Expert Blogs
My wife and I write about technology for a living, and so it behooves us to stay up-to-date and always carry around the latest and greatest. Yet, I still have my old iPhone 3GS, and my wife hasn't yet complained about her lowly 3G. Truth be told, what both of us anticipated more than the new iPhone was getting off the AT&T contract. We're both off contract now, so that's good. However, why is it that we're told new phones are subsidized and are essentially paid off during that 2-year contract commitment when the charges stay the same when the contract ends?
I always take my iPad with me when I travel, but traveling abroad is a mixed blessing because thanks to AT&T's exorbitant charges for data service I'm usually limited to hunting for free WiFi hotspots. Last time I arrived in Mexico, AT&T informed me via text that it'd cost me $20/meg for data, which is insane. There are, of course, the "super affordable" (according to AT&T) international data plans/packages you can sign up for, but even that costs $100/month for 275meg, or six times as much as the $15/250meg domestic plan. And 275meg doesn't get you nearly as far as AT&T would like you to believe.
I really can't live without my iPhone and iPad. And as a professional publisher, writer and editor, I pride myself in always having, and knowing about, the latest gear. So it's pretty strange that I still have a lowly iPhone 3Gs and a first generation iPad. I mean, the iPhone 4 has been out forever, and there's already plenty of buzz about the iPhone 5. And the second gen iPad has also been out of a while. So what's going here?
Steve Jobs announced the iPad 2 on March 2. No one expected Jobs to do it himself as he's been on a medical leave of absence for a while now. He looked none the worse for wear, though I can't imagine that things are very good for him.
Another road trip for the iPad. Carol and I flew to Tennessee for an extended Thanksgiving weekend, which meant I had to take along my electronic gear. We both packed our iPads, cameras, iPhones, and I also took along my big MacBook Pro.
Yes I know, provocative title. But I didn't choose it to add to the anti-iPhone chorus and litany championed by legacy publications like PC World. And I also didn't choose it to tell you about the latest HTC Awesome or Droid Maxximus that outdoes the iPhone in this spec or that. I didn't even choose it because I have become a convert to Android, though as a professional reviewer I am certainly interested in that latest and apparently finally successful mobile Linux implementation.
And yet another trip with the iPad. This time a 10-day product review trip to the Honduran island of Roatan. I took along all my dive gear, as well as a boatload of underwater cameras, both of the still and video variety, so luggage space was at a premium.
Right on the heels of my last European trip, the iPad accompanied me on a very different kind of journey, a five-day dive trip to the California Channel Islands. That meant eight hours on the road each way to and from Santa Barbara, and the three days on the good ship Conception, an 80-foot dive vessel.
Back from a 3-1/2-day intercontinental trip that included a 17-hour trip to and a 22-hour trip back from Stockholm, Sweden. I checked what I'd usually consider a carry-on (the airlines don't charge for a checked bag on international routes, yet) and simply took along a shoulder bag just large enough for my MacBook Pro, camera, the usual assortment of cables and chargers, and my iPad. I usually take the MacBook as my main machine, but this time it came along as backup to the iPad. And how did that work out for me?
Well, I am at Chicago O'Hare, waiting for my flight to Stockholm, Sweden, where I'll be giving a presentation on trends and concepts in mobile computing. The plan is that I'll woo the audience by whipping out my iPad and do a long Keynote presentation on it. It should work, in theory. Best Buy had the requisite iPad dock-to-VGA converter in stock, and the iPad version of my Keynote presentation looks almost identical to the original. The only issues I noticed are that my 3D graphics where converted into 2D, and the iPad version cannot pick a small part of a larger QuickTime file, so I had to crop that file.
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