so i took the plunge and even left my bluetooth keyboard at home. so from the get go the weight difference was amazing. no more laptop(s) plus their powerplugs, no more kindle. no more having to get the laptops out at airport security. all of this was great. while waiting for the airport i used the boingo app to connect to their wifi and it was easy. one hour of blog reading at the airport. then the flight. baltimore to phoenix was about a five hour flight. i sat down got out the ipad went through the presentation deck twice, then watched two episodes of 24, read a book, read some of the economist (via zinio), then played with one of the crossword apps. all in all the flight went by in a breeze, i didn’t turn off the ipad for a second so taking out take off and landing probably used the ipad for a full 4 hours in the flight … plus the one hour before at the airport … when i turned off the ipad i still had 55% battery power left … my dell laptop from work would have died on me with that kind of usage probably after two hours. so using the ipad during a flight is amazing, you just don’t have to worry about battery life at all.

ok then the day to day usage on the road. what i have to do on the road most is check emails.even with the wifi version this was no problem the aloft hotel i stayed in had wifi throughout the hotel. in addition to email i have to present research material … and that went better than i thought it would go. all the content is in PDF, all in landscape format and it looks great on the ipad screen. i have nearly all material in goodreader and so during one client conversation i wanted to show a study that i would not have packed if i would have taken paper copies with me, but with the ipad no problem. just pull up the other report and boom, ready to go. there was also no hassle with the paper pages or if the content is shown on a laptop you have to stand strangely around the screen. with the ipad you put the device just between yourself and the client and both of you can see the screen and you can toggle back and forth.

in addition to that i need to access saleforce.com a bit, and even though their app for the ipad is not ready (yet) their web site is very functional on the ipad.

on top of this business usage … it is also really great not to have to carry around with you all the other devices that you carry around for post-work … like the kindle. so once i was done in the evening i could choose between one of the movies i had on the ipad or one of the books. or just play a game.

so while in the future i might take the bluetooth keyboard along, especially if it is a multi day trip and i want to get a headstart on meeting notes, i will no longer take my laptop with me. there is just no need for it. i can do anything i need to do on the ipad and on top of it reduce weight by quite a bit and during flights there is no need to worry about battery life. overall way more successful than i thought it would be. will there be people that won’t have a similar experience, i bet. people that need to work on documents more than i, people that need to rework their presentation decks, people that need computing power on the road (photographers, video people) but all others (and i think that is a large amount) will be able to leave their laptops at home and speed a little faster through airport security.

1. laptop is the secondary computer for the road
2. laptop is the main computer, more or less a desktop replacement

for those users in group one that have a desktop at home (i don’t know, an iMac, a Mac Pro or some sort of windows tower) or at work as their primary computer and that use a laptop on the road, for those the ipad in my view is a clear laptop replacement. you can do all the processor intensive, all the heavy lifting work at home … but you have a device with you on the road that is capable to do very likely everything that you need to do, and especially everything you will need to do when on the road (ok, now that might differ if you are a professional TV guy, or photographer where you want to have full editing capabilities on the road).

for those in the second group, ok there the ipad won’t replace the laptop. there the ipad might be a good secondary computer for the road (similar to the first example).

so the question really shouldn’t be is the ipad a laptop replacement, but is the ipad a usable secondary computer? and for that question, i would say: yes, definitely. i was in the market for a new computer as apple announced the ipad, and initially i was planning to replace my told macbook with a new macbook pro … the machine would have probably cost me somewhere in the range of $2500. but instead i thought, why not get an ipad and an iMac as a primary computer. in the end the combination of the ”27 iMac plus the ipad is just a tiny bit more expensive than the macbook pro, but now i have a huge screen at home (when i really need to work, or want to work on some phtotos) the iMac is more powerful than the macbook pro i would have gotten, and the ipad does everything i need to do on the road … really well … access to email (check), access to my presentations and reading material (check), access to calendar (check) … it does it all, and in case i need to type a bit more on the road, i just take the tiny bluetooth keyboard from the iMac along with me.

so yes, the ipad can most certainly replace a laptop, it just can’t replace a primary computer. and think lots of us have secondary computer which we all wish would be smaller and lighter.

The bottom line: To sell this device to more than just Apple acolytes, Apple will need to teach consumers not just a new way of using this particular device, but an entirely new way of computing. Apple will need to teach consumers to be less dependent on peripherals and more dependent on the cloud. To crave experiences that are less open-ended and more curated. At the same time, Apple will teach consumers to expect more from computing—more visual pleasure, more touch.

the problem with this view completely ignores apple’s and general consumer’s adoption history.

• the cloud arguments sounds just like the complaint the tech press had when apple got rid of the floppy drive back in the ’90s. in the end consumers didn’t care
• people didn’t think the ipod would attract any mainstream consumers … well it did
• and i can’t even think of all the complaints the tech press had of the iphone … from the lack of a real keyboard to no multi-tasking … in the end it didn’t matter

on top of all of this apple now has millions of iphone and ipod touch users for whom the touch interface is nothing new anymore. and who are used to move data from the iphone cloud to other devices they use. i assume too that forrester has adoption data of the iphone and will likely find that a lot of those iphone adopters these days are no longer applings but rather very mainstream consumers and judging from the jd powers surveys they love their iphones … if they had a problem on how to use the device they would have voiced their thoughts by now … but all we can hear is silence.

rotman epps is right in that this is a consumer device as well as an apple fan boy device. but one group she misses are corporate travel bees. all of us who are on the road a lot and don’t want to carry around a ton of devices for (laptop, mp3 player, ereader …) the ipad will be great. you can use it from reading and listening to music to finalizing your presentation decks and actually presenting it …

overall though, what becomes clear looking at these pictures is that as a whole humanity (and this sounds a bit like an odd word to use here) spends a shitload of money and resources and ultimately just fighting each other.

admob’s US mobile OS traffic shares. the graph was posted in an arstechnica story looking at the mobile OS market space. internationally there were no surprises but for the US the admob numbers seem to have offered a surprise.

and the surprise is visualized by the ascent of the green line which represents the android line. according the ars story this is how the admob data is being collected:

AdMob uses ad requests for ads from its network as its primary metric. Since these requests come from both mobile websites as well as apps that use AdMob ads, it’s important to consider what AdMob data shows. Unlike traditional market share measured in units sold, AdMob’s data could best be characterized as usage data; that is, AdMob’s statistics show that platforms like iPhone OS or Android are used more often than others online, far more often than their relative market share by sales might suggest.

so i admit that i am a longtime apple fan (although i am not using an iphone), but i also admit that overall this doesn’t come as a surprise (afterall, google, like microsoft, goes for mass markets and in order to get there they open up the OS and the platforms). what comes as a surprise is the speed. the droid most certainly is a success (for both verizon and motorola … although i still have my doubts it will be the live saver for motorola that they are hoping for) and htc has flooded the market with android phones, each new one slightly different from the others. ultimately what all these phones have done is to spread touchscreen phones with good browsers and bigger screens beyond the att domain.

back to those lines on the graphs. here is why i am a bit skeptical about those numbers:

• the story says that admob also hosts in app ads, but i have to admit that i have rarely seen any. facebook app for example, has none. which leads me to my point that i think that most of the traffic admob is seeing is browser based, and iphone users have moved beyond the browser. when i had my iphone i can’t recall using the browser a lot. i pretty much used targeted apps for finding flight info (tripit … don’t recall ads on that) to using the bofa app rather than going to their site.
• the spike in the middle of last year shows that once you have new users there is a spike in traffic … people want to justify the cost for the phone, and play around with it all the time. the android market is still new so people are still discovering the phones and spending a larger amount of time on the network … once those users get used to their phones their usage will mellow out.

overall though i think those numbers show that apple’s iphone app market is the main difference and iphone users are more likely to abandon the browser based web in favor of a faster, more targeted mobile internet experience that is apps based. as the google app market is growing it will be interesting to see how those numbers develop.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

he makes the more than valid point that republicans should have engaged in the debate rather then be the opposition of “no”. well now, just a couple of days after the vote and the blog frum is no longer with the american enterprise institute:

Mr. Frum said he was taken out to lunch by the president of the organization, Arthur C. Brooks. He said Mr. Brooks told him the institute valued a diversity of opinion, and welcomed that one of its scholars had become such a high-profile critic of Republican legislative leaders. Mr. Frum, who has been with the institute since 2003, said that he was asked if he would considering being associated with the institute on a nonsalaried basis.

the AEI so far seems to argue that this has nothing to do with the waterloo arguments. and to a degree they might be right. it might not be the argument mentioned above from his column that did him in, but this section of the same waterloo blog entry:

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

after all, you do not mess with fox news. makes one wonder if fox news and limbough (btw, has he moved yet?) pulled some strings here because they felt unhappy about being singled out.

for conservatives, and the republican party this is bad news. because they seem to have a problem with smart people within their ranks. i just finished reading a piece at ordinary gentlemen about the problems of the republican party, and the story points out:

Republicans and conservatives may have experienced a euphoric taste of resurgent popularity and shot of life with the emergence of charismatic and defiant personages like Sarah Palin and the win of Senator Scott Brown over what is broadly understood to be the dismal candidate of Martha Coakley. But the long term demographics line up squarely against Republicans and their conservative base and they have for some time.

and for more detail, here is the gallup poll graph that should be the most worrying for republicans and maybe even more so conservatives, because they might lose their home in the republican party. look at that first bar … that is a reduction in college grad americans moving away from the republican party. of all the demographics, that is the one with the largest negative jump. now long term this is also the demographic that engages in politics, that has money to give to causes … so while i don’t want to ring the death bell for the GOP here this data is serious. and for the conservative groups to trample on their few intellectual leaders that they have left (like frum and last year buckley) is dangerous. yes, palin is a crowd pleaser and fox news is a loud mouthpiece, but they will alienate the american center, and without the center the republicans have no chance of winning elections.

republicans are always talking about reagan, but i have to say that i doubt that he would have liked this movement of the GOP. after all while not the brightest guy in the room, he knew he needed bright people around him, and this didn’t just mean that he needed bright yes men (and women) like bush, but people with an opinion. following in the step of bush, the GOP seems to now move towards getting rid of any dissent in their lines, mostly driven by fox and other so called conservative loud mouths.

Ad units on the iPad are attracting big-name advertisers. The NYT reports that a high-end credit card company has purchased its iPad ad inventory for the device’s first two months on the market, while brands, like FedEx and Buick, are buying ads on the apps of other publications, including the WSJ, Newsweek, Time (NYSE: TWX) and Reuters (NYSE: TRI). The NYT says the going rate is $75,000 to $300,000 “for a few months of exclusivity” on one of these apps.

and on top of this, it looks like some of these companies will ask their users for a premium:

The WSJ’s app may cost $17.99 a month.

with color graphics and all kinds of interactive content companies like the wsj can probably justify the premium. all good news. and i think all of these orgs will come up with great products. their main competition? there are blogs and other new media entities like huffington post and then also apps like instapaper, read it later … and once ipad native a google reader app. while google has more then enough resources to create an app like that (and they might already be working on it), i doubt new media entities are working on it, they will expect their users to use their web sites … nice thought, but it won’t work. media consumption on the ipad, the iphone, and other smart phones and tablets will happen via apps … say good bye to search, say good bye to the browser.

the threat to old media outlets like nyt and wsj will come from intelligent content aggregation apps that work seamlessly across devices, apps, and the browser (which will be used on computers) but the apps will be used on smart phones, tablets, tvs … the google reader has a good shot at getting a big slice of the content cake, but it will have to get pretty … think of pointcast but in 2010 on a tablet. will old media move fast enough? i don’t know. they will have a life line (if tablets will sell) but after that it will require them to innovate at a much faster pace than they have shown they are capable of. the good thing is that free is not necessary the primary business model anymore.

more jokes can be found on the web site old jews telling jokes

Palm sold just 408,000 smartphones to consumers in its last quarter. But it shipped 960,000 smartphones to its retail partners

i have said it before and i will say it again, the pre was just too little too late. the problem of palm was (and is) that they thought they were apple and could go it alone … create the software and create the hardware. they were could on the software but the hardware just wasn’t sexy enough. i think their only chance would have been to go the google route and make the software available to players like htc or motorola, but even that train has left the station now that google’s android is there.

it is sad to see one of the great device companies die, but the company just made too many mistakes. after apple came out with the iphone they should have aggressively opened up their web os. that didn’t happen. and now the company sells as many phones as apple will likely sell ipads (a product that no one has even held in their hands yet).

my favorite quote of the speech is “we think of our future as anticipated memories”