Ipad

As entertaining as the game was, the best action in yesterday’s Super Bowl was off the field.

In the second quarter, Motorola ran a one minute ad which parodied Ridley Scott’s bold, apocalyptic 1984 Apple ad.

In Scott’s ad, Apple seemed to be implying that the world of personal computing, circa the actual year 1984, was dominated by a Big Brother-like power (IBM, anyone?) more reminiscent of Orwell’s fictional 1984.

Continue reading "Motorola taunts Apple: “Who’s Big Brother now?”" »

I love progress. I’ve got an IPad and a desktop computer. I shop online. I work from home.

I even do my own software updates, partly from necessity and partly because I’m feeling empowered enough to do it.

The debate about the NBN has left me cold. I find myself asking: do I need faster internet speed?

Continue reading "But seriously, where will the NBN cables go?" »

Remember all the things you learned at school: the periodic table and calculus and Egyptian pharaohs and dangling participles and the causes of the First World War.

Now think about what you learned at school that is actually useful in your everyday life today.  Excluding obvious basics such as reading, writing and arithmetic, I’d nominate two things, neither of which I imagined would turn out to be so handy.  The first is touch typing.  The second is what the teacher announced in the opening class of Grade 11 economics: wants are unlimited but resources are limited.

It’s something I think about all the time.  For example, I like to imagine that if I had an iPad with The New Yorker application on it, I’d be Perfectly Happy for the Rest of My Life.  Sadly though, I predict that soon after, there’d be a strong hankering for a stylish red leather pouch for said iPad. 

Continue reading "iWant therefore iAm" »

In an old episode of MASH, the doctors are talking about missing television, in particular missing watching Milton Berle at night with their wives. Charles, arch conservative who likes old wine and even older music, says television is a passing phase.

Winchester wasn’t the only one who poo-poohed the arrival of a new medium of entertainment, nor was he the last.

Well, its de ja vu all over again. There’s a new gadget on the market, the doubters and sceptics are doing their thing and technological evangelists are doing theirs.

Continue reading "I hope I didn’t buy a $1000 calculator with WiFi" »

Call me a miserable old piece of shit but I reckon it’s pretty weird that on the same day that some of Australia’s most committed virgins are queuing up in the cold outside the Apple Store for the launch of the iPad, in China, they’re queuing up on the roof to kill themselves at the factory that manufactures them.

If you want to know the story of globalisation, this one surely will do. On George St, Sydney, extra staff have been called in at the Apple Store to cope with the demand as hundreds of cashed-up geeks gather in a display of commodity fetishism which will hopefully be the subject of formal study by some sardonic anthropologist from the developing world.

Meanwhile, not that far north at the Foxconn factory in China’s Hunan province, nets have been installed on the roof after an 11th employee hurled himself to his death as the workers struggle to meet a deadline which has been created by our demand.

Continue reading "I’m dying to get one of those iPads they’re dying to make" »

A new messiah arrived in the US over the Easter weekend, ready to save the world’s flailing print media industry.

Sandal-less and sleek, it was, of course, Steve Jobs’ new fantasy tablet, the wildly anticipated, possibly revolutionary, definitely state of the art, iPad thingymajiggy. And America threw a bonza welcome party for its latest chosen one. Australia will have to wait a month to throw theirs.

Apple sold 700,000 iPads in two days, with 300,000 plucked from shelves and UPS men on Saturday, the first day of sales. By any standard that’s a massive take-off; even by Apple standards. The now ubiquitous iPhone sold 200,000 on its first day in stores in 2007, a third less than its plus-sized cousin.

But it was the media laying the palms for the iPad’s arrival more than the shoppers.

Continue reading "Will the iPad save the news?" »

It was never going to take long - here’s the Downfall parody of Hitler finding out about the iPad. As usual, he’s not happy and this contains some strong subtitles.

The one advantage that paper-based magazines have had on their electronic counterparts is usability and look. The ability to turn the page and take in the beauty of a well-designed magazine is something that most web sites can’t match.

Portability is the other area where magazines have had the edge. Carrying them around is lot easier than a standard computer.

As such, many have scoffed at Rupert Murdoch’s aim to get people to pay for digital content. After all, lots of online content is currently free and there’s been nowhere near enough ‘value-add’ to warrant people paying for content. However, the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet could well be the game changer that proves Murdoch right. With their new ultra-portable tablet, Apple can change the publishing industry to the same degree that they’ve changed the music sector.

Continue reading "Why the iPad could be the saviour of paid content" »

The first thing that came to mind on seeing pictures of Apple boss Steve Jobs with his new iPad device this morning was Trigger Happy TV, the British skit show whose signature sketch involved the star taking hysterically loud phone calls at inappropriate times on a three-foot telephone.

“Hello?” he’d suddenly shout in a full cinema, brandishing the prop. “No, I’m at a movie. It’s rubbish.”

Let’s not kid ourselves. The iPad is a laptop computer that doesn’t fold. But its appeal – or potential – lies in the content you’ll be able to access from it at a touch, once you hand over your $560 for the basic model when it ships worldwide two months from now.

Continue reading "The future of media is a comically oversized iPhone?" »