[cue dirge]

I'm talking about Patrick Smith's leather flight case, pictured above. After more than 20 years of service this festively adorned briefcase has been retired.

It was the only flight bag I ever owned. (The handle, just out of view, has been repaired with hockey tape.) It traveled with me, secure in its cockpit cubbyhole, on assignments to five continents and who knows how many countries. The stickers have changed many times (the Thailand decal is the oldest, dating from 1993), but the rest of it, battered and scraped and patched, is unchanged.

I purchased it in August 1990, at a pilot supply shop in a hangar at the airport in Bangor, Maine. BGR was headquarters for the first airline I ever worked at -- something called Northeast Express Regional Airlines. We were one of the old "Airlink" affiliates that flew on behalf of Northwest.

Continue Reading...

Dear Friends, I just launched News.va  Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI

But in the age of virtual identity theft and Catfishing, how do we know that this tweet was actually written by the papal leader himself? Simple: Time magazine has a video of Pope Benedict poking confusedly at an iPad while an archbishop touches the screen for him.

Continue Reading...

Hewlett Packard's consumer PC sales dropped 23 percent, Dell's fell by 7.5 percent, and Microsoft Windows sales fell by 4.4 percent.

The popularity of the iPad is clearly one major factor, but buried deep in the story is an intriguing hint of another. Computer systems sales to corporations appear robust, but consumers are holding back:

In a conference call yesterday, [HP CEO Leo] Apotheker bemoaned a "bifurcated" PC market, where companies are spending and consumers aren't. Sales in the company's personal systems group fell 5.4 percent to $9.42 billion last quarter.

What could explain such a phenomenon, aside from the iPad craze?

How about the fact that corporate balance sheets are doing great, but unemployment is at 9 percent?

Continue Reading...

"Angry Birds isn't a video game," I replied. "You only play it on your phone or iPad."

On a more fundamental level, though, I don't believe that one "likes" or "dislikes" Angry Birds. It's more like the drug Substance D in Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly": you've either tried it, or you haven't. If you've played Angry Birds once, chances are you own the game and your friends have to hide your phone from you so that you'll make eye contact with them during conversation. Perhaps you even wrote a fan fiction about the iOS game. If you haven't played it, you don't understand what's so fun about throwing birds at pigs. So let's be clear: It's not fun playing Angry Birds. You just have to.

Continue Reading...

From Bloomberg:

Consumer PC shipments dropped 8 percent in the quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein said. Netbooks -- the cheap laptops that became popular during the recession -- plunged 40 percent, partially because of defections to tablet computers, he said.

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad 15 months ago, critical appraisals were all over the map, from effusive to dismissive, but I don't think even the most gaga fanboy predicted that in little more than year the tablet would have meaningfully reshaped the entire personal computing industry.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Schedule:

9 a.m.: "Crowdsourcing Interactive Strategic Content Design and the Ubiquitous User Experience" (lecture) -- Learn this year's hottest empty buzzwords to use in presentations to possible investors of your start-up from the leading self-proclaimed experts in the industry, none of whom you've ever heard of.

10:30 a.m.: "Malcolm Gladwell: Genius or over-rated hack who has no idea what he's talking about?" (panel) – Several professors and more experts you've never heard of will tell you exactly why it's not cool to like "The Tipping Point" anymore.

Continue Reading...

Here's a breakdown of all the new features:

Faster processor
Featuring the new Dual-core A5 processor, the iPad 2 will be twice as fast as the current iPad -- graphics should perform 9x faster, says Apple. Despite the more demanding processor performance, the iPad 2 will feature the same 10-hour battery life as the original iPad

Two colors, Two networks
The iPad will come in white and black and will be available on both AT&T and Verizon networks.

Thinner, lighter design
In addition to being 33 percent thinner -- a few millimeters slimmer than the iPhone 4 -- the iPad 2 weighs just 1.3 pounds instead of the 1.5-pound iPad original.

HDMI output
The iPad 2 provides HDMI video output with resolution up to 1080p. An extra $39 adaptor needs to be purchased and allows you to charge your iPad while using.

New case
A new Apple cover will also be available. It magnetically grasps the screen to prevent slipping, automatically wakes/sleeps the iPad, cleans the screen and comes in polyurethane or leather.

Updated operating system
With the release of the iPad 2, Apple will also unveil iOS 4.3 which boasts better Safari performance, iTunes home sharing, and new preferences for the iPad switch. BONUS: The iPhone 4 will become a personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

Improved iLife software -- including iMovie and Garage Band
With the addition of dual video cameras, you can now use iMovie to make and edit video on the iPad. The new Garage Band allows you to turn your iPad into a musical instrument with full size, touch screen interfaces for guitars, drums, pianos and more. Garage Band and iMove are available in the App Store for $4.99 each.

Continue Reading...

The invitations Apple sent out show a calendar page tearing away to reveal the top corner of the popular tablet computer. And the event will be held at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts -- the same location where the iPad was unveiled in January 2010.

Continue Reading...

(Will The Daily make me obsolete? Will The Daily pay my mortgage?)

(Who am I kidding, will The Daily pay my rent -- for the hole I'm renting from toothless glue addicts?)

The reviews -- as the cliché goes -- have been mixed:

• Huffington Post's Larry Magid is hardly a fan, citing a "yesterday's news" problem that plagues dead tree screeds.

• Jack Shafer: ''I'd say that The Daily is more about establishing a new business model, with an efficient pay wall, than embracing a new medium.''

Continue Reading...

However, news of the company's monster success, accredited largely to holiday sales of the iPhone4, iPad and Macs, was overshadowed by the disclosure that the company's CEO, Steve Jobs, is taking medical leave.

Jobs has suffered pancreatic cancer in the past and took six months off in 2009 when he underwent a liver transplant. He has provided no timeline of when he'll be back to Apple, if at all. Apple's COO Tim Cook will take over the day-to-day operations of the company.

Continue Reading...

Apparently, the answer is yes. The Guardian writes that this new publication will feature "a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence" (funny, that's pretty much how David Talbot described Salon when we started it!) and tells us:

According to reports, there will be no "print edition" or "web edition"; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices. With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

Continue Reading...

I'll be taking a more thorough look at its many features in an upcoming post, so don't think of this as a review. Rather, consider this a welcome to the overdue competition in an arena that Apple has pretty much owned.

Now, the Galaxy Tab isn't going to dislodge Apple from its high ground, at least in terms of market share. The iPad has a lead on the competition, and Apple has created a huge ecosystem around its mobile devices -- a smorgasbord of hardware and software add-ons that Samsung and other providers of Android-based devices haven't begun to match.

But if you were looking for a choice, you have one now. And in a few months you'll have many, many more choices.

Continue Reading...

Verizon Wireless on Wednesday said it will start selling Samsung Electronics Co.'s tablet computer, which is half the size of the iPad, for $600. That's more than the basic version of Apple Inc.'s tablet.

Verizon will start selling the Samsung Galaxy Tab on Nov. 11. It has screen that measures 7 inches diagonally and runs Google Inc.'s Android software. Access to Verizon's cellular data network will cost $20 per month for up to 1 gigabyte of traffic. The tablet has two cameras, which could be used for videoconferencing. The iPad has no camera.

Verizon will start selling the iPad on Oct. 28, starting at $499. It can't access Verizon's network directly, but the carrier will sell an add-on gadget for about $130 that bridges the gap, with the same $20 data plan.

Continue Reading...

• The market research firm iSuppli reports that "the number of worldwide subscriptions for wireless services is expected to reach 5 billion this month." That's equal to 73.4 percent of the world's population.
• Best Buy's CEO told the Wall Street Journal that "internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50 percent."
• Apple finally started officially selling the iPad in China, the world's hottest and biggest market for wireless devices. Press reports indicate that the launch is a huge success. Apple may end up selling as many as 12 million iPads in 2010.

After reviewing the data, one can only conclude that by the end of the decade, every human being on the planet will own a tablet computer. OK, maybe not everyone. But even making a joke about tablets conquering all would have seemed far fetched at the beginning of 2010. I'm not sure what the most important implications of having seven billion or so people all connected wirelessly together via their mega-powerful handheld devices will be, but that future is just about here.

Continue Reading...

Discussion of these guidelines in the tech press initially framed the move as a "relaxation" of Apple's policies, because the company will now allow developers to use third-party frameworks and toolkits. But view the guidelines from the perspective of content publishing and "relaxation" is not the word that will spring to mind.

This item stands out:

Continue Reading...

The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab is ready to compete with the insanely successful iPad, and with its unrestricted applications, multitasking capability, and larger storage capacity, it might prove itself to be a contender. Side-by-side comparisons are already flooding the Internet, and the technical specs are being dissected by the nerdiest of us all. The Galaxy Tab made its debut at the IFA Consumer Electronics show in Berlin today, and was only one of numerous gadgety reveals. An astute Guardian columnist writes about the sweet spot for tablet screens and batteries. Toshiba has its mind on pulverizing the iPad as well. We want a fair fight, ladies. No scratching.

Continue Reading...

That was part of it, I realized, trying to analyze my own ridiculous, knee-jerk judgment of this stranger. I couldn't see what she was reading, and it bothered me. I couldn't peer in that tiny window onto someone's interior world, or delight in the juxtaposition that a book choice sometimes presents -- when you notice a stuffy, 90-something grandma buried in a trashy romance novel, or a would-be gangsta engrossed in "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

More scuttlebutt surrounds Apple's negotiations with the TV networks to offer new episodes of hit shows less than 24 hours after they've aired -- with no commercials. Consumers could rent the programs for 99 cents, and the "à la carte" option would help Apple compete directly with Netflix and Hulu. Not everyone thinks Apple will be able to dominate television with its usual steamrolling panache.

Continue Reading...