Steve Jobs introduces the Death Star

It's been making the rounds but I couldn't resist:

iPad Reflections, Week 2

I am left a little more disenchanted after the second week of my iPad experiment than I was after the first. Further observations:

• There is a noticeable dearth of quality iPad-optimized applications in the App Store. No iPad optimized Facebook (though AIM for iPad with its Lifestream feature is a decent alternative). Similarly, no Blogger support (either an app or a version of the Blogger web client that works on the iPad).
• The Gmail iPad interface is quite well designed but performs poorly. The Inbox doesn't refresh properly half the time when you navigate back to the page and often gets into some weird loop where it keeps redirecting until Safari finally barfs.
• Not really great for using on a bus. It's just hard to use without sufficient elbow room, so if there's anyone next to you, you're constantly clocking them in the ribs or contorting your body and fingers into odd positions.
• The heaviness bothers me more and more. It really makes the difference between a go-to device you can use at will and something you have to dedicate yourself to using, and it's really not functional enough to rival something like a laptop if you're going that far.
• I've fallen into a nice pattern of leaving my laptop in the office and carting the iPad home with me at night to do email, web and document reviewing at home at night. It's nice not to have to lug my MacBook home every night, but there's no way I would attempt this if there wasn't another real computer at home that I could use in a pinch.

I'm left wondering if there is an audience I would recommend this to. It can't replace the utility of a laptop or the use-it-anywhere quality of a smartphone for the road warrior. It certainly does not replace anyone's primary computer (laptop or desktop).

Perhaps it's an alternative to a smartphone for someone who does a lot of note taking or media consumption in situations where the ultra-portability of a smartphone is not important (e.g. college students, frequent coffee shop patrons). I could see where a dumbphone plus iPad is better than a smartphone for these folks. This is allegedly the market for netbooks, so in the final analysis, the iPad may just be a netbook killer. I'm just not in that demographic and never 'got' netbooks anyway, so while it's an occasionally fun toy, I'd get along just fine with only my laptop and smartphone.

Wedding Favor-It

When I reflect on our wedding planning process, the single biggest source of disappointment is the treatment we have received from an unfortunate number of potential wedding vendors. This is an industry that is all-to-frequently characterized by high levels of dysfunction. For example

• Vendors who believe that just because the word 'wedding' is attached to something they are justified in charging ridiculous prices for stuff. We looked at one venue that wanted to charge us $10 per chair to set up chairs for our ceremony -- chairs they already own, mind you. For 120 people, that's $1,200. Let's say it took two people an hour to set up 120 chairs and you paid them $10 each. Let's also say it took the same two people another hour to break them down. That works out to $40.
• Vendors who are clearly working off a rehearsed script that defines their interactions, prices and level of service. These guys treat the wedding experience like buying a box of Fruit Loops at Stop and Shop.
• Vendors who just plain suffer from severe personality disorders.

I've run successful service businesses. You need to offer people a level of service commensurate with the price you're charging and the importance of the experience to them. If I've just spent three hours in your store picking out wedding invitations and am about to drop close to a thousand dollars on them, don't tell me your bathroom is for employees only and send me across the street in the rain to a (locked) public restroom.

So that's a long-winded way of setting up how pleasantly surprised I was to finally encounter -- well over a year into our planning process -- a vendor who actually went above and beyond the call of duty. The set up: we were planning on addressing our invitation envelopes using my office's super beefy solid ink printer. This thing has handled worse, but for some reason decided it didn't like our envelopes. Jam city. Invitations had to go out Monday, it's Saturday and we're SOL. Dialing for dollars commences.

Fortunately, we found Paula. Paula is the proprietor of the Favor-It Shop in East Brunswick, NJ. She sells and prints invitations and other stationary, as well as favors and gift items. She had just gotten back from her son's wedding the prior night, but when we called told us to come right over. She sat down with us right away and started picking out fonts and importing our list. We do a test run on her printer: the envelope feeds perfectly but the printer is randomly dropping ink (smudging) and we can't figure out why. Burns through two sets of ink cartridges. Still no dice. Unboxes the back up printer and burns through another set of cartridges and print heads. Finally success. Envelopes printed and ready by 10 o'clock the next morning.

Again, Paula didn't sell us these invitations (I wish we had known about her a few weeks ago!). She'd never seen us before. She was trying to land our business, which in this case amounted to a relatively modest sum of money. But she spent well over three hours on a Saturday afternoon just trying to win that business, to say nothing of the additional time of actually doing the printing. She could not possibly have been kinder, more pleasant or more fun to be around the entire time. For the first time in the entire wedding planning process, we finally felt as if our big day was as important to one of our vendors as it is to us.

Form factor

I was looking at the newest crop of PDAs and smartphones over the weekend. The trend here is towards these flip or slide phones where the screen (usually a touch screen) rotates when you open the phone to reveal a full, (comparatively) large QWERTY keyboard. Examples include the AT&T Tilt, Verizon Wireless XV6800 and Samsung SCH-i760. I played around with a couple of these at the happiest place on earth (aka Best Buy) and came to the conclusion that I'm not a fan of this form factor.

The concept of a bigger keyboard seems like it would be a good innovation in an abstract sense, but when I atually tried to use it, the weaknesses immediately became clear. First of all, the size of the keys doesn't work for me. If you use, e.g., a Blackberry or Motorola Q (which, for my money, has the best keyboard of any smartphone), you develop the technique of thumb typing using the very tips of your fingers (or even the nails). This works for me, and I can do it with reasonable speed and accuracy.

My expectation with the new breed of devices was that you could adopt the technique of typing using the pads of your thumbs, rather than the tips. I could see where this would lead to greater speed and a little more flexibility with being able to hit a key off center and still getting the right character. But it turned out that with my average-sized fingers, the keys were still too small to do this with any degree of accuracy.

As a result, I had to switch back to the the tips-of-the-thumbs method, but this doesn't really work either. Because the devices are so wide, I found myself having to shift the way I was holding them in my hands in order to comfortably reach all the keys with my thumbs. This is in contrast with the Blackberry or Q, where I can just cradle the device in my hands and hit all the keys comfortably without having to adjust my grip.

Also -- and this is coming from an admitted Microsoft homer -- I feel like we should be able to do better than Windows Mobile 6 on these devices. In the post-iPhone world, I don't think it's too much to ask that these phones offer an attractive, clean, simple UI; a desktop-like browser experience and touch screen functionality that can be easily used without a stylus. I don't really get the cartoonish appearance of the UI on a business-oriented operating system (especially when the UI appearance in recent MS products like Vista is so attractive), and Mobile Internet Explorer isn't in the same sport (let alone the same ballpark) as the iPhone's browser.