I have a stack of unwritten and partially-written blog posts in my “to do” list and my drafts folder. These include such vital topics as the war in Afghanistan, the future of Facebook and the spat between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. But because I am a great big gadget nerd, I am going to disregard all of those important topics tonight and, rather than finish one of those posts, I am going to write about the Apple Bloody Tablet or, as we now know we should be calling it, the iPad.

Throughout much of the 97-minute presentation a couple of hours ago in San Francisco, I was disappointed. The iPad seemed an impressive piece of kit, but essentially, just an overgrown iPhone. However, my dissapointment was grounded in the expectation of a price point around the $1000 mark, as frequently leaked in recent weeks (it’s now tempting to conclude that Apple was, in fact, tacitly allowing quite a bit of technical information to leak, the better to keep secret the real surprise: the price. When Jobs announced the starting price point of $499, I’ll admit my jaw dropped. Of course, it’s possible to spend almost double that on an iPad to get the top spec, and many Apple fanboys inevitably will. But that low starting price suggests that Apple is taking on the netbook sector head-on and ensures that the iPad will, at the very minimum, sell respectably.

After the end of the event, and having perused follow-up reports like Engadget’s hands-on with the device, here are some more thoughts.

It’s clearly an masterpiece of engineering. Innovations like the MacBook Air have made us used to ultra-thin screens, but nevertheless, a full-fledged computer with a 10″ touchscreen, no thicker than an iPod, is impressive by any standards. From close-up photos it appears to be extremely solid, essential for a product like this with aspirations to being carried around in people’s bags. Perhaps the most impressive part of the Apple presentation was actually when the screen flashed up a picture of Amazon’s Kindle. Seeing it, with its strange tilt-buttons and enormous frame-to-screen ratio, made it clear just how nice-looking the iPad is for its size.

It’s big. It wasn’t until I saw the shot of a iPad next to an iPod that I realised just how big. A 10-inch 4:3 screen with a broad frame makes it substantially bigger than the 10-inch 16:9 Samsung netbook I’m typing this on; and substantially larger than the Kindle, which by all accounts only just manages to be handbag-friendly. What does this mean? It means the iPad will be provide a rich experience for media and web browsing, but also that it’s destined primarily for the home rather than portable use - which is probably why they felt comfortable making 3G optional.

It may not be as satisfying a web experience as Steve Jobs wants us to think. At 1024×768, the iPad has a high enough resolution to show a standard 1000-pixel web page at full size in portrait mode. However, the presentation made it clear Apple expect users to primarily use the device in portrait mode - and it certainly looks like it would be more comfortable in that configuration. That means viewing web pages designed for a 1024-width screen with a 768-wide screen, slightly zoomed out. It’s likely that the user going to the New York Times website with the iPad in portrait will still need to zoom in to read stories, which isn’t really a sufficiently big leap up in user experience from the iPhone.

Why didn’t Apple cram in more resolution? After all, higher resolution would improve the iPad’s usefulness as an e-book reader, which is clearly supposed to be part of its attraction; and would have enabled the iPad to accurately boast HD video, although the fact that the iPad’s actual resolution doesn’t allow for HD didn’t stop Jobs bragging that it could play it for some reason.

It’s unlikely that it would have added much cost - Dell have introduced a high-resolution option to its Mini 10 netbook for just $40 extra. Obviously, higher-resolution touchscreen would cost more. But I suspect the real issue is users’ eyes.

A 10-inch screen running at 1024×768 produces a pretty standard pixel density - the number of pixels along an inch of screen line - of around 100 per inch. That’s relatively easy on the eye, but go any higher than that and some users report strain and headaches. Apple has had some of this trouble with its new 27″ iMac, which with a resolution of 2560×1440 boasts an unusual pixel density of around 110 ppi. And the iPad is designed to be held relatively close to the face, which could have made eye strain even worse.

Granted, my flatmate spends whole evenings surfing the web on his iPhone, so having to zoom in is clearly not an experience-destroying problem. But I do wonder if, in a future iteration, they shouldn’t try to get the portrait width up to 1024 pixels, even if it means an 11″ screen.

It’s far more of a gamble than the iPhone. We don’t know much about the level of investment that’s gone into the iPad, though leaks and rumours from Cupertino suggest it’s been substantial. But whatever money Apple has invested, it’s taking more of a risk with it than with its (probably bigger) initial investment into the iPhone.

The iPhone was essentially based on a gamble: that users would like multi-touch enough to upgrade to their first smartphone. The cost to consumers of enjoying the intuitiveness of multi-touch, in comparison to other phones and smartphones, was a somewhat higher price - offset by a 2-year contract - and a crap camera. In retrospect, consumers were clearly always going to bite Apple’s hand off.

This time, Apple is making a similar, but much riskier, gamble: that users will like multi-touch enough they’ll choose the touch-rich, but extremely limited, iPhone OS over a Windows netbook, the iPad’s most obvious competitor. Unlike upgrading to the iPhone from, say, a Symbian handset, switching from a netbook to an iPad as your second computer requires giving up a lot of capability - the ability to run more than one program at once; the ability to run most applications, at least until the App Store fills up with iPad-designed apps. Granted, the iPad version of iWork demonstrated today shows the potential is there for iPad software far more powerful than any iPod app. But it could be months or years before a range of software is available that can begin to replace the range of software available for Windows (or, for that matter, full-scale Mac OS X).

In addition, there’s a host of tasks people use netbooks for which the iPad just doesn’t seem to be able to do. Notably, there’s acting as a media hub. Like many people, when I got my netbook, I continued to use my desktop computer for managing photos, podcasts and my music collection. Then, as I found myself using the netbook more and more, I copied the collections over, for a while storing my media on both computers and trying to keep them in sync. But soon enough, I realised that I hadn’t used my desktop for several weeks. My netbook - a bog-standard Samsung NC10 with the usual 1ghz/1gb/160gb specs - had proven more than powerful enough to be my main computer. It’s the netbook I plug my phone, camera, and MP3 player into to charge and refill them.

By contrast, the iPad’s reliance on iPhone OS means it’s incapable of being, in Apple’s own parlance, a “digital hub.” You can’t plug an iPod into an iPad to manage the music on it - both have to be plugged into a Mac or PC. Even just getting pictures of an SD card will, by all accounts, require an additional kit. You can’t even transfer files to the iPad to use on those lovely iWork apps on a USB stick: no USB ports.

None of this is surprising. Apple’s “digital hub” strategy is designed to have a Mac in the middle. Granted, it may have made a lot of money from the gadgets - iPod, iPhone, and now iPad - around the edges. But it’s not going to give those items the power to render the hub redundant. Apple aren’t going to cannibalise its sales of $1000+ Macs to sell their $499 iPad.

But though it’s not a surprise, the iPad’s limitations - no multitasking, no media hub, no USB - are a problem because they make it impossible to even consider the iPad as your only, or even main, computer. Picture the scene: you’re at home, on your sofa, surfing the web on your iPad. You see your favourite website has put up a new episode of your favourite podcast, and you want to download it and put it on your iPod. Can’t do that with the iPad, so you go upstairs, get your laptop, and bring it downstairs. Ten minutes later, having downloaded and transferred the podcast, you realise you’re now surfing the web with your laptop, and the iPad is sitting unloved on the floor.

Apple have made their career as a company out of closed systems: the Mac is a closed system, in that the software doesn’t run on other manufacturer’s computers and Apple’s computers don’t (OK, didn’t until recently) run Windows. With the iPhone, Apple took the closed system a step further, allowing only those applications officially approved by Apple themselves to be installed. This works fine in the mobile phone world, where the whole idea of installable software is a new one. But it’s a very different proposition in the personal computer market, which for all Jobs’ talk of a “third category”, is ultimately where the iPad will compete.

The iPad seems to me like a sort of Bang & Olufsen version of a netbook: lush, beautifully put together, but actually no more useful than a cheaper one. The benefits of the iPad’s power are likely to be negated by the limitations of the software available for it being subject to Apple’s whim.

Will the iPad prove as successful as the iPhone? I doubt it; the iPhone has performed well in an existing product category, whereas the iPad is trying to create a new one. But what’s more, I hope not. For millions of people to spend much of their computing time, between iPhone and iPad, in front of a closed OS would be bad for innovation, bad for competition, and bad, ultimately, for users. Windows, as depressing as its dominance is, is at least an open platform for development with millions of applications, ranging from thousand-pound professional suites to 50k applets, available all over the place. iPhone OS couldn’t be more the opposite. And while that approach has worked in the mobile realm, it’s far from clear users will accept it in a home computer. And, in my view, they probably shouldn’t.

It’ll be interesting to see if this model catches on. Many blogs comment boards, though open to the public, are dominated by a hard core of users. The Guardian’s Comment is Free site, where frequent commenters are often too busy arguing with each other (or commiserating each other on the deaths of loved ones) to talk about the posts they’re commenting on. The site has occasionally promoted an arch-commenter to contributor. But any attempt to let commenters produce posts without moderation would be a disaster because the site is open to anyone who registers.

A serious current affairs blog with a wide range of contributions both from full-time bloggers and members of the public - but with processes to ensure only serious, thoughtful people can register - that might be really something. In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep trying to pass my ‘audition’ to be an approved commenter on Lifehacker.

Ever since the concept of the ’social network’ website was coined in the early 2000’s, it’s been abused as much as it’s been used. Properly understood, a social network is a website whose primary purpose is to enable people to build connections and communicate with each other through those connections. Though Facebook is now considered the sine qua non of the medium, it began with Friendster and encompasses MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn as well as smaller, specialist sites like the British, gay-focussed Thingbox.

But because social networks evolved around the same time as other Web 2.0 services, it’s often used as a catch-all term. [Read more →]

Palm warned that after seven or eight apps, depending on footprint, we’d have to start closing some items to save memory, but we’ve taken the Pre up to 12 apps and beyond (including four browser windows, email, SMS / AIM conversations, the AccuWeather app, Pandora streaming in the background, dialer, and more) with no issue.

- Engadget

This makes me very happy.

Imagine if, instead of criticising each other in op-eds, engaging in showpiece letter-page spats or sprawling, hard-to-follow blog arguments, the thinkers of our time actually discussed things directly with each other? Rebutting and responding to each other in real time? And they let us watch? Wouldn’t it be, just, the best thing?

Don’t let the ramshackle presentation and iffy video quality put you off. If it plays its cards right, and maybe smartens up a little, the rapidly-growing Bloggingheads might just be the most important thing ever to happen anywhere (at least, since the last thing I said that about).

A case in point: This exchange - between semi-repentant neocon David Frum and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation (American think tanks always have three-word names, and one word is always “America”) is the best broad-reaching analysis of the current Middle East situation I’ve seen coming out of the recent Gaza debate. It provides a great impression of what the practical road to a palestinian state might look like - and a fantastic insight, for those of us used to the European viewe of the issue - an incredibly useful view of the conservative take on the current state of play and how we got here. There’s an audio download and podcast subscription options also available.

You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, ‘this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic’…

The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it’ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers. [Read more →]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. is offering free e-mail accounts under two new designations in an effort to attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.

The Sunnyvale-based company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of “ymail” and “rocketmail” around noon PDT Thursday at http://mail.yahoo.com .

-Wired News

This is… wierd. rav-g@rocketmail.com was my first email address, in 1997 I think. Now it’s back! This can’t be progress, can it?

American cinema’s creative zenith was reached in the 1970s, just as movies were being displaced by TV. Now we have a golden age of American TV drama, just as TV is under threat of being completely displaced by the internet. Was it always thus? Are we doomed to see the economic models of great art forms disrupted, just as they have reconciled their artistic and commercial imperatives?

[Read more →]

I’ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something. [Read more →]

I got a little angry at friend of mine. Let’s call her, for the sake of example, Mandy Davis. Not a close friend, it’s fair to say: someone I’ve done a couple of film projects with, nothing major. Possibly she’ll invite me to the party, but definitely not to the actual wedding. That sort of thing. But a nice, friendly, fun person, not someone I’d expect to get annoyed with. [Read more →]

The world has been drooling recently over the new Apple mobile phone. Like the iPod, it’s sexy, slim, and simple to use, and it’s expected to fly off the shelves. But it’s not just phone companies who should pay attention: it’s the Government, too.

[Read more →]

In a faraway domain, a fragile democracy is fighting for survival. Everyday we watch on our screens it struggles to maintain order amongst chaos and defend its day-to-day operations against dissent and malicious attacks. What? No, not Iraq! I’m talking about Wikipedia.

[Read more →]

Nothing But Bonfires is my fabulous acquaintance Holly’s marvellous blog. And there are pictures of me! and other people.

MP3 Blogs. Essentially a good idea. But with so bloody many of them, how do you keep up with the gems? Enter the shining white horse of technology, and riding atop it - The Hype Machine! This marvellous thing aggregates all the best MP3 blogs into an almighty daily list you can play in a thousand different ways - including a podcast, for those who desperately want to fill up their hard drives. The tech doesn’t matter - what it basically means is instant, free resource to a stupidly large number of great new (and some old) songs.

Enjoy! R

try it yourself: www.googlism.com

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rav is an extremely flexible antivirus platform that integrates extremely well with a broad array of mail servers [Read more →]