The Reality.

Underwhelming. The truth is that the Slingbox setup is not cheap and barely works. When accessing a recorded program only displays correctly half the time and the guide fails to display certain channels, you have a real problems. Had Slingbox just arrived on the scene, I would naturally be willing to extend it a few months’ grace to iron out the wrinkles. In fact, the first Slingbox went on sale over four years ago. The core experience should be better.

Hardware.

No complaints. I purchased the Sling Adapter directly from DISH Network for $99. The device is tiny, noiseless, elegantly designed, and all indications are that it works as promised. Had I been required to spend the $250+ for the Slingbox Pro-HD, I would not be writing this article. Even a gadget enthusiast like myself has little patience for a several hundred dollar toy with limited utility.

Software.

As a 21st century Hamlet might conceivably lament, ay, software, there’s the rub. Software for accessing your Slingbox comes in three flavors: browser, tablet, and phone. None of them provide the flawless experience I’ve come to expect on Apple devices, though each, in its own way, does deliver.

The user interface is hit or miss. SlingPlayer mingles traits from both parents. It lives on a computer, so it supports filtering, search, and other conveniences, yet it’s saddled with the traditional channel metaphor as the primary interface. While the appropriate design for television is likely radically different than the one currently in place, it’s hard to find too much fault with Sling Media iterating rather than revolutionizing. Still, it would be nice if the implementation wasn’t quite so slow and bug-ridden. For example, SlingPlayer for the Mac only works in Safari and Firefox; no support for Chrome. Except it doesn’t even work for me in Firefox, which means I’m forced to use Safari, a browser that currently sits third on my depth chart.

It’s worth noting that, contra Netflix, only one person at a time may view the Slingbox feed. It’s an understandable if quaint and frustrating restriction. Word is that it’s a technological limitation. Given all the problems I’ve experienced, that sounds plausible. Whether it’s arbitrary or innate, it is an impediment to what ought to be legitimate family usage.

More than a few design decisions are, to be polite, curious. On the iOS side, even basic computer interactions like scrubbing a timeline and gestural controls like pinch-to-zoom haven’t been included. I’d say it’s spit-and-polish like this that makes or breaks a product, but in the case of the Slingbox, the video quality is so grotesque that the UI blemishes are merely salt in the wound.

Video Quality.

Mediocre, below average, and terrible. Watching in the browser is … adequate but hardly without issue. Do not expect HD quality. Don’t even expect March Madness on Demand or ESPN3 quality. Not even close. Under ideal circumstances, with the perfect configuration, you could say watching Slingbox on your computer is like watching SD television. From 18 inches away. This experience, however, rarely lasts more than a minute without interruption, distortion, or lag. The sub-par quality is a bit of a mystery. Even on “HD,” Slingbox fails to saturate my 12Mbps download or 3Mbps upload, so insufficient bandwidth can’t be the culprit. There’s no explicit promise of a high quality feed, but the implication of “watch your tv anywhere” is certainly that you can watch your tv just like you normally do. I don’t know about you, but for me that means HD.

Video on the iPhone and iPad is even worse. It’s blocky. It drops frames. It stutters. It struggles to keep up with any quick motion. It’s practically unwatchable. Cartoons for the kid? Okay, fine. Basketball, football? Eh, if you literally have no other choice. Hockey? You might as well listen to the radio because you won’t be able to follow the puck on the iPad and you might not even be able to follow the players on the iPhone. The miserable quality is a bit confounding. It can’t be the hardware as I’ve seen some pretty fantastic video played on these devices even over the Internet. I can only surmise that the SlingPlayer software is intentionally limiting the quality or is incapable of transmitting, receiving, or displaying even mediocre video. Had I paid anywhere close to retail for the standalone version, I’d be fuming right now. As is, I’m more than a little miffed.¹

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It’s fair to say you can watch your tv anywhere — as long as you don’t care to actually watch your tv. Every fiber of Slingbox screams “hack.” They hacked the system to serve up video television operators don’t want you to see, so, naturally, the video quality is horrid. The software itself is a monument to the dying age of cable television. Despite all of this, you are, in fact, able to (usually) watch the tv you want on whatever device you have nearby.² That’s still an incredible statement to be able to make.

In short, television is still broken. Cable offered choice. Digital video recorders delivered convenience. Slingbox promises independence from television’s physical shackles. In that mission it both succeeds brilliantly and fails dramatically. It cannot provide salvation. It is, instead, a mangled in-between state: the harbinger of television to come and the handicapped progeny of television past, prophesying the way forward yet perversely constrained by its nature as a child of the old way. The beauty of the concept merely serves to accentuate the warts of the embodiment.

There is little doubt in my mind that Slingbox will ultimately be seen merely as a historical curiosity on the road from television comprised of just a few channels on the dial, served up at specific times to infinite programming variety, available at the time and location of your choice.

1. It’s worth mentioning that if you buy the standalone Slingbox, you’re about to be nickle-and-dimed for $30 for both the iPhone and the iPad SlingPlayer apps. For real.
2. “Usually” is more or less accurate. I use the iPhone app most frequently, and the bugs are just excruciating. Even the most mundane requests meet sloth and often outright insubordination.

Abigail. Age: 27 months.

A wunderkind if I do say so myself, Abby is under the false impression that the family iPad is, in fact, her iPad. She scoffs at the notion the iPad battery should last more than a day of standard usage. Hobbies include:

• watching Kipper, Daffy Duck, Thomas the Tank Engine, Veggie Tales, and Pixar movies streamed flawlessly via Netflix.
• intently attempting to play Canabalt, Harbor Master HD, Flight Control, Angry Birds, Trainyard, and The Incident.
• raucously playing the piano, the drums, and the xylophone, splashing the pond, watching the fish swim, and filling imaginary refrigerator after imaginary refrigerator with colored, stamped, and smudged virtual canvases.
• happily dominating games of concentration and jigsaw puzzles.

Most endearingly, she giggles at scores of videos automatically synchronized from my iPhone of slightly-younger-Abby crawling, walking, running, jumping, and generally cavorting about.¹

Least endearingly, she routinely drops, bumps, and generally slimes the iPad’s glorious glass and metal exterior. I am, however, happy to report it is none the worse for the rather significant wear.

Lest you find my first-hand account exagerrative, I present video evidence:

Abby messes around with Trainyard.

The tour-de-force, a practically infantile 20-month-old Abby demos her entire iPad repertoire.

Susan. Age: 24 years.

Bearing our second child for most of the last year, Susan had ample opportunity to appreciate the benefits of a light-weight, touchscreen computer², so when Abby wasn’t monopolizing the iPad, Susan snatched it up.

Anecdotally, I think we’re talking 30-60 minutes per day roughly split among general purpose reading, socializing, gaming, and utilities — to be more specific, browsing Facebook, taking her turn at Words with Friends, researching recipes, killing time with Angry Birds or Trainyard or the latest game of choice.

For Susan the iPad doesn’t so much carve out new functionality as make existing tasks easier, more convenient, or more fun.

Me. Age: 25 years.

The iPad allegedly being a gift for my birthday in May and my much asserted love of the form factor, the concept, and the execution notwithstanding, I actually get by far the least time with it.³ I console myself by reaching for the ever present iPhone for reading and gaming or the MacBook Pro for anything else. That said, when it is my turn, I don’t fool around.

The iPad is a champion reading device. I love leaning back and cracking open Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, Twitter, or Safari aided by the invaluable Readability. I could devote entire posts to the genius of Reeder and Instapaper in particular, but their success speaks for itself.

Most of my iOS gaming happens on the iPhone, but the additional screen real estate makes gaming on the iPad feel luxurious when I do get my turn. A shockingly high number of game creators seem to be unable to grasp the incongruity of using joystick based games on a touchscreen device. Those that emphasize instead the tap / gesture / draw / tilt dynamic are thoroughly fun and, not surprisingly, dominate the app store.

A younger me, or a me in a different situation, would no doubt take greater advantage of Netflix, iTunes, Pandora, and a dozen other applications that simply make sense to offload to a personal computer that isn’t a laptop and doesn’t come with the concomitant baggage. We all have our burdens to bear.

The Rabble.

Despite a fiercely cultivated life-long misanthropy, I do sometimes play host to friends, usually during NFL RedZone, or find reason to leave the house and lug the iPad along. On these occasions, depending on the exact nature of the family / friend relationship, the iPad user will fire up photos and videos, try his or her hand at a game, take in the latest viral video on YouTube, or, frequently, check fantasy stats. All in all, about what I anticipated.

When not in use, the iPad rests invitingly on the coffee table patiently awaiting its next pilot who, inevitably, finds delight in its friendly, intuitive, rich charms.

What Does it All Mean?

So. After six months of — and I kid you not — nearly constant use, what conclusions can we draw about the iPad?

Conclusion #1.

I’m going to put this in bold so you don’t miss it: the iPad is the single greatest form of child entertainment ever invented. It’s intoxicating. Movies and television on demand (thanks, Netflix!). Games, games, games, and — wait for it — more games. Apps that exercise every motor skill from eye-hand coordination to color and sound identification to problem solving skills. Educational material ranging from newborn to … well, we’re only up to 27 months, so, I’ll let you know. Bottom line, this thing is comfortable for a kid to hold, practically indestructible even sans case, tantalizingly tactile, incredibly fast, responsive, and intuitive, and infinitely expandable. Look, I know I’m gushing, but for $499 the budget iPad occupies more of Abby’s time than the rest of her toys combined. Case closed.

Conclusion #2.

As a family room computer replacement, the iPad isn’t there. Lack of individual accounts is, while perhaps not an oversight, a seriously limiting factor, as Jeff noted upon its release. If you compare it to a desktop computer, you’ll inevitably be disappointed by the workarounds necessary to get photos on it, to print things, to compose long strings of text, to do, basically, more than one thing at a time. These are all legitimate concerns and unfortunate sacrifices. Yet this is at best a forced comparison and at worst a dramatic misunderstanding of the future of computing. Tablet computers are a) a new and exciting medium that should not take their cues from a fundamentally different medium, one in which you have a different posture, use different inputs, and naturally have different expectations and b) still in their literal and figurative infancy. Grunting about the iPad’s inability to (currently) program new applications, display windows side-by-side, and rescue kittens is shortsighted.

Putting my prognosticating pants on for a minute, I see a future where a handful of tablets (and phones) litter the house doing admirable touch-based work by day and docking snugly to a big screen, keyboard, and mouse by night.⁴ One shared computer just isn’t enough. Now that the technology is cheap enough to make this dream a reality, I see no reason it won’t be one soon.

Conclusion #3.

The iPad isn’t a replacement for dedicated gaming consoles and handheld devices, Apple commercials to the contrary. It is a fantastic gaming platform, but it excels in precisely the opposite vectors as traditional, controller driven systems: direct manipulation, asynchronous play, interstitial time filling. The iPad has some wonderful games, and I’m looking forward to playing many more in the years to come. Games like the ones mentioned previously. As long as quick-twitch, button-mashing games remain fun to play, however, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft will continue to rake it in. If you’ve ever attempted to “mash” the glass while playing a shooting or sports game, you know what I mean. If you’ve ever attempted to use a “joystick” on a touch screen, you know what I mean.

Conclusion #4.

Handing the iPad from person to person is indeed every bit as easy and enjoyable as I speculated it would be. There is almost⁵ no digital precedent for this type of shared computing experience and no conceivable limit to the opportunity it presents. Why buy Taboo when you can download it and never lose the pieces? Why struggle in vain to master a poorly conceived controller with scores of tiny hardware buttons when you can just tap a video on the iPad and watch it on your AppleTV? Why deny yourself the simple pleasure of handing your spouse / child / friend the iPad and saying, “look at this”? If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

Let’s Put a Bow on This Thing.

I’d say the iPad leaves me speechless, but it clearly doesn’t. I can (and have) gone on for thousands of words discussing its substantial pros, its few but frustrating flaws, and its impact on computing both now and in the future. If you’re not convinced it is worth $499 today, you will be someday, and, hopefully, you’ll look back at this post and smile knowingly at the truths contained herein.

1. Naturally, she is also immensely entertained by videos of Abby watching videos of Abby.
2. Can you say “contraction timer”?
3. Have you heard the one about first world problems?
4. If we want to get really crazy, maybe each will be biometrically identified and connected to files and preferences stored online.
5. If you laughed at Surface simply because it was from Microsoft, you missed the point badly. The iPad, the iPod Touch, Surface, the Wii, Kinect, et al are mere harbingers of the revolutionary intersection of ever cheapening electronic components and decades of user interface research. Don’t even get me started on ubiquitous Internet connections and video transmission. The technology Rubicon is being crossed.

His Square reader had finally arrived.

[scene]

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

— Clay Shirky, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”

As I’ve mentioned before, Shirky is a guiding light for Full Stop. We believe we’re living through monstrous societal disruptions, chief among them the Internet’s irresistible march to invisibility. It’s not a coincidence we decided to make our living helping people understand and react to that fact.

This trend has long been evident. In fact, it’s the reason I abandoned my undergraduate training in economics and political science¹ (c. 2003) to build websites. It’s also the reason Jay and I left comfortable, well-paying jobs working for an established agency (c. 2009). The potential energy in this system is enormous, and we fully intend to tap it.

Make new friends, but keep the old.

The traditional Internet (i.e. what you see when you sit down at your computer) is well-established now, yet it’s still in the growth stage. Approximately half the businesses in America do not have websites. That’s good news, because it means they’ll need to create them. The rest do have websites. That’s good news also, because they understand the value websites bring and are prepared to invest further into expanding and re-designing them.

The absolutely staggering fact that we’re faced with, however, is that while the mobile Internet is even less established today, it may well be larger when all is said and done. The sheer amount of time we spend away from our desks, the convenience of accessing information from pocketable devices, the lack of entrenched PC bias in the developing world, the pattern of embedding Internet connectivity in every conceivable device—your car, alarm clock, mp3 player, handheld video games, e-reader—all suggest vast opportunity and incredible scale.

We are at the precipice of a revolution.

At the risk of belaboring the point, somebody will be building these sites. They will necessarily be different than the experience you encounter when sitting at a desk with your mouse in hand, but the core ideas are the same: data on one end, person on the other, Internet connection in the middle.

The cellphone industry.

Which brings me to the genesis for this post. David Pogue recently wrote an article in the New York Times praising Line2, an iPhone application making VoIP calls easier than ever. Conveniently, there was also a story in the Wall Street Journal quoting Sprint CEO Dan Hesse saying cell phone carriers will be charging strictly for data within the next two years rather than the current model of charging for minutes spent talking.

Hesse’s right. Though I know nothing about the timeline for such a prediction to come true, the idea that all phones will come with the Internet built in and that we will meter them in megabytes not minutes is patently obvious. The 20th century notion that radio, television, phone calls, and text messages are fundamentally different things is nearing extinction. It’s just data, and somebody, somewhere is going to serve it that way sooner rather than later.

Three laws of early 21st-century technology.

Finally, we need to understand that the invasion of the Internet is only part of the larger story of the cheapening and miniaturization of electronics. It is, of course, the most disruptive part and justifiably receives a disproportionate amount of the attention.

The technology is nearly in place for an ever-present, reliable, fast Internet connection. When that happens, the Internet will go from ubiquitous (always available) to invisible (so tightly enmeshed with our way of life we only notice when it’s gone). For many of us, it’s already as much a utility as electricity and plumbing, and powerful companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Intel, and Microsoft stand to profit handsomely by making this increasingly inexpensive technology truly invisible for not only the information workers but also their friends, family, and neighbors. We are tantalizingly (or frighteningly) close to the day when every phone is an iPhone².

For context, I’m going to propose three broad laws for understanding the tidal wave of technology rushing toward us in the first half of the 21st century. These aren’t universal, there will be exceptions, and chances are they’ve been stated before by others. They will be, I hope, useful in framing the way you think about the next 25 years.

1. Everything that should be electronic will be electronic.
2. Everything that is electronic will connect to the Internet.
3. Everything that connects to the Internet will have at least a screen and input mechanism, if useful.³

Will a baseball bat be electronic? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet against it. I suspect it may ultimately have sensors attached and somehow wirelessly communicate the data it gathers. Perhaps, though, it can do without a screen.

Will cereal boxes come with screens and Internet connections? Jesse Schell thinks so. It’s hard to find a reason that it won’t happen.

So what.

Well, first of all, get your head out of the sand if this is news to you. If you work on or around computers in any capacity, you are working on the Internet. That includes phones, televisions, cars, etc. See the three laws above. The sooner you understand that, the better for your career.

Everyone else, keep doing what you’re doing and batten down the hatches for an avalanche of real-time, location-aware, cloudy applications rolling out in the near future on a platform of your choice.⁴ As media producers and information wranglers, we have a lot to learn, a lot to improve, and, frankly, a lot of customers to lead. On the flip side, as consumers, we’re faced with a glut of entertainment, productivity, device, and carrier choices. The competition⁵ has done its job in producing an array of incredibly robust, inexpensive options. Let’s just hope that the Internet’s infiltration into our lives doesn’t leave us flummoxed by the paradox of choice.

1. That, the low pay, and the cringe-inducing prospect of working in the governmental sphere.
2. In capability if not in quality.
3. I’m cheating a bit on this last law, as you can tell. Many devices that connect to the Internet will most likely do so by proxy. Just like your Bluetooth headset connects to your phone, these items will be able to connect to a primary device that can read data from them and write data to them. It won’t be necessary to include screens and input mechanisms on each and every device.
4. Except maybe Palm.
5. Free market, ftw.

The iPad could be a complete failure (though I think that’s almost impossible given Apple’s current pedigree), but it’s guaranteed that within the next two years consumer touch computing will become ubiquitous (if the iPhone hasn’t already). It could be under the Apple brand or it could be someone else’s, but either way that ubiquity is what has gotten me excited.

— Cameron Adams, “A Missive to the iPad haters.”

Yes, yes, yes. The changing paradigm from abstract input device (mouse) to those things connected to your hands (fingers) is absolutely critical to understand. Besides the performance improvement of solid state disks, the switch from user file system control to “it just works,” and omnipresent Internet connections, the rise of touch interfaces will be one of the most important and disruptive facts of computer life for the foreseeable future.

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

— Steven Frank.

I’m no longer updating my iPad thoughts article, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still finding compelling things to say about it.

I won’t be able to afford one immediately, but I see its place in my house already. That PC I have in the family room? Gone. Banished to some office somewhere to consort with the printer and extra hard drives. When friends come over and need to look up their fantasy team stats, I’ll hand them the tablet. We’ll pass it around like the dusty photo albums of yore. The tactile experience will be immediately familiar and intuitive. When we want to watch a video together, we’ll huddle up; or, maybe, I’ll press a button, and the video will stream straight to my Apple TV.

If I’m completely honest, I was hoping for a bit more. That was probably an unrealistic expectation. What Apple has done is remarkable. They built a device that is beautiful, usable, and, in the grand scheme of things, not that expensive. Sure, they exercise dictatorial control over what appears and when, but is that so bad? I say, with David Hume, a benevolent dictator is better than anarchy nine times out of ten. Having now seen the completed device, I can safely predict I will be buying one at some point in the next two years.

A lot has been said in the run-up to and the wake of the iPad’s release. Some of the people talking are worth listening to, most aren’t. I’d like to quote a few of the best.

Marco Ament:

Nothing about the iPad is obviously revolutionary, but it didn’t need to be: the iPhone OS and iPhone hardware are already revolutionary.

Stephen Fry:

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company.

Luke Wroblewski:

The iPad is not a laptop nor is it a smart phone. It is a couch device, a bedroom device (don’t read that the wrong way), and a kitchen device (swivel it to cook from a recipe you find online). In all these places, a laptop always felt wrong. The iPad is optimized for media consumption: surfing the Web, reading blogs/news/books, watching TV shows, playing casual games, listening to music, managing personal productivity (calendar, contacts) and looking at photos. Expecting it to provide the creation capabilities of a laptop is the wrong frame of reference.

Jack Moffet:

The hardware is just a blank slate. Yes, there are plenty of important considerations that had to be made in the design of the physical form, but what really makes or breaks this device is the user experience provided by the applications.

David Pogue:

Today Apple finally unveiled its tablet computer, the iPad. Thus concludes Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.

Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”

That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.

…

Like the iPhone, the iPad is really a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential. It may become many things. It may change an industry or two, or it may not.

John Gruber:

Lastly, there’s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”.

Russell Beattie:

I think all of us really wanted to see a MacPad, not an iPad.

Not a peripheral gadget, but a primary computing device that can be used by touch if desired. Something that can function on a desktop with a keyboard and mouse, and then be picked up and tossed into a bag, or to be used while sitting down on a couch or in bed with only the touch screen for the interface.

Jeff Croft:

Let’s talk about something that really matters: multi-user support. There is no excuse for this thing not to have multi-user support. This could have been the world’s greatest coffee table device, if it only had support for multiple users. Think about it: the thing sits on the coffee table. Daddy logs in. He checks his e-mail and his sports scores. He logs out and puts it down. Little Timmy logs in. He IMs a friend and plays a game. He logs out and sets it down. Mom logs in. She get a recipe from her bookmarked Martha Stewart page and forwards some totally-not-funny cat video to her best friend. And so forth. This is the new PC.

Derek Powazek:

I also could see the iPad becoming a powerful social computing experience. It’s easier to use a iPad with another person than it is to share a laptop.

The iPad may not turn out to be the missing link in the media ecosystem, but it is definitely a fascinating glimpse into the future of personal computing. I’ve already picked the spot on my coffee table where mine is going to live.

In summary, Apple mayn’t have hit a home-run with iPad 1.0, or they may have. But I’ll be wagering at least $499 they smashed a triple into the corner while everyone else was content to leg out an infield single. Unlike the iPhone or the laptop, the iPad is a social device. It’s designed to be touched and shared by multiple people. When new features (like a front-facing camera or wireless iPad-to-TV video) start trickling in, it’s only going to be more obvious Apple has successfully (and lucratively) predicted the future of family-room computing.

As John mentioned, the grotesquely fast performance isn’t something to be sniffed at. Apple’s custom chip plus a blazing SSD is a potent combination. (See my earlier tweet.) The difference between “slide to unlock” and “boot up” the family computer can’t be overstated.

The simplicity of the interface may be seen as disadvantage, but having now been the unofficial tech support of myriad (it seems) family members, I can tell you it’s not. The difference between “tap to open” and “where did I put that” is similarly large. If kernel-level control of the OS is important to you, you’re not only outside Apple’s target market, you’re the minority of a minority. Most people just want something that works, and that’s what Apple delivered.

It’s far from perfect, however. I could list a hundred features I wish it had. An integrated SD card reader may be first on that list. It’s inconceivable to me that Apple believes a chintzy dongle is a more elegant solution than what is currently offered on the MacBook / iMac line. I can only hope they fix this (and other) flaws in future releases. I believe they will.

Finally, I co-own a web design and development company. How could I not purchase the device heralding the future of websites? I am firmly convinced that not only is this a more efficient and pleasant way to interact with computers than a mouse but that it requires new and different ways of interaction. I am compelled to experience this first-hand if I have any hope of providing worthwhile experiences for people who own this device. Plus, I already have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone … I need to complete the set.

NB: After publication, two more stellar articles were released. Andy Ihnatko provides a brief overview, more from John Gruber, and Joe Hewitt says it’s “exactly the product I’ve been wishing for.”

• “Nexus None” — Bob heralds the end of feature phones.
• “Predict Me, I’m from the Government” — Ooh, burn.
• Predictions for Microsoft, Apple, and Google.