I opted to pick up our iPad at the Apple Store in Austin, since we’ll be in that general area when it’s released, and it might be fun to shop for accessories at the same time. We’ve shopped at this store before, and know the parking is exceptionally easy, which is why I picked that one. We may be staying in New Braunfels, which is closer to San Antonio, but what the heck? Either way we’d have to get in the car and drive for an hour, so the direction we head in doesn’t make much difference.

Apparently I was not the only person a little bit excited about getting my name on the list of early adopters. Mashable said there were an estimated 51,000 iPads sold in the first two hours, and 90,000 on the first day of preorders! Not too shabby for a device the pundits kept wondering why anyone would want one. I know why I want one, of course. I’ve got a Kindle DX, and I have been very disappointed with it. While we do use it, most of the time I prefer to fire up Windows 7 in a VirtualBox window and use Kindle for PC to read my Amazon ebooks. When my iPad arrives, I’ll just use Kindle for iPhone on that instead, unless Amazon has a native iPad app ready by then. Color and a backlit screen make the reading experience so much better for me than eInk’s grainy, low-contrast screen that requires a strong reading light. I really don’t understand at all those people who say it’s harder to read an LED computer display than an eInk device or paper. They seem to get their data from the bad old days of CRTs with flickering, unshielded UV-radiant screens. Silly.

As an ebook reader, I certainly expect the iPad to be the best of the breed, but that’s not the only reason I want one. It will be a superb portfolio display, too. And using Reunion for iPhone combined with a collection of family photos, it will be the star of any family gathering. Oh, the possibilities just keep growing….

One of my primary objectives for having this device, especially the 3G version, is to supplement our very pricey VerizonWireless Mobile Broadband account. While that has been a real lifesaver on the occasions, like this past week, when we are in a place without acceptable internet connectivity, only 5 gigabytes of throughput for a month just isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Figure that only two Netflix streaming video movies would use the whole month’s allowance and you’ll understand. We simply use the internet too intensively to be happy with that kind of parsimony. AT&T’s iPad unlimited data plan, which we can turn off when we’re happy with local WiFi, will be wonderful. Phil will be able to watch movies, I’ll be able to get all the video tutorials and podcasts I want, and all the rest, without paying Verizon twice their already excessive monthly fee for using 1/5th more bandwidth, like we have the past couple of months. After all, as many people around the world have said, internet access is a basic human right.

So, we expect to really, really, really enjoy this device when it finally arrives!

So, we are really looking forward to being able to watch streaming video on the road again, which we have had to forego while using Verizon’s lame 5GB mobile broadband. Even while trying to avoid overusing it, we’ve had to pay extra for exceeding the cap for the past two months, which is very stupid. If AT&T can do unlimited data bandwidth, Verizon and Sprint could do it, too. They just don’t want to. Maybe the competition will make things change eventually, but we need it now. As it is, my Digital Media class online will starting our video project next week, and we have already used all except 1 GB of this month’s allowance on Verizon after just 2 weeks from the rollover date (the 20th of the month in our case). Thank goodness, by the time we are ready to do peer reviews we will be in Dallas (Princeton, TX, actually, but the greater Dallas area) where we will be staying in an RV park with good WiFi. We can supplement it with our Verizon modem if necessary, but I think we’ll be ok there.

But video isn’t the only attraction, of course. By getting the 3G version we will have assisted GPS on the iPad, and larger maps than on the iPhone. I have been using the Google map app with GPS on our iPhone to navigate this year, and it is really wonderful. It will be even better on the larger screen. Naturally, we will enjoy what I anticipate will be a superior ebook reading experience and photo sharing, too.

I’m considering getting some of the accessories Apple has mentioned, like the keyboard dock and camera/SD card connection kit. With the latter and with all the SD cards I’ve bought for my netbook as well as tons of computer hard disk storage, both built-in to the computers and external Firewire and USB drives, I don’t see a lot of reason to spend the extra money to buy the 64GB iPad. We will probably get the 32GB version, just because 16GB seems awfully small these days. We have 32GB on the iPhones, and even with bajillions of apps, ebooks, Audible.com audio books and data files on mine I am only using about 20% of the available storage, so I rather imagine we can get by with 32Gig on the iPad, too.

Now our only decision is where to get it? We will be in central Texas in mid-April, and Phil has agreed to stay there until the 3G iPad is available, so we will have a choice of Apple stores in Austin and San Antonio. I want to go ahead and preorder it for pickup rather than take a chance of them being sold out.

The excitement builds!

Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

The way it works, first you create a free account by entering an account name (in my case, “DigiKat”), password and email address, then confirm the address by clicking a link in the email the site sends you. Once that’s done, you go to a list where you can select up to 100 “feeds” — lists of blog or news site articles — to add to your MyAlltop page by simply putting a checkmark beside the ones you want. When you’re done, click the “Save” button, and go see the results. If that’s not easy enough, watch the video tutorials to get a step-by-step walk-through of the process.

Unlike many of the other currently popular create-it-yourself sites out there, there is no way to add personal information or design touches, at least not right now, and any revenues generated by the embedded ads accrue to the Alltop folks, not you. But it’s rather neat to have a page with your own selection of news and info, and to be able to share it with everyone, and their monitization scheme may ensure that the pages will be around for awhile, so it’s all good.

As well as the RSS feed aggregation page, Alltop offers some other “goodies”. An example is the Alltop badge in the right sidebar here, below my Twitter feed badges. The topic I chose for this badge, “Journalism”, isn’t included in my own MyAlltop page, but of course it’s a subject I’m interested in. Maybe I’ll make another MyAlltop page on that subject. Think of a whole page full of paragraph-sized link lists similar to this badge, and you’ll begin to see what Alltop is all about.

If you decide to try it out, post a comment here with your MyAlltop page name!

It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.

For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.

As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.

First, there is the screen itself. It is not paper-white at all. The contrast is rather poor, and text is not as sharp-edged as I’d like. Not having a backlight, while saving battery consumption, does mean it’s necessary to have a light source handy to read productively. My caveats don’t extend to the point of complete disgruntlement, though. While the screen on my iPhone is backlit and high contrast/resolution, its smaller size makes it much more difficult to read for more than a few minutes. Since one reason I want an eReader is for grad school textbooks, that makes a difference. However, although I can list a number of caveats, my reaction was not nearly as negative as that described by Nicholson Baker in his The New Yorker review. However, even Baker says in his final paragraphs that once he started reading, “Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos promised it would.” However, one feature that leaves me completely unimpressed is the built-in Web browser. I’m not sure if it’s Sprint’s 3G network or the browser software or the Kindle’s hardware, but for some reason opening a page on the Kindle is excruciatingly slow, and unless the page has a very clean design and a well-functioning style sheet, the results can be unreadable. I find that even though Web links normally provide very useful extensions to many documents, on the Kindle they are just too much trouble to be worth the time and effort required to use them.

Kindle for School

Last term I bought several textbooks in ebook editions, and found it quite a hard slog to get through them on the iPhone. For the Fall semester I’ve already purchased a couple of required texts in Kindle format, and I’m much more confident that I will be able to read them more productively than I could on the iPhone. For one thing, the Kindle for iPhone app doesn’t have a way to highlight or mark text selections, a time-honored study technique used by students for countless years. The Kindle DX does allow highlighting, and automatically adds marked selections to a file called “My Clippings.txt”, which can be downloaded to a computer using the USB cable. As a plain text file, these notes can then be organized in any way one chooses. On the Kindle itself “highlighting” consists of a light grey underlining that is not very conspicuous, but not invisible either.

Kindle Resources

Speaking of Kindle for iPhone, since Amazon’s acquisition of the company who make the highly-regarded Stanza ebook reader software, the latest version of this app shows many improvements obviously imported from that excellent application. Stanza itself comes in a desktop version as well as for iPhone OS, which has a feature I just found out about. Possibly new since the Amazon acquisition, it is now possible to save books readable by Stanza Desktop in Kindle’s .azw format. In particular, I’ve found that .epub format ebooks, available from many publishers including O’Reilly and Associates, Baen Books, and the public domain resource, Project Gutenberg, are very easy to use on the Kindle. Just open them in Stanza Desktop, select File-Export Book As-Amazon Kindle and copy the resulting file into the Kindle’s “document” folder when it is connected to the computer with its USB cable. Or, email it to the Kindle using your personal [yourname]@kindle.com address. Before sending documents to the Kindle via email, though, you have to register the email address you want to send it from in your Amazon “Manage my Kindle” account. Using this address costs US$0.10 per document, but will send it directly to the device over the Whispernet Sprint cellular network. There is also a free email address, [yourname]@free.kindle.com, but there is not much point in using that for this purpose since you have to then copy the document from your computer to the Kindle, and if you already have it on your computer in the appropriate format, why send it through Amazon’s system?

The Whispernet cellular network does add a special filip to the Kindle. Buying books on the Kindle and having them delivered directly to it within minutes is possibly the most compelling reason to buy this eReader instead of others on the market at this moment. Amazon’s Kindle Store has an enormous selection of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs available, of course, and the hardest thing about it is to avoid blowing the budget filling up the Kindle with the enticing commercial offerings. But finding a lot of sources of free ebooks has saved my finances. One list of sites offering free ebooks is in The Kindle 2 Cookbook: How To Do Everything the Manual Doesn’t Tell You, which has a lot of other very useful information, too.

This ought to give you a taste of why I’m happy with my new Kindle DX. Will I still be as thrilled with it if Apple announces a competing product next month? Maybe not, but in the meantime I gotta go now… so much to read, so little time!

I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now you can tell I’m having fun. So much to read, so little time….

You may be sure I’ll write more about it after receiving it next week, but right now I still have a term paper to complete, so that’s all for now. Ciao!

Now I have a problem. I ordered a Kindle DX a couple of weeks ago. Naturally, I’d rather have this new thing from Apple, especially with what I expect will be a high-res color screen and other functions besides just being an ebook reader. Think about a 10-inch iPod Touch…

So, should I cancel the order? Or use it for a couple of months until the Apple tablet comes out and sell it? Tell me what you think I should do. Vote in the poll in the sidebar before July 31st.