LaughingMan

Pay $9.99/month and still get ads? Lame.

Virgin America for the win. Their entire fleet, consisting of Airbus 319 and 320s are all wifi enabled with gogo.

neptronix :

http://priuschat.com/news/2010-toyota-prius-abs-brake-recall-less-than-a-minute

The ABS braking issue was fixed several months ago as SSC-A0B.

@ebgolfin

You are right that the iPad was designed from the ground up to be a companion device that absolutely 100% depends on iTunes on a PC or a Mac for backing up, syncing, whatever. It is just like the iPod or iPhone in that regard. Not surprising.

It is however, apropos to criticize the fact that it is a companion device just like the iPod. It is the source of some very befuddling limitations.

For example, Steve Jobs has said as much that the iPad will not tether with an iPhone's 3G connection, even if the carrier supports it, and you purchase a tethering plan for the iPhone. Technically, it is a very simple thing to implement via Bluetooth, but Apple will not allow it.

The iPad will have a full suite of productivity applications from Apple, but if someone hands you a USB key in a meeting with a slidedeck or a word document to look at, you'd better hope that there's a PC or Mac nearby, because the iPad is a companion device, and doesn't have USB Host capability...

It's things like these that truly irk a lot of consumers. Apple's point of view is that they can limit the functionality because the iPad is a companion device for a Mac, not a Mac... the iPad is not supposed to have that autonomy.

I think a lot of people have a desire for this kind of autonomy though. That is one area where the iPad doesn't deliver. It's a companion device, inexorably dependent on a host.

@Major Payne

Apple doesn't necessarily make a surefire winner every time out of the gate. There are moments when even when they put their entire company's resources into a product, it just doesn't take off.

In recent memory, the following products have had a mediocre to just OK reception : Apple TV. MacBook Air.

And they have had absolute bombs in the Steve Jobs era too. The iPod hifi (anyone remember that?). The PowerMac G4 Cube.

The Cube especially was extremely hyped up, and you can tell that Steve put his heart and soul into it, and it had to be put on ice soon after release.

@Kelmon

I can concede that Apple's touch screen interface on the iPhone and iPod touch are pretty well suited for the small screen size. The adaptive text correction is crucial, and I can type fairly quickly on my iPhone's touchscreen.

But using the iPad will not be the same as the iPhone in this regard. The iPhone's keyboard, whether oriented portrait or landscape, is designed for two thumbs typing. The goal of the iPad keyboard, at least according to Steve Jobs, is to approach the size of a laptop keyboard, meaning that you'll be expected to use all of your normal typing fingers.

I am a pure touch typist, all the way, and what this means is that i simply cannot rest my idle fingers on the touchscreen, lest they be construed as touch input. What this means is that you'll have likely most of your fingers of both hands floating above the iPad as you are typing. The problem there is that without a firm base, your floating fingers or your whole hands will eventually drift without you constantly looking at your fingers to visually align them, which is contrary to touch typing to begin with.

Secondly, others have brought up the issue of ergonomics, and I have to echo this point. With a laptop today resting on a table, the screen is at an obtuse angle from the keyboard, and allows your back and neck and head to be more upright as you are typing. With the iPad resting on a table, since the screen itself is a typing surface, there will be a tendency to hunch over your fingers to get the same view.

Since all of your fingers are engaged in typing, there's nothing to stabilize the base of the iPad when you are typing on your lap for example... hilariously, the solution presented in the iPad videos is to balance the thing with your crotch and your legs...

I am with John Gruber on this one. These most basic of apps work fine on the iPhone and iPod touch because they comfortably fill the whole onscreen UI, but it's difficult to imagine a 1024 x 768 FULLSCREEN clock or stock ticker application.

To me, this points to a very serious flaw of Apple's decision to simply extend the iPhone OS as is to a bigger 1024 x 768 screen of the iPad.

The iPhone OS only supports a single running application that must fill the whole screen. On a small screen of the iPod touch or iPhone, widget applications make sense to fill the screen, but not on the iPad.

By choosing the iPhone OS, they've pretty much abandoned the windowed user interface metaphor that Apple pioneered with the Mac way back in the 80s, and gone back to a metaphor where every app must fill the whole screen corner to corner. If you're working on a spreadsheet, a calculator can't be quickly brought to the front and layered on top of your spreadsheet app to help you work.

Clearly Apple has recognized this as an issue... this is why they'd rather have nothing at all there for Clock, Weather, Stocks, etc than to be embarrassed by the result...

But this leads to another question. How will Apple deal with the potential iPad app developers that will want to develop similar "widget" type applications that will be nonoptimal in a 1024 x 768 environment too?

Will we have a wave of ugly pixelated 3rd party applications with sparse user interfaces that don't completely use the iPad's screen real estate?

@reader1

How about this one?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

I'm pretty sure the Escapist and Zero Punctuation are not junk, and are wholly ad supported.

@reader1

I don't think it's a good idea to use Comedy Central as your posterchild for why Flash is dying.

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report web sites are packed to the brim with Flash.

I'm not a huge fan of Flash, but I recognize that commercially, it is still very important going into the future. Right now, Flash provides a company like Viacom (owner of Comedy Central) the infrastructure to run ads before any clip you want to watch, or to display a popup on top of any clip.

Flash is the basis for quite a lot of ad revenue dollars that go into running a web site like dailyshow.com or colbertnation.com. Perhaps HTML5 will have the capability in the future, but keep in mind that Flash is entrenched in the ad-supported web video market.

Gamefly is renting it. Consider a free trial. You'll get the game by the end of next week if you put it on your queue immediately.