Tech - iPad Review

I went down to the Apple store on 4/3 to get an iPad. I was not going to buy one because with a desktop and laptop, I really don't need one. But, curiousity got the better of me, and I wanted to see for myself whether this could be the Next Big Thing (John Doerr seems to think so).

Is this really "the computer for the rest of us"? No. But it is an amazing device, and will be quite useful once version 4 of the iPhone OS is released later this year.

Pros--

• Onscreen keyboard is surprisingly easy to type on. I was using a bluetooth keyboard, but decided I don't need it.
• Small and light.
• Great battery life.
• The iPad-specific apps are awesome.

Cons--

• Power users will be frustrated.
• No multitasking means a lot of switching in and out of apps--to email an article, for example.
• Mobile Safari is still somewhat crippled.

I am going to use it for meetings and conferences where I am not going to be cranking out long docs or spreadsheets, but rather checking email, taking notes, and doing some simple web browsing. I have a Verizon MiFi card that creates a wifi hotspot off the 3G data network, so I can connect wherever I am. A MacBook Air might work better with only a small weight penalty, but the battery life is too short.

I consider myself a laptop "power user", so I am really not the target market for the iPad. Who is?
So far, my kids are all over the iPad, especially my 4.5 yr old. She loves to type on it and interact with the Cat in the Hat app. My 2 yr old likes watching videos, which he can do just fine on an iPhone.

I can see that there is a whole class of people who have a desktop computer for most of what they do, and would like a lightweight option for when they are moving around. Next test....what do my mother and mother-in-law think of it.

Cycling - What does being Godlike look like?

I remember after the "Twitter Time Trial" in Hawaii that Lance put on, there was a shot of his SRM computer showing his average speed, which was impressive at over 35mph (though he had a tailwind). But, he demured when it came to show his power output--booo!

Thankfully, Fabian Cancellara is not as bashful. After winning the Ronde van Flanderen yesterday, he kindly shared his ride data with Markus Neuert (@CycleFilm), who kindly shared it with the world.

So, for 259km over about 6:26 of racing.......
Max.Speed:80km/h - Max.Cad:147 - Max.HR:190 - Max.Power:1450W - Tot.Calories: 6459
Avg.Speed:40km/h - Avg.Cad:73 - Avg.HR:143 - Avg.Power:285W

That is why they call the man "Spartacus". 285W average is mind boggling when you consider all the easy riding in the early part of the race, and the coasting downhill. The average cadence of 73 indicates a fair amount of coasting. An average speed of 25mph for over 160 miles. According to Boonen, at the end he was doing over 30mph and still losing ground to Cancellara. I can maintain that kind of speed for about 300m, they did it for over 10km, with 250km already in their legs. 6459 kilojoules of work

The best sprinters can uncork up to 1600 watts for a short burst at the end. Spartacus hit 1450 watts in dropping Tom Boonen up the Muur, and probably held that level for around 30 seconds. Apparently he did not even mean to attack, he just decided to go a bit harder. "Ooops, I am sorry, did I just crush your dreams with my little acceleration." Boonen is a legitimate Hero in the cobbled classics, and Spartacus outclassed him on the Muur (Boonen cramped up, which did not help). Skip to about 2 mins into this video.


This is why I love the Classics--there are no accidental winners. No lucky breakaway that gives a domestique a chance to grab glory (well, almost never). The Classics are won by the most fearsome of the peloton's elite. Everyone knew Spartacus' gameplan. Only Boonen could answer to the first attack on the Paterberg, and on the Muur it became an anaerobic victory lap.

It is appropriate that there is a chapel on top of the Muur (or Kapelmuur, as it is also known), because it is one of the cathedrals of cycling. Heros are anointed here by the rabid crowd and steep cobbles. I could go on about cycling's cathedral's, but I think I will make that another post.

On a side note, Lance did pretty well to get 27th place. He was always up amongst the leaders, which I was glad to see after his lackluster performances earlier this season.

Bravo, Spartacus! I look forward to Paris-Roubaix this weekend.

Is the future of news here?

Further to my post a while ago on the future of news, today it arrived. I went down to the Apple store and picked up an iPad. The store was crowded, but they still had the 32GB and 64GB in stock. I went before 3pm, because at 3pm they were going to put back into stock machines that had been reserved but not picked up, but this did not matter.

Anyway, I have been playing with it, and in particular I wanted to see the Wall Street Journal app. The video above gives you a good sense of it. I find it very slick. It looks like a paper, but with the convenience of an electronic device in terms of navigation, emailing and saving articles. You can download into the device up to 7 days of the whole paper (hmm...what else to call it) for reading if you are offline. It works well in portrait or landscape mode.

The ads are unobtrusive for now, and the ads themselves are much more interesting because they can be interactive. It will be interesting to see how these monetize for the WSJ. Of course, since they are charging $18/mo, that will help the business model.

[Update: The app is slow to get going. Once you open it, you have to wait for 10-15 seconds while it loads the latest edition before you can do anything. That should be fixed.]

Estate Sale

While thinking about my previous post/rant regarding West Marin, I remembered a sign that I found particularly funny, though not specifically a West Marin problem.

As I was rolling through Lagunitas, there was a sandwich board-style sign for an estate sale. No, I did not get a picture....I was working my ass off in a paceline and if I had stopped to take a picture, I would never have caught back up. Anyway, the sign itself is not at issue.

The question is, what is an "estate sale". Well, denotatively it is the sale of a dead person's belongings. Boy, that sounds like fun.

Connotatively, it has been usurped to describe the common garage sale. People think of estate as in a manor, not a legal construct, and apparently like to think they live in one. In this use, if you see a sign for an estate sale, apparently George Lucas is clearing out the garage, because he is the only guy I know of who has a proper estate in Marin. The rest of us are mere country squires in our little houses. So if we are having a true estate sale, we will not be able to attend.

What is in West Marin's water?

I ride my bike a lot, and I usually choose to ride out in West Marin, in the bucolic countryside. Sometimes I am out by myself, sometimes in a small group, and occasionally in a large group of up to 30 riders. It seems like every ride, I have a negative encounter with an aggressive motorist, angry about sharing the road with cyclists.

What makes these hippies so unhappy? If you have chosen to live in West Marin, you have checked out of the fast lane. You are not in your pickup rushing to a board meeting. The CEO has not summoned you to the office for a critical strategy session. If you have to wait a minute until the road straightens out so you can pass safely, the world will keep spinning. And yet, I often see untempered aggression.

In Marin County, West Marin is the poor stepchild. All the tax base is within 2 miles of 101. Go west, and you are looking at subsidized living.

Bolinas is particularly irksome. Those people are downright hostile to visitors, and yet they have no obvious means of support other than tourism, agriculture (probably more accurately herbiculture) and welfare. The Bovine Bakery, which does serious business with cyclists and other tourists, delights in not having an espresso machine. "We only make real coffee", they say. What would Europeans, who have been drinking it a lot longer than we have, think about that.

During the Tour of Marin, where we had a rolling CHP escort, I actually saw a slackjawed yokel throw a Big Gulp at the riders. He was immediately pulled over...that guy is not just hostile, he is an idiot.

When I have ridden in other rural areas, people are just not like that. When you move to West Marin, you have to accept that there are going to be some inconveniences. When I lived in Oxford, UK, I faced a similar situation. In the summer, the streets were infested with tourists, mostly Japanese. The sidewalks were literally jammed with various tour groups moving like slow schools of fish. And they would not get out of your way as you tried to move through them. Did I start throwing sodas at them or pushing them into the street? No. I am a civilized person. I walked in the street to get around them, or waited impatiently when I had no other option.

So, what makes people in West Marin so unfriendly? If they are so put upon by cyclists, tourists and other money spending inconveniences, why don't they move to Iowa?

End of rant.

Review - Bose SoundDock

My not so cheap iPod speaker solution crapped out last week. Feeling spendy, I trotted down to the Apple store and picked up a Bose SoundDock Portable. I got the portable one so I can put it on my shoulder and roller skate down the bike path to P Funk, old school.

This is my first Bose product. I thought about a Wave Radio for a long time, but never pulled the trigger because I am just not enough of an audiophile. I have 3700 songs in my iTunes library, but I rarely listen to music. I don't spend enough time making interesting playlists, but when I put it on shuffle, the algorithm seems partial to my Mandarin lessons.

What finally pushed me to make the purchase was Pandora. F* the iTunes playlists. Dinner party with Mexican food? Cool....that will be the Mariachi channel. Chilling? Flamenco channel. Holiday time? Yeah, there's a channel for that. Polka time? Of course.

I have an old iPod Touch that is the perfect companion to the Bose. The price was steep at $400, but the sound quality is remarkable. My old $100 solution really struggled with any volume, but the Bose pumps it out loud and clear. This weekend I pulled the plug and brought it outside for a BBQ. It played for 4 hours before I turned the music off, so battery life is fine.

The remote is designed for iTunes, and probably works well with it....I have really only used the Bose for Pandora at a couple of parties. It would also do well for NPR in the morning via their iPhone app.....but I can't listen to NPR anymore after seeing this - http://bit.ly/c63kxT.

I have not heard music out of some of the other high end speaker products, so I don't have a frame of reference, but for its size, the Bose's audio was clear and impressive. The price may hurt, but you will not be disappointed with the sound.

The iPhone will be free of AT&T at last

News today in the WSJ (http://bit.ly/bd1E0j) that a CDMA iPhone is in the works for the end of the year. That means Sprint or Verizon, or possibly both. Verizon has the stronger network, but it will probably be down to who is willing to stump up the $600 up front price that AT&T currently pays.

Apple's business model is a bit unusual in that it gives away the blades to sell the razor. iTunes barely makes profit, but it moves iPods. The App Store probably does make decent profit, but again, it is primarily a way to move hardware. The wireless carriers are the other way around. AT&T pays buys iPhones from Apple for $600, sells them for $199, but makes it up over time with outrageously priced data plans.

As an iPhone lover who has long suffered on AT&T's woefully inadequate data network, I welcome a new carrier to share some of the load. The iPhone has singlehandedly propelled AT&T into the smartphone lead, for which they reward us by failing to invest enough in infrastructure.

I would actually like to stay with AT&T, because I am emotionally attached to GSM (like the metric system, it makes me feel all international). But will a new carrier for the iPhone make my AT&T experience better? Probably not.

I don't expect current iPhone owners to bolt for a new carrier because of the costs in doing so. You have to pay the early termination fee (ETF) to AT&T, and sign up for a new contract--and Verizon's ETF is now $250. It might happen slowly as people roll off their AT&T contracts and want the latest iPhone. It will somewhat depend on how much of an upgrade this summer's iPhone is. If it is super digital hotness, lots of people will do an early upgrade option (they all upgraded last year to the 3Gs) and bam!, there is that ETF again. If the new model is a snoozer, then perhaps next summer people will make the jump to a new carrier for the 2011 iPhone.

Many just won't bother. I like the fact that GSM lets me be on the phone and using the data channel at the same time. I know that Verizon is working on a 4G network, LTE (Long Term Evolution, I think), that will not be compatible and therefore require a new phone. Many current iPhone users are geeks, and these things will matter to them as well. Unfortunately, they are also the heavy data users.

New iPhone buyers probably consume far less data, on average, than existing owners. Sure, there will be some people whose business required Verizon who will move up from their Blackberries, but I am talking big picture here.

So, unless AT&T continues to invest to upgrade their data infrastructure, a Verizon iPhone won't ease the congestion on AT&T. But, if AT&T fears that their growth will be stunted by a Verizon iPhone, they are going to scale back their network investment to protect their quarterly profits. AT&T still thinks like a demented monopolist.

Want proof? Go into an AT&T store and buy an iPhone. Now go do the same thing in an Apple store. AT&T has decades more experience in retail than Apple. What have they learned? Apparently, nothing.

But AT&T will still manage to sell more iPhones....even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, and the data use on their network will continue to grow.

Of course, I have a Verizon MiFi as a backup....when AT&T craps out, I fire up the MiFi and ride on Verizon's data network.