I love my iPad and one of the things I’ve been doing recently has been using it to view movies. Since I have the smallest capacity iPad I’ve been using a great program called Air Video Server which allows me to stream movies from one of my home computers to the iPad over a TCP/IP connection.
This works fabulously at home, where I have fallen asleep to Miracle.
It doesn’t work so fabulously away from home. It could–I have no problem connecting to the server from elsewhere. But it doesn’t, because the uplink speed of my Time Warner Cable RoadRunner Internet service is capped at one megabit per second.
That’s really pathetic.
I would so love to be able to use this program from just about anywhere on the ‘Net. We need faster broadband. That would make this so great.
I would really like to have some (more) eBooks on my iPad. While I am not much of a reader (especially of fiction), it’s clear to me that I would read much more if I could get books on the iPad.
There’s also no shortage of eBook readers for the iPad. Besides Apple’s iBooks application there’s also a Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle application, plus others. Google Books has a bunch of freely available eBooks too.
Yet the eBooks I really want access to are the ones that my public library lends out through their Overdrive program. Unfortunately, since these books are electronically copy protected they are not easily transferrable to my iPad.
If this is addressed, I think I really will become an eBook convert.
I’m writing this at Good to Grill, a local eatery in Honolulu that I would likely never have frequented except for Twitter.
I just finished off their $9.99 prime rib special for lunch on a weekend–that I would not have heard of if not for Twitter.
Earlier today, I gave some tech support over Twitter. And I heard about 4 gigabyte flash drives for $10 at WalMart on Twitter.
There’s a lot of financial power in my life afforded to Twitter.
When my dad got my sister and I a computer–an Apple II Plus which still works–for the first time in 1982, computers were really expensive–the II Plus was well over $1300 with two 5.25 inch floppy drives–or not so expensive but really of poor quality.
Today, a Netbook is often in the $200 range and a fantastic notebook desktop can be had for under $1,000. Yes, any amount of money could be spent, but computing power becomes cheaper all the time.
Which means more and more people can afford to be using them, increasing productivity and participation in activities like computer programming and gaming.
My ten year old niece has had three computers already. When I was her age, computers were restricted to businesses and government agencies.
It’s wild to see how much the price of technology has come; let’s see how far technology take us in the future!
While the Kindle has been the leader in the electronic book reader realm for some time, the introduction of the iPad undoubtedly took some wind out of their sails. In the meantime, the Barnes & Noble Nook has provided direct Kindle competition–as well as price competition.
Now, with the announcement of the Kindle 3, prices have dropped dramatically.
Two models were announced: the WiFi only Kindle (all previous Kindles included 3G capabilities) for $139 and a 3G, traditional style Kindle for $189.
No, these readers do not have color capability–they seem in many ways similar to the previous Kindles, just for less.
Let’s see how these newly priced Kindles do in the market.
Or at least its leader, Steve Ballmer, feels it. A CNNMoney.com story says that Mr. Ballmer has his company working hard with their hardware partners to develop Windows 7 based tablet computers to compete with Apple’s iPad.
Interestingly, Microsoft has had tablet versions of Windows XP dating back to at least 2001.
So it’s not like they haven’t had the market lead for a long, long time. They just haven’t been able to keep it.
In addition to that, I have a lot of misgivings about Windows 7 working well on a tablet computer, as well as the price of that operating system.
However, we shall see, Competition, particularly in tech, is a great thing.
Apparently, for many, too hard.
A Fortune article this past week says that buying online is a pain, which is one of the reasons so many online retailers, large and small, have turned to PayPal, Amazon, and Apple to sell their wares rather than their own online shops, even though these can have substantial fees associated.
The reason: in all likelihood if you’re buying online, PayPal, Amazon, and/or Apple already have your credit card information.
There are new solutions on the market (Boku and Zong, neither of which I’d heard of before this article) to assist, using phone numbers to bill, but their fees are even higher.
Somehow, technology must come up with an easy way to solve this soon.
As part of the #whitetwedding2010 I attended last Wednesday, 4G wireless hotspots were used to provide Internet access for the guests as well as for a live video stream for all the Internet to see.
I was in charge of making sure all of that worked. And it did, with varying degrees of headache.
One of the hotspots I used was the Sprint Overdrive, and two others were Clear USB modems with Cradlepoint (or rebranded for Clear Cradlepoint made) routers. . In Hawai’i (or at least O’ahu) we have several vendors of 4G: Sprint, Clear, and Road Runner, although they all appear to be using the same network and the same WiMax technology.
First off: the Overdrive performed very poorly–so poorly in fact that I gave up on it after messing with it for about an hour. The USB modems with Cradlepoint routers performed much better.
When we had a strong signal, the 4G worked well–perhaps not incredibly, but more than well enough for our purposes. We got download speeds approaching two megabits, but that was not really what we were looking for–we also got upload speeds about one megabit, which was what we needed for the video.
The issue, however, is that the speed was very dependent on location–a few feet in a different location would mean speed drop offs of more than 50%. The modems also take much longer to connect than the older but still prevalent 3G modems of which I have one.
For a comparison at home of how 3G vs. 4G fared, see this.
We got the results we wanted but it involved a lot of work and a lot of searching for the best location. So, while I liked the results, I’m unconvinced that at least in Hawai’i, 4G is ready for prime time.
Antenna issues aside, the iPhone 4 is a sales success, no question. One of the new features it brings is its FaceTime video calling with front facing camera–it allows users to make video calls to others with an iPhone 4.
I haven’t tried it myself, but it could be a killer feature (if not its current iteration, perhaps an alternative like what Fring brings). While front facing cameras and video chat have been available on European mobile phones for several years, they have yet to make much of an impression.
However, Apple is selling FaceTime as a way to be connected to your family. If, for instance, there’s a new family member (a baby) somewhere and both you and that family member have iPhone 4s, you can see a lot of that baby even if you’re a world away.
That might be a huge selling point for a lot of potential iPhone 4 owners.
It seems that there are location based services all over the place. Brightkite, FourSquare, GoWalla, and others have its members check in and often give both intangible (like mayorships on FourSquare) and tangible (like iPod nanos or eyeFi memory cards on GoWalla) rewards for doing so.
The feeling is that if someone’s location is known, Internet based advertisers can serve up ads based on what’s near you.
Now, if this really is the future of tech, there ought to be a way to capitalize on this monetarily, such as investing in one of these companies, but at the same time, none of them have shown they’re going to be profitable.
Call me skeptical on this future of technology.
