So this happened: they gave the Pope an iPad and he went and signed up for Twitter. For his very first tweet, he sent a picture of his junk to that cute altar boy from Thursday’s Mass. He can’t deny it’s his penis because the tip looks like one of those funny hats he wears.
That’s a picture of a prototype of a very tiny PC that a group called the Raspberry Pi Foundation hopes to turn into a real product that could be sold for about $25. It has 128MB of memory, which is enough to run some flavor of Linux, and would rely on an SD card for storage (presently they go up to 32GB). There’s only one USB port, but you could presumably connect a small hub so you could attach a keyboard and a mouse and maybe even a USB WiFi adapter (since there’s no built-in networking). It would be cool if they do end up being able to bring this to the market for such a small price point, but everything about it reminds me of the hype that went into the OLPC seven or eight years ago. Meanwhile, by the time they do get it to market, smartphones will have replaced PCs anyway.
While we’re talking about tiny tech, here’s a story from Singularity Hub about video cameras the size of a grain of salt that can be used for endoscopy (among other uses) and are intended to be disposable. They’ll probably end up embedded in so many different things your head will explode, but at least there will be plenty of pictures of that moment to share on Facebook.
Aaaand, speaking of ubiquitous cameras and their myriad uses…here’s ANOTHER Singularity Hub post that wonders why we STILL don’t like to engage in video chatting, even though it’s gotten to be essentially free and trivial to set up. If you figure it out, I’m sure the folks at MicroSkype would love to hear it.
Fast Company reports that PBS conducted a survey of iPad users with children as part of their effort to develop some iPad apps and discovered that 70% of them are willing to let their small children play with their iPads and regularly download apps specifically for the kids to play with. Like their headline implies, this really only reaffirms one of the main criticisms leveled at the iPad: that it is simply a toy, albeit a 500-dollar toy. The school board in my hometown might want to take notice of this.
Speaking of tablet computers (man, I am just FULL of segues today), next week Barnes & Noble are expected to announce the next generation of their Nook e-reader (since all of us left behind from the Rapture will have plenty of spare time to catch up on our reading), and Ars Technica recently speculated on what that announcement might entail. Their guess is that it’s a refresh of the original e-ink Nook and not the more advanced color Nook, which lately is everybody’s favorite cheap way to get a tablet computer.
Lastly, British tech news website The Register, who win the award for most frequent non-ironic use of the word “Boffin”, says that it looks like Cisco is going to unload the Linksys home router business as part of the same realignment strategy that saw them discontinue the Flip videocamera a couple of weeks ago. I know the home wireless router business isn’t what it used to be since the cable companies that provide Internet service to most American homes now incorporate wireless routers right into their cable modem devices, but you gotta think that somebody would pick that up.
I’m sure all of my homies know about this story, but if you’re not one of us, you may not have heard that there’s a plan afoot in my hometown of Auburn, Maine to give iPads to all the incoming kindergarten students this fall. The idea is that by giving the youngest students the devices they can jumpstart reading for them, and the school board hopes to be able to come up with the $200K for the devices through private sponsors, but it acknowledges that if the funding doesn’t materialize, the money will come from local taxpayers. So, unsurprisingly, there’s quite a bit of opposition by local parents.
Meanwhile, not only are iPads going to replace kindergarten teachers, they’re also probably going to replace waitstaff at your favorite chain restaurant any day now. Slate describes one company that’s already pilot-testing putting iPads at tables in restaurants to let patrons order their own food directly by making choices on the device that are sent via WiFi to the kitchen, eliminating the need to have a server come to your table to take the order. Of course, they still need people to deliver orders and do a variety of other tasks related to food service, but the robots will be along to handle those jobs soon enough.
(SImularly, the New York Times says that pretty soon we’ll be able to do away with lawyers and let computer software take care of all of our legal needs. From there, it’s just one little step to having a lawyer app on your iPad, so that you can sue anyone anywhere anytime! Isn’t technology wonderful?)
While iPads may be teaching our kids how to read someday, letting us ask for our salad dressing on the side, or filing a restraining order against that creepy guy who keeps walking past our house, we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves. According to Google, almost 20% of people who own smartphones never use them to go online and a whopping 32% don’t use apps at all. And we already know that apps only get used one time by the people who download them 26% of the time.
While Hollywood still seems intent on turning every movie made into a 3D extravamaganza whether it needs to be or not, apparently TV makers are now running away from 3D like residents of Tokyo in a Godzilla movie. Two years ago, they couldn’t get on board with the upcoming All-3D-All-The-Time Revolution fast enough, but the 3D backlash is so in full-swing that even Time Magazine has reported on it. CrunchGear says that with four months to go before CES 2011, electronics makers have already stopped promoting 3DTV and have moved on to another fad: apps. And by “apps”, they mean the combination of built-in wireless networking (a feature that has been coming along without too much fanfare for a while) and software widgets that let viewers access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Verizon added that functionality into its FiOS service last year, but this would be independent of your service provider because it would be controlled by the television itself.
The reason they’re all talking about this now instead of waiting for CES? The Apple fanboi propaganda machine started spinning in overdrive this week for what might be the Next Big Announcement at Apple’s September press event: the much-anticipated overhaul of Apple TV into a cloud-based set top box redubbed (what else?) iTV. All the gadget websites are talking about the leaked details this morning, but here’s Fast Company’s run-down. The box will drop Mac OS for iOS, and the video output will only be 720p, but in addition to streaming video and music, the iTV will be able to download and run iTunes App Store apps natively because it will essentially be that ginormous iPad we all joked about. Unlike some of the more fanciful pre-launch rumors about the iPad, the stories in the tech press are all pretty consistent and reasonable, and Apple needs to do something to make up for the gaffes with the iPhone 4, so I think the confidence level about this should be a lock.
Cat with an iPad:
Dog with an iPad:
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a link without getting someone telling you something about the iPad, iHave iNevitably wound up reading a few of them, and iThink this guest piece at Tech Crunch by iPhone app developer Ethan Nicholas is the closest to my own opinion: the iPad is the final distillation of the personal computer into the iDiot’s dream machine. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, because he is talking about his mother…and my mother…and your mother…and every other person who wants this level of technology to be as simple as turning on the television. And so now the Next Big Thing has reduced the personal computer to a television you hold in your hands and also use for some other entertainments like music and books and those addictive little iPhone games, and they’ve taken away all the scary stuff like video editing, spreadsheets, antivirus programs and Flash.
I talked to my mother on the phone a few nights ago, and she told me that she is considering buying a netbook to replace her aging desktop computer. She asked me for a recommendation on the hardware, which I gladly gave her, but now I’m thinking SHE should get an iPad, too, for the same reason: even a netbook is more computer than she really needs. For example, I spent this weekend watching my wife drive herself mental trying to install iTunes on her Windows netbook. All she wants her netbook to do is to play videos, play music, play simple games, and the netbook still want her to be able to finagle her way through downloads, installations, customizing the software, syncing the iPod and then troubleshooting when it doesn’t work properly. The netbook is not simple enough. If my mother buys a netbook, you-know-who will have to drive up to Maine to set it up for her and continue to provide her technical support as I have done for the last nine or ten years.
I wish I had some sort of data source to support my hunch, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that you could probably replace 60% of the home PCs in the United States with iPads without the owners feeling the slightest bit cramped by the limitations of a closed-source proprietary device that only supports a single task at a time and imposes content restrictions. In fact, I’ll bet that most of those people would PREFER it, because it takes away the intimidating vastness of all the things you can do with a full-fledged computer, but still lets you enjoy the benefits of being able to magically access all the wonderful things the Internet has to offer. It’s no accident that the basic iPad is priced to compete with netbooks, after all. For all the talk about the iPad killing the Kindle, et.al., it’s actually a netbook killer.
If the fanbois would all just shut up for a bit and let the people who are the ACTUAL intended market for the product have a chance to discover that their long-awaited Home Entertainment Device Of The Future has arrived, it might actually turn out to be more transformative than the technobabblers said their fantasy iTablet was going to be.
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