Glif, an iPhone 4 stand and tripod mount

Glif, an iPhone 4 stand and tripod mount. I really like it. It gives the ability to mount the iPhone 4 on a small or big tripod for photos or videos, and it makes a handy stand for reading or watching video on the iPhone 4.  Handy product for both uses, and good quality material.

I have combined it with the the tiny GorillaMobile tripod. I leave one glif on the tripod and one on the phone, and it's super-quick to change it over.

Annual Tech Show Had Some Surprises and Same Old 3-D

Annual Tech Show Had Some Surprises and Same Old 3-D, article by David Pogue, NYT.
“These companies are like 6-year-olds on a soccer team,” one company representative told me. “The ball goes over here, and they all run after it in a blob. ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ” [...]
The second theme of C.E.S. was, once again, Technologies We Desperately Wish You’d Want. For the 417th straight C.E.S., the industry trotted out yet another vision of the Connected Home (your appliances, home theater and other gadgets all on a big network). And for the 417th straight year, nobody in Americaland will have any interest.

It's pretty strange all right. Where's the applied intelligence in all those companies? How do they make their money?

iPad 2, wireless sync?

Here's my prediction for the iPad two: I think it will finally allow wireless syncing to your computer. This is a bad hangup for many people, and I admit it's a bit silly to have to move your iPad and plug it in every time the computer has auto-downloaded new podcasts and such. It should happen continually in the background.

Or heck, why even be dependent on the computer at all? Why can't the iPad stand alone? To sell Macs? I just don't know, maybe it's just inertia, for sure Apple has been busy.

Rumors say it'll arrive in February 2011, but I really don't see why Apple would do that, when version one is still selling like hotcakes. Seems more likely they will go for a yearly update like the iPod and iPhone. (The first one came in April last 2010.)

Geekbeat TV

A tip if you like to follow the general tech world, and appreciate a perky and enthusiastic presenter: Geekbeat TV.

Ancient tech explained by children

Ancient tech from the '80s explained by iPod-era children, article and video.
Perhaps the funniest moment comes when the kids are presented with a floppy disk, which they guess is everything from a camera to a credit card.

(Slightly off-topic for this blog, but fun.)

11 tablets worth looking at

Ray found this article, which includes several interesting videos showing newly introduced tablets. I find the Asus Slider (second video) with the slide-out keyboard to be promising, for example.

ibis Reader

I'm testing the ibis Reader, which is quite interesting, basically an online ebook reader, you have your library on their server. But they are also saved to your device for offline reading. It works, impressively, with a normal web browser, and with Android and iPhone, and iPad.
It is a commercial app of a kind, but it's free to use, and seems to be some kind of labor of love on their part.

(I'm writing ibis in all lower case so the first i is not confused with a lower-case L. Sigh, semantics.)

iPad battery life...

I went to a café this afternoon and had a leisurely cuppa coffee and cake. I'd brought my iPad and I sat there for... not sure, but it felt like far off an hour, watching video podcasts. I even connected via my Mifi device and downloaded a few more (in smaller versions though, otherwise there would have been some waiting, over the cell phone network).

After I came home, I plugged in the iPad to charge, and I noticed I'd only used about seven percent of the battery charge on that adventure! Durn impressive when one is used to notebooks, where you're lucky to get maybe four hours total.

iPad not "mobile"?

Apparently WhazHisFace, the FaceBook founder, commented that the iPad is not really a mobile device, it's a computer.

There might be something to it. It seems most people, including myself, primarily use the iPad at home. For a wealth of tasks. For me that's overwhelmingly reading, on several different apps. (Zinio, Instapaper, NetNewsWire, Kindle App, web browser...)
I'm not sure what we can learn from this*, but it caught my attention.


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*A Danish comedian in my childhood had an excellent TV show for children where he would show some far-out video clip, and upon its ending would always say: "... And what can we learn from this? Well..." and he would come up with some even crazier morale for our enlightenment. Very funny. But: I do believe that a datum or event only gets really interesting when we can sort of extrapolate to bigger spheres and try to learn something new, applicable in other areas of our lives too.