As I said, it’s hard to compare yourself (myself) with some of these guys, but I still can tell you how I get my news and what I read otherwise. I get a newspaper, but most of the time I save it for when I travel or have some time to kill out of the house. For my main source of online news I use an RSS reader with a twist called Feedly. It uses Google Reader as input for news, so you have to load some feeds into that, but than it makes a newspaper/magazine style front page. On this page the stories are displayed which are most read and shared by other people, so you get the most interesting stories on top. After that you can always zoom in on some specific news sources.

This works best if you have many different news sources in there, as long as you don’t oblige yourself to keep up with them all (you don’t need to, you get the best of the best on the front page). I have added the feeds collection of Zee of The Next Web at one time to my reader. It’s a file (OPML) which you can import into Google Reader which will add all the feeds to it. There are many interesting blogs and news sites in there although it is very tech centered. A bundle with 13 of my favorite feeds can be found and imported into a feed reader here. Some more favorites in the Dutch language can be found here.

Besides these feeds I like to read things on Digg, I have to keep myself from visiting too often, so I go there once a week and read some of the top stories. After this I enjoy browsing the site of The New York Times, especially Opinions (Krugman and Friedman first) but I also like the Technology posts by David Pogue. New Scientist is great for popular science and Physorg features some more detailed scientific news, it’s quoted/linked to a lot by other news sources. For economic article the Harvard Business Review is one good source.

Obviously there are many more interesting news sources. One way of finding them is by using your Twitter friends. You can watch their stream for good links, but Twittertim.es gives an overview of the most interesting things for you, quite similar to Feedly. I’ve written about Twittertim.es before.

Allright, I’d love to hear what blogs you don’t miss a post of. Or have you started a real media diet for yourself and are you trying to cut back on reading online? Let me know on twitter or right here in the comments.

I’d use the Nokia for phone calls, but also some mobile web browsing such as Google Reader or a mobile web Twitter client. I’ve never installed many applications on it. It almost seemed Nokia didn’t want you to install anything on it, that’s how hard they made it. And the launch of their Ovi app store only made it a little better. I still really like the company Nokia, they are the complete opposite of Apple with their openness and anti-hype way of communicating (which may be part of their Scandinavian nature but perhaps also a little damaging to their PR). In the end I was not a big fan of their products anymore. Even the N97 which looked like Nokia’s answer to the iPhone failed to deliver with a certain confusing difficulty to it’s menus and unfortunate trade offs such as the resistive screen.

I carried around the iPod Touch for consuming news via newspaper apps or watching video podcasts. It’s obviously very user friendly, but sometimes a little frustrating in what Steve Jobs doesn’t allow you to do (and that’s how it feels when you can’t do things like multitasking or installing another media player). I just read Apple did allow the Opera browser to the app store, but just the fact that everyone was holding their breath for that and the arbitrariness because other browser have been disallowed says it all.

Now the Android operating system which is inside my new phone (think of it as the Windows or Mac OS inside the phone, while it’s actually based on Linux) is like a marriage of the Nokia and the iPod Touch. It’s versatile, but user friendly. There are more things to figure out than with an iPhone which makes it more customizable, but also less easy to use. When you give it to someone less computer savvy (I call this the girlfriend test) she will pick up and figure out the iPhone a lot faster than the Android phone.

HTC Desire keyboard installed on a Nexus One

The hardware of the HTC Desire is practically the best there is with a fast processor and amazing screen. Only the camera could be a little better (I’ve never been blown away by a camera phone, although the camera in the Nokia was very good) and the internal memory could have been more especially since that is the only place to store apps. Music, photos and videos can be placed on a memory card. I also think the on screen keyboard is the best I’ve used. I’m typing this on it right now.

One major difference between the iPhone and Android phones is the app store of course. Apple has a huge advantage with their ever increasing collection of apps. Usually this causes so called network effects (the more apps there are, the more interesting the product becomes, the more users it will get, the more apps there will be developed, etc) which at a certain moment are very hard to duplicate or substitute for a competitor. The fact that the same app store can be used on many different Android models is a very smart way to overcome this problem, I think. This causes the user base to grow, which stimulates aforementioned cycle. Already almost 80% of iPhone developers have stated they are planning an Android app.

So I’m very optimistic about the Android platform and can’t wait to see what to future hold for these two rivals, because I think it’s clear these will become the two dominant players.

Technological Perspective

There are two ways of looking at this new product. From a technical perspective it really is just a large iPhone or iPod Touch. It really doesn’t have any technical features over the iPhone. David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, introduced the three phases of a new Apple product category.

Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.

Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”

That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.

Summing up all the technological shortcomings is part of the current phase two. Most bloggers and people on twitter were “underwhelmed” and “disappointed” during or right after the keynote speech. In the first day afterwards articles appeared such as Ten Things Missing From The iPad – Wired Gadget Lab The Anti-Hype: Why Apple’s iPad Disappoints – Mashable and What’s Missing from the Apple iPad? – Mashable. These articles are focusing mostly on the missing camera, usb ports, SD card, flash support, HD playback or HDMI connectivity and multitasking.

Possibilities of Use

The second way of looking at the iPad is not from a technical perspective but by looking at the possibilities of use. When I thought of a web tablet before the product launch, such as this Apple tablet or perhaps the CrunchPad (similar to the iPad but with only a browser) I couldn’t think of any reason the buy one when you already have a smartphone and laptop. Then I realized I own and love an iPod Touch and use that a lot. I use it for surfing, reading e-books and articles, twittering and games and of course use some other apps. I use it quite a lot at home, because it’s connected online via wifi and about the only place with available wifi that you can use is at home. So the only thing missing from my iTouch actually is 3G connectivity.

If you look at possibilities instead of shortcomings you see what Apple has created is really a clean “slate”. An empty vessel for developers of apps and websites to create content on. As heard quite often from tech pundits and journalists it’s the ideal content consumption device. E-books, e-magazines, videos, websites, music, it can all be consumed while comfortably sitting on a couch holding the sleek 700 gram device. Just look at what Sports Illustrated envisioned before the launch of iPad:

Comedian Stephen Fry, who was present at the keynote said the iPad had to be experienced to be judged fairly and that you’d be amazed by the speed and simplicity of the interface (link – it’s a long but good read, you can always spot the real writers between the bloggers). Below is a video of a demo where you can really see how beautiful it looks and how fast and responsive the graphical user interface is.

So if iPad is supposed to be a consumption device, an open playground for developers, then it’s especially disappointing it’s still a closed system. As Alex Payne writes the iPhone can get away with having a closed system where you can only install Apple approved apps and are not able to tinker with most of the settings, because it’s quite a step ahead from the older “smartphones” where it’s really difficult to install apps. A device between a smartphone and a laptop however can be much more open and “Apple’s decision to make the iPad a closed device is an artificial one”.

So I think Apple has shown us the future. I’m very interested to see if will be massively adopted like the iPhone or that for the average consumer there’s just no point in having an extra device. As @breun said: “It would be great if your iPhone turned into an iPad when you get home”. Regarding the openness, I’m waiting for the other device manufacturers to launch their tablets. Would be great to see a similar device with Android or even Chrome OS where you can install android apps and have the freedom of these operating systems.

The iPad does stimulate ones imagination about possibilities and the future of connectivity to the web and media consumption. Now let’s hope it also stimulates the imagination of the competitors. Are you already saving money for the first iPad or would you rather wait for a later version? Or don’t you feel the need for such a device or are you looking at other devices?

I started with firing up Seesmic Web, an online twitter client. I wanted to open some columns with my followers, some twitter lists of people who were going to be there and a search query on “Apple” or “Tablet”. Unfortunately the web app is quite the memory hog and my computer grinded to a full halt when I opened more than four columns. I then opened the same things in tabs of Firefox and that worked very smoothly. I also opened the live coverage of GDGT, Engadget and Gizmodo. GDGT had the fastest and most complete coverage (including images) and Gizmodo the funniest, so I soon dropped Engadget. Twitter was predicted by many to cave under the pressures of the event. Although this didn’t happen they did shut down the list features altogether, which was a real shame because now I had to miss out on local commentary. Best video and audio stream was provided by Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv, but I found the website hard to reach and when I did manage to connect the video needed a lot of buffering and lacked in quality. I preferred the images of GDGT.

Alright, that sums up how I followed the event live. I’ll let you know what I thought of the iPad soon in a new post. I’m confident I didn’t miss out on any information during the keynote speech, getting my information from both GDGT and Gizmodo. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it really adds much to follow the event live, over reading about on blogs afterwards. One advantage is that you can place comments in perspective, but with Twitter’s lists down that didn’t work anyway. It does make sense if you just want to know everything first and it was a nice experiment to see how much information you can get online. Have you followed it online or do you think it doesn’t add anything to follow it real-time?

Image source: GDGT

And boy, were there many people who went and saw it. It’s a regular box office success. It grossed over $1 billion worldwide in the first month and people have paid $1.6 bln up until today to get in. To put that in perspective, it’s the number two in the list with highest grossing movies ever, behind James Cameron’s previous movie, Titanic, which was released 12 years ago and has turned over $1.8 bln. Another interested statistic is that the whole of the movie industry has resulted in about $10.5 bln in 2009. So Avatar (released December 19th) makes up almost 10% of that. (source Boxofficemojo)

James Cameron has been developing this movie for 12 years. In this period he has seen the movie industry changing and struggling with internet phenomena such as piracy. The revenues have been steadily rising, but still people worried. Then he and others wondered how to get people away from their computer screens and living rooms, into the movie theatres. 3D movies seemed like the answer and heavy investments were made in developing a whole new way of filming. Would these investments have been made if the threat of people watching movies at home hadn’t existed? I doubt it.

Now of course of of the biggest hits of Consumer Electronics Show of this January in Las Vegas was the 3D television, so people can watch 3D movies at home. No doubt 3D movies will get pirated. This doesn’t mean this development has been for nothing. It’s just another step in innovative progress.