Online shared intelligence

I have been using the iPad for two days, savoring its nuances and details. I will spare you the review (good reviews have been already written). Rather, I am going to share with my belief that Apple has been finally castrated by suits. Innovation is dead, long live good business. So much care has been put into making sure that the (increasingly stale) advantage Apple holds in packaging and integration is preserved and protected from cannibalization, that the iPad (and the company, and Jobs) have lost their balls.

Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. 

Apple is becoming more and more Big Brother and less and less the innovator; that is wrong, and outbalances their ability to deliver well-packaged functionality. It’s time to start favoring other challengers, and the phone market is full of them.

A friend asked me if I was planning to get an iPad. I started answering “I haven’t decided yet” and then, without even an inflection on my voice, before ending the sentence I added to it “why I will buy it”. In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode… So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time, and get back to check the accuracy of my predictions in four months.

I really have no idea, I just heard the rumor. But for some reason, the driver for the MiFi is already built into OS X since 10.4 (As just read from the MiFi manual). Connect the dots:

• The MiFi is the killer enabler for netbooks-like computers;
• The netbooks have miniaturized to the point where they are becoming to use a keyboard and/or a good screen at the same time
• The Windows tablet is horrible, but an Apple one, with an iPod / iPhone interface would be awesome
• The iBlet (like the name?) is the drooling dream of anybody using iPods, iPhones, Macs, and quite a few Win-zealots

If it happens before September, send me a cookie. If it’s called iBlet, send me an email and I will send YOU the cookie.

The MiFi is not a revolutionary concept, or a totally new product. But I tell you, it will revolutionize the way people like me work. Constant connectivity in a computer with true computer ergonomics is now a reality

Patterns on use of Nokia N810: how the N810’s particular convergence of memory size, connectivity, processing speed, storage and UI bandwidth gets very close to ideal for me

I am using the Nokia N810 more and more, and finding myself increasingly charmed by the device, its community, and Nokia itself. I find that uncommon (I am increasingly disenchanted with technologies, and hold very little respect for its ability to do any good), but at the same time somehow enjoyable. Well beyond the point at which I hit the hype curve’s down-slide with other gadgets, I keep finding more reasons to like it. That is strange…