

Okay, so about these new Chromebooks in general and off of the specifics of the Cr-48. They should be a bit faster, but they still have Intel Atom processors and if owning a Cr-48 and a netbook has taught me anything, it’s that even newer generation ones are going to be slow. There’s just no way around it, they’re underpowered chips. And at the price points that they’ll be hitting, they’re a bit too expensive to beat out tablets. If they came in at $200, I think they’d have a fighting chance, but for the general consumer, $350-500 for a web-only computer that is barely useful when not connected to the internet is a bit much. There is some offline capability, but it’s only a few Google apps right now and it won’t be able to compete with tablet apps.

When comparing a $500 Chromebook to a $500 tablet, the tablet wins…not to say that there isn’t merit to having a physical keyboard, but the tablet is more versatile, I think. I even think a $500 tablet is a better buy than a $350 Chromebook. The tablet will almost certainly get a lot more use. A netbook is a better deal and those things are crappy as hell (I really have a vendetta against them after owning one). Besides, once you hit $500, you’re into the territory of good enough cheap laptops that the Chromebook has another competitor that it can’t really beat unless you need that instant on functionality. You can run Google Chrome on any Mac, Windows, or Linux laptop so you could just use that. A Chromebook really doesn’t offer much over a netbook or full-blown laptop, you actually get less.

If you change the price to $200, the Chromebook beats tablets, netbooks, and full-blown laptops, but that’s not reality.

Where I think a Chromebook can compete is in schools and in businesses. People’s data not getting lost when the Chromebook is lost/damaged (it’s all in the cloud), just about zero maintenance, and prices starting at $20/month and $28/month, respectively, are big pluses, but that monthly cost isn’t for the general public (they just get the lumpsum price). These are places where you need a physical keyboard too. A tablet won’t quite be up to task for writing lots of emails or school papers. I just don’t think this same thing applies for a general consumer though, I think the tablet wins.

So to sum it all up, I do like the idea of Chrome OS, but I think it came to fruition too late. Mobile OSes are good enough now where a web-only OS doesn’t have much of a place outside of a few specific sectors. For the money and what it offers, I just don’t think there’s a bit market for the Chromebook. There’s not enough of a place between the tablet and the full-blown notebook to fit in.

I think there was a time when it looked like the future of the computer was something like Chrome OS, but that was 3-5 years ago. Since then, an alternate reality actually happened where data does live in the cloud, but is accessed through apps as much as it is through the browser. The app may prove to be a temporary idea that will die out in a few years once HTML5 and such completely invades the internet, but right now, it’s king. Google Chrome and Chrome OS do bring apps to the table in the form of webapps that can be “installed,” but they’re not nearly as good offline (or even online) as iOS and Android apps. The form factor of computers and the way we interact with them is changing too. Out is the mouse and keyboard, in is touch. Touch isn’t a trend. Touching things on the screen to interact with them in the future of computing and the Chromebook isn’t that. The Chromebook really has one foot in the present and future (the cloud) and the other in the past (traditional form factor). Chrome OS may have touch support built-in/coming, but it won’t be able to touch Android and iOS. Those who need more than touch and actually need a keyboard and mouse/trackpad often need more than just a browser window in front of them too. Bloggers and writers may be the one exception to that, but I don’t think that’s a big enough segment to sustain the Chromebook, it’s only real hope is schools and business and they’re not a given either.

Oh, and don’t forget, Google has said that they think Chrome OS and Android will eventually merge into one project. So what kind of future are you buying into? Just get an Android tablet now and save yourself. Or get an iPad and get a tablet that’s actually useful today (I think Android tablets need another generation or two before they can really compete with iPads).

So I got myself an iPad 2, a nice fully loaded 64GB black one with 3G thanks to my fiancée and I having hit our wedding savings goal six months early. We’ve been wanting to get one to share for a long time now, but I was insistent on waiting for the second generation. After playing with it for a couple of days, I think I’m ready to type up a review…and I promise I’ve got some complaints down there.

Getting One
Since Apple didn’t do a preorder, the only way to get one before the weekend was to wait in line…and that’s what we did. Throughout the course of the day on Friday, I did my best to try to monitor the lines at Apple Stores around the country via Twitter, but I really couldn’t get a good read on the local situation. Some stores seemed to have crazy lines while others had nothing.

When it was finally time to head over to the store at 4pm, we really had no idea what to expect. We went to the store in the Bridgewater, NJ mall and when we walked in and started to head down to the first floor, we immediately saw an intense line. Hundreds deep. No one knew how many iPads were going to be in stock when 5PM finally rolled around and they opened up the doors so I was petty worried that we weren’t going to get one. I decided to increase our odds and ran across the street to Best Buy while the fiancée stayed in line at the Apple Store. The Best Buy line was much shorter, I was somewhere in the 60-70 range when I got there. I claimed my spot in line and waited. It had been announced that Best Buy would start handing out tickets at 4:30, but they didn’t. This process didn’t start until 5. Until then, the line continued to get longer as other people decided to come across from the mall and see what Best Buy could do for them.

When Best Buy finally started handing out tickets, they quickly ran out of the exact model that I wanted, a fully loaded model in black, 64GB WIFI+3G for AT&T (a little faster data than Verizon and useable overseas with a prepaid SIM card from a local carrier). This was apparently one of the most popular models. After this news broke, a few people left, but I decided to stay and see what they still had when the all-mighty ticket-giving guy got down to me.

Meanwhile over at the mall, my fiancée was being told by Apple employees that it was unlikely she would be able to get one considering where she was in line. Things were looking pretty unsure.

Eventually, Mr Ticket-Giver finally got down to me and still had a sizable stack of tickets left. I was pretty psyched that I’d be able to get one, but I knew I’d be getting my second choice. No worries, I’d just get what I could get and see how the fiancée made out. I actually could have gotten the model I wanted in white instead of black, but I’m just not feeling the white. I decided to go with the 64GB black Verizon model. I got my ticket and could barely have been happier (an AT&T model would have been the only way). I texted the fiancée and let her know we got one, but to still stay in line until I got over there to pick her up. Anyway, I was a bit surprised at how many tickets they still had, it turned out that the last person in line (maybe 130ish?)  got the very last ticket. Worked out pretty well.

Once I had my Best Buy ticket, I still had to stay in the line outside as they only let five people in at a time to actually buy their iPads. It wasn’t too much longer at this point though and once I got my our iPad, I hopped in the car and drove across the street.

I met my fiancée in line over at the Apple Store. She had about five more people ahead of her (remember, she was somewhere around 200-300 in line and I was only 60-70 at Best Buy with about a fifteen minute window from when I got mine in hand to when I got over to her). Once we got up to the front, we were informed that they too were sold out of the AT&T model. So instead, we picked up a 16GB white WIFI only model for my buddy (we had a reciprocal deal worked out for whoever was able to get their hands on them first).

When we left the Apple Store, there were still a couple hundred people waiting. I have no idea if everyone got an iPad or not.

First Impressions
Alright, so with what went into actually getting one into my hands out of the way, let’s talk about the iPad itself.

This thing is insanely thin. You really can’t get a sense for how thin it is until you hold it yourself. It’s thinner than my iPhone and even with the Smart Cover on, is just a hair thicker. It’s like holding a (heavy) clipboard. And this thinness actually makes a difference. Even though the device is a bit heavy (despite being slightly lighter than its predecessor), the thinness almost makes the hardware disappear while you’re using it. You forget you’re using a device and you just sink right into what you’re doing. It’s truly amazing and I realize what it sounds like to say something like that, but it really is true, this is unlike any other computing experience.

Hardware
The iPad 2 has a great feel to it. The workmanship and  design easily best any other tablet on the market right now, including both the original iPad and the new Motorola Xoom. The aluminum backing makes the device feel super sturdy and from an aesthetic standpoint, the device just looks great. The only real knock here is that the iPad is still a little heavy (though not when compared to competing tablets of the same screen size), at first you’re not quite sure the best way to hold it to keep your arm from getting tired, but you figure it out pretty quickly. The weight lets you know this isn’t a toy, this is a real computing device.

The screen is very good, but still not a Retina Display. The viewing angles on this thing really couldn’t get much better, the colors never wash out. It’s plenty bright as well. That being said, if you’ve used an iPhone 4, you will notice the difference in the pixel density. The display isn’t quite as crisp, however, this difference isn’t anything like when I pick up my fiancée’s iPhone 3GS. The iPad is crisper. Now, to be fair about this point, that’s when holding the devices at the same distance. You don’t hold an iPad as close to your eyes as you do a phone. Under actual use, the pixel density is a complete non-issue. You only notice it in comparison, not on its own.

Battery life is outstanding. The device comes charged to something like 75-80%. Other than while it was plugged into a computer to sync stuff a few times, we didn’t plug it in to charge until today and it has been in use almost constantly since we got it out of the box. We can’t put it down. Battery life will never been something anyone could complain about on this device. Ten hours of real world use will be no problem. I’ve seen some of the battery rundown tests from a few gadget sites and their tests are getting about 10.5 hours of life with tests that are probably a bit more intensive than your average usage. I’d say, expect more.

Put bluntly, the cameras are the weakest part of the device. The front camera is VGA and the rear one isn’t even 1MP for stills (takes 720p video). That’s pretty low-end. I would imagine that this choice was more of a size issue than a cost issue for Apple. Higher quality cameras wouldn’t have fit into a device this thin and I’ll take the thinness over the higher quality cameras. The quality is fine for video chatting, but you’re not going to be taking stills with them. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Really. Even if the cameras were as good or better than an iPhone 4, holding up a 10″ device to take a photo is just all kinds of awkward. A tablet is never going to be heavily used as a camera, it just doesn’t fit the form-factor of the device. Besides, I don’t know about most people, but I will never have this thing with me and not have my phone which takes excellent photos just as close. It’s a non-issue.

The speed on this thing is redonkulous. I’ve never actually typed “redonkulous” before, but it feels appropriate. It just flies. Everything is so smooth, it makes my iPhone 4 feel slow and that takes a lot for a mobile device. iFixit’s teardown of the device actually showed that the A5 processor (built on a Cortext A9 dual-core chip) is actually not even running at a full 1GHz, it’s underclocked to around 900MHz. On paper, the A5 compares pretty evenly with Tegra 2 chips that run the Motorola Xoom and benchmarking puts CPU performance neck-and-neck. But in actual use, the iPad 2 just responds so much more smoothly than the Xoom, in my opinion. Graphics processing on the other hand, the iPad 2′s A5 smokes the Xoom’s Tegra 2. Games on this thing will fly. Existing iPad games already run much smoother, but once developers start taking advantage of this hardware, it’s going to be ridiculous. I’ve read a bit about the benchmarks for the graphics processing and the general consensus of all the articles and reports I’ve read is that it’s not even fair to put the two platforms on the same graph, the iPad 2 pretty much embarrasses the Xoom.

Okay, so that was a bit of nerding out, let’s talk actual real world performance…it’s nuts. The iPad 2 is a workhorse. The device runs incredibly smoothly. Apps launch instantly and run with no limitation, they just do their thing with no holdups from the hardware. I was reading some tweets by the developer of Filterstorm and he’s finding that he can drop full resolution RAW files from a DSLR into his app and work with them like it’s nothing. Nuts. This better mean that Adobe gets on the ball to get a Lightroom app into the App Store and, better yet, into my face.

The iPad 2 has 512MB of RAM which is twice as much as the first iPad, but only half as much as the Xoom and other competing tablets coming out soon. In practice, this doesn’t seem to limit anything, I dumped a bunch of RAW photos from my camera and could swipe through them like they’re nothing. Apps don’t seem limited at all. We’ll see what happens, but it seems like enough.

Simply put, on the hardware side, wow.

My only hardware complaint besides the display, which really doesn’t even lack in actual usage, is the lack of an SD slot. I got the camera connection kit and I don’t mind the $29 cost of it that much, but it’s just another dongle to try not to lose and make sure that I always have with me. I plan on using this a lot with my camera to dump photos to and maybe even be able to start editing some before I get home so having a built in SD slot would have been pretty solid.

Software
On the software front, we get basically the same old iOS that we’ve been play with since June of last year. My personal preference is iOS over Android (that’s a discussion for another day), but I do like Android and what it brings to the table a lot. iOS is a clean and smooth mobile operating system that likes to keep things very closed up, but this attitude is what makes the device not only “just work,” but just work smoothly and quickly.

iOS is great, but there are some big issues that I have with it that seriously better get fixed in iOS 5. I actually had two basic complaints, but now that I’ve been using this, I’ve got a third. One of the initial two complaints is much less apparent on an iPad than on an iPhone and the other is the opposite. Firstly, the damn notification system. It’s awful. There’s not much else you can say about it. Luckily, there are less notifications to get on an iPad than on your phone so this is a little less of a problem, but if you’re still planning on using a lot of push notifications, you’re going to find this just as annoying as on an iPhone. iOS is the only modern mobile OS that still hasn’t gotten notifications under control, Apple must fix this.

The second complaint, and this is the one that’s really apparent on an iPad, is that there are no widgets. I don’t want much, but I would like to be able to see calendar events and weather and such right on the homescreen without going into an app. The homescreen looks nice and clean without it, but this slight break in cleanness would be worth the usability. Besides, you know if Apple were to add this, they’d make it look all nice like.

The wildcard complaint, the new one, is that Apple hasn’t yet built in a nice way for iDevices to work together. Before the iPad, this wasn’t really an issue, but it would be really nice to be able to send links/files/apps/photos/videos/whatever back and forth wirelessly without another app or anything. I just want the devices to know the others exist and communicate with each other. I’d also like this from my Mac as well, please. This isn’t a dealbreaker, photos and videos can be transfered from an iPhone to an iPad with the camera connection kit and Bump can also move some stuff between the two, but why should this require a third-party app? If third party developers can make it happen, Apple should be able to build it in.

Alright, so anyway, iOS 4.3 is what we’ve got for not and despite those complaints, it runs great and gets the job done. It’s reliable and it’s clean. I’m a fan. I don’t miss Flash. I really don’t. Most video on the internet is HTML5 by  now and Flash is a crappy resource hog…even on a computer.

Photobooth is kind of pointless and I haven’t installed Garageband or messed around with iMovie yet so I can’t comment about them myself, but the reviews I’ve read are full of praise. I also haven’t tried FaceTime yet…in fact, I’ve only used it exactly once on my iPhone so I probably won’t be using it on the iPad anytime soon.

I’m still checking out more third party iPad-optimized apps, but I’m really digging Air Display which lets you use the iPad as a second display for your computer. It works via WIFI and is really good. There is some noticeable lag, but it’s very minimal. You can’t play video (well) or games on it, but for just having other things visible, it’s great.

Oh, and I enabled the extra gestures that make the home button unnecessary and I’m digging them a lot. I’d suggest it if you have one.

Smart Cover
This is pure genius. It’s not an entirely brand new idea to have a cover that can also be a stand, but the way that it can fold into a stand for two different positions is great. Attaching it is quick and easy too. There really is no fuss to this, the magnets pull it right into place and it’s perfectly lined up every time. It’s the easiest to attach case that’s ever exist for a gadget, hands down. And it stays on too. The magnets are stronger than you think.

Opening the cover wakes up the iPad without the lock screen and you’re good to go. Closing it puts it to sleep. It just happens…like the refrigerator light. It’s well thought out and a great addition to the device.

Other Thoughts
I didn’t  have an iPad 1, so the actual owning a tablet thing is new to me, but I have used others here and there to try out. So far, I’m finding that typing on this thing is much easier than I thought. I’ve got a good one handed thing going on with it and when putting it down and typing with two hands, it’s not too bad. I wouldn’t want to type a book on it and I only got through part of this review on it before wanting to switch to a real keyboard, but it’s more than good enough to get the job done.

A lot of people still question the need for tablets and I get that, but I also do agree that they are the future for most computer use. They won’t be great for everything, but general/casual computing actually feels better on a tablet than on a traditional computer. I’ve found that web browsing and social networking is a more comfortable and informal experience on an iPad. I can sit back on the couch and find a comfortable position without needing to worry about placing my computer on my lap. It really is ideal when you’re not typing a whole lot.

Compared to the Motorola Xoom
I had a few minutes to play with a Motorola Xoom today and I’ll be honest and say that it’s pretty a nifty and overall solid device. However, when you compare it to the iPad 2, it just doesn’t hold up. The Xoom’s Honeycomb version of Android is nice and the widgets and various things on the homescreen are useful, but they seem to make it feel cluttered and messy. iOS just feels cleaner. The Xoom also seemed decently powerful, but at the same time it wasn’t nearly as responsive and fluid. Despite having a solid notification system and a nicer app-switching UI, Honeycomb is lacking that smoothness and polish that the iPad has. The Xoom’s cameras are definitely better, but it was awkward holding the device up to take a photos with them. Like I said, non-issue.

The Moto Xoom seems to do a lot well, but but it also lacks in a lot of ways and in the end loses out to the iPad 2, in my opinion.

Photos

Thanks to my fiancée’s Valentine’s Day gift to me, Bender, my MacBook Pro got a very appropriate tattoo.

The decal is from LapTatt.com.

Yup, still alive over here and still hardly posting! There just hasn’t been much going on to post about. I haven’t seen any movies besides The Green Hornet (I’m probably going to go see Gnomeo and Juliet this weekend), I haven’t been allowed to run because I’m trying to get over my ankle pain, I haven’t been taking many photos because I need to finish getting through my Disney ones.

Excuses!

Oh, and part of what’s slowing down the Disney photo processing is the file server meltdown that I’ve been dealing with at home. Long story short, all my media is kept on a home server and it’s been having problems lately so I don’t really have much access to it until that’s sorted out.  My MacBook Pro is running out of hard drive space for stuff that I’d normally keep on my server (gigs and gigs of photos, music, and video) and making sure I’ve got two complete backups of all my data before blowing the server away and reinstalling Windows Home Server starting fresh with Amahi Home Server has been a two weeks and counting process. I’m getting close though. Also, because of that, I haven’t really be able to put any new music on my iPod in a while so I’ve got nothing to post about on that front either.

Anyway, I’m just about done with the photos (they’re been processed, they just need to be tagged), which I’ve already posted many of on Facebook, so I’ll post those here in the next week or so probably. If you’ve seen them on Facebook, then you’ve seen a larger, but less organized selection than I’ll be posting here.

I’ve also been meaning to add more to the nerd post count here by doing a Lifehacker-style “what I use” kind of thing. Maybe I’ll actually finish that and post it too.

And lastly, I’ll be hitting up the first day of the Don Giovanni showcase on Friday so I’ll probably have some photos or something to say about that.

Alright, yeah.

For many, Apple is a love ‘em or hate ‘em company. Some don’t like their closed systems and some still think there’s an Apple tax (there isn’t, but that’s not a discussion for right now). Many, including me and my fiancée, really just enjoy their products and find them to beat the competition for overall experience and what we’re looking for. That’s not what this post is about though. This is about something else.

Two days ago, my fiancée’s iPhone 3GS decided to go swimming. Okay, in reality, it was her fault 100%. She accidentally left it in the pocket of her jacket when she put it in the washer. She quickly realized and pulled it out, but it had already been mostly submerged by this point. Acting quickly, she threw it in a bag of rice and when I got home shortly after that, I took the phone apart to speed up the drying process and put it back in the rice. We were hopeful that we had saved it, but we both knew that the phone probably wasn’t going to make it. I could clearly see all of the liquid detection indicators inside had been tripped.

We let the phone sit for a day and a half in the rice before I put it back together and tried to turn it on. The next couple of hours were spent trying to get the phone out of an endless boot cycle. It wasn’t completely dead, but wouldn’t fully turn on either. We got nothing but the Apple logo on a very clearly waterlogged screen that at least still worked if you didn’t mind the water swirls. I plugged it into my computer to try and see if I could do a restore and, to my surprise, iTunes recognized the phone and would sync it and back it up (I was sure to only backup on my computer and not hers to avoid any chance of corrupting her backup and losing stuff forever). I ran the restore process successfully, but the phone still would not boot.

After being stuck in the endless boot cycle for a while and restoring a couple more times, I gave up. I took the phone apart again and threw it back in the rice. I knew that if there was still moisture, everything I just did probably sealed the phone’s fate and letting it dry more wasn’t going to do anything at this point. Still, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

Today, we made an appointment at the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store. After work, we came home and I put the phone back together so we could bring it over there. This time, the phone wouldn’t turn on at all. It seemed completely dead.

Now, I explained all that because this is exactly what I told the Apple genius. I was completely straight about it. The phone had water damage, it was our fault, and I even took it apart (which would have voided the warranty if it was still covered). Why beat around the bush? They can tell if a phone has water damage and lying wasn’t going to help anything. At least, if he knew what happened, he would know what steps to take.

He plugged the phone into a computer and it seemed like the battery was just completely dead. We let it charge for a bit and he restored it, but the phone still would not boot. While we were waiting, I asked him what our options were and I was frank with him. I told him that we really didn’t want to sign another two year contract with AT&T and buy an iPhone 4 more than half way into its lifecycle. He totally got that and basically agreed that if that was our thought process then it made sense for us not to.

Coincidentally, the genius that helped us had actually seen that same phone before. I remembered him from a while back when the screen was acting funny and we took it in. It turned out to just be a cable that had come unseated inside and he fixed it in about two minutes. After he explained what it was, I asked if he wouldn’t mind double checking the cable on my phone (I still had a 3GS at the time) just in case. He had no problem taking a look for me and didn’t even care that my phone was jailbroken–he just reminded me that if I had a problem, I’d have to restore and unjailbreak before bringing it back. Anyway, I mentioned that to him and we chatted a bit.

Back to the point, he looked up my fiancée’s account and came back and said “I’m just going to replace this for you.” I was pretty shocked, we had prepared ourselves for re-upping with AT&T and plunking down $200 for a new iPhone 4 (this would have also killed my iPhone 5 upgrade plan since I had the idea of taking her upgrade and giving her my current iPhone 4, a plan she was okay with). I was hoping it wouldn’t come to all that and we could at least just buy a 3GS refurb cheaply or something. So when we were told that they were going to take care of us, I was pretty stoked. The guy simply said that he’d rather see us leave happy than have to decide if we wanted to sign a new 2 year contract with AT&T and get an iPhone 4 halfway through it’s lifecycle.

What other company would do this? Seriously? Companies don’t replace water damaged products, nor should they. A water damaged product is clearly the user’s mistake, not theirs. Apple didn’t need to do this, but they did…and it was their idea. The entire time, the genius was very friendly, happy, and kept small talk with us. There is nothing else we could have asked for from the experience. Actually, they could have done a lot less and we still would have been happy.

This is one of the reasons why Apple will continue to get my money. I’m no fanboy, but despite their flaws, they just do most things better.