iPad

When you bring home your first iPad and open up the box, everything is so pristine and pretty--so Apple. Eventually, as you warm up to the device, you're going to want to make it a little less "factory fresh" and a little more you.

Loading up your own media, photos, and apps is a good start, but there are also a handful of quick things you can do to really put your unique stamp on the iPad.

Whether it's slapping on your own home screen wallpaper or new ways to organize bookmarks in Safari, I've … Read more

Best Buy has sold out of the iPad at all 673 of its U.S. stores with Apple shops. In contrast, Apple stores are maintaining stock.

"We expect to have iPad inventory replenished at these locations by Sunday," said company spokeswoman Paula Baldwin.

Six Best Buy stores contacted in the San Diego and Los Angeles area said they sold out of the iPad on Saturday, the day iPad sales began. Ditto for Best Buy stores contacted on the East Coast; stores in suburban Philadelphia and Boston also sold out on Saturday. A New York store, however, said it … Read more

Before many tech journalists even had a moment to sleep from the nonstop iPad coverage, Apple sent out a notice that it would be updating the world on iPhone OS 4.

One anticipated feature is an option for a global in-box. You're probably going to see a lot of predictions for the upcoming release. In the meantime, here are the features I feel iPhone OS 4 should have.

First, Apple should change the name of the underlying operating system from iPhone OS to Touch OS. With the operating system running on the iPod Touch and now the iPad, it makes little sense for Apple to continue to call the software iPhone OS. Something like Touch OS would convey the larger message that Apple wants to ultimately send about its vision for the future of computing.

Second, the push-notification system could use some help. The current push notifications are essentially dialog boxes that pop up, occasionally play a sound, and then give you the option to ignore or launch an app.

The biggest problem with the current system is that messages tend to pile on top of each other and obscure the previous push notification. This is especially cumbersome in IM applications. The next generation of push notifications should probably closer resemble the popular messaging system for Mac OS X called Growl, especially when it comes to a device like the iPad, which has more screen real estate.

I hope to see a queue for push notifications, and I hope that Apple allows developers to push out more advanced notifications that are more like tiny HTML widgets that would allow users to respond to instant messages without launching their chat client, display images, or even background messaging that updates news applications with the latest stories.

Push notification was Apple's solution to multitasking, but given the speed of the iPhone 3GS and few practical uses of multitasking on a screen so small, Apple has steadfastly refused to allow third-party multitasking on the device. Rumors of an Expose-style multitasking interface are floating around on the Internet, and I am inclined to believe that Apple is finally ready to allow multitasking, if only to get the tech press to shut up about the lack of multitasking. … Read more

Largely overlooked amid the overwhelming iPad hype is its biggest potential achievement. Apple's touch-screen quasi-PC may have finally struck a fatal blow to the long-standing king of input devices, the computer mouse.

Make no mistake about it, the era of the familiar PC mouse is coming to an end. It may not be a 2012-style apocalypse (and the mouse will surely hang on in some form for many years to come), but the door is slowly shutting on the universal acceptance of this single iconic piece of hardware that we have equated with personal computing for decades (for argument's sake, let's agree to date its lifespan from the 1972 invention of the ball mouse, and its use as a consumer device from the 1981 Xerox Star). Replacing it is an array of touch input devices and icon-focused operating systems that are built (not always for the better) around expediency over flexibility.

Long before the iPad, touch-screen tablet PCs had been around for years, occasionally enjoying a brief surge in consumer interest, and then fading away again, as users discovered that touch navigation was not really ready for prime time. Apple's iPhone, and later the iPod Touch, changed all that, bringing actual one-to-one touch to the masses for the first time.

But on the PC side, this only made the sluggish, temperamental touch screens found on most tablets even more glaringly obvious; we frequently described these devices as having a rubber-band effect. You'd drag a finger across the screen to move an icon, and it would follow behind by half a beat, as if on the end of a rubber band. The takeway was that touch was workable on tiny handhelds, but not well-suited to larger laptop screens.

The iPad's disruptive success in building a larger touch environment that has received almost universal praise puts the lie to that theory. It may not be as productivity friendly as your ThinkPad, but add a Bluetooth keyboard and Apple's iWork apps, and you've got a reasonable approximation of a laptop experience in many cases.

But even before the iPad, PCs that traded the mouse for a fingertip have been making significant strides. HP has led the way with its TouchSmart line of all-in-one desktops and convertible tablet laptops. Again, the experience wasn't entirely seamless, but each successive generation of these systems has seen further refinement of their specialized touch interfaces, which sit on top of Windows, hiding the mouse-driven desktop from view. Asus also did an decent job with the custom interface on the Eee PC T91, a touch-screen version of the popular Eee PC Netbook (despite that system's other flaws).… Read more

The traditional iSuppli component breakdowns that attempt to put a neat little number on what a product actually costs to build appeal to a primal part of us, the part of us that wants to know, "Did I get screwed?"

"How much is a company making off of me? Was I a sucker?" It's a clever gambit. Because everybody wants to know. You can't help it.

It's a tricky thing, though, to finger how many dollars were poured into, for instance, each and every iPad out there. Even if you don't want … Read more

Many people are hoping the iPad can replace their traditional laptop for many productivity applications. One such group is students. If you need to copy text from one of your eBooks on your iPad, you may be disappointed to find out that the DRM management in iBooks does not allow this directly. Use this tip to copy and paste content from your downloaded eBooks.… Read more

On its Web site, BlueLounge has a quote from Albert Einstein that says, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but simpler." Well, when it comes to accessories, the company's Cool Feet ($12.95) product, which was initially designed to raise a laptop just enough to "allow a constant cooling airflow," is about as simple as you can get, and now the company is marketing it toward iPad owners.

We're not sure how much sense this makes for an iPad, but we can see how the feet, which have integrated suction cups for … Read more

I spent half of the last weekend doing something sobering: I dragged wet bags of trash out of my parents' flooded basement on Long Island. Up to 7 inches of groundwater rose up after a recent series of rainstorms, and the unfortunate result was that boxes of old papers, books, and childhood possessions were irrevocably waterlogged and destroyed.

We should have gone through the boxes earlier, some years before. Old game systems--the Atari 5200, Sega CD game boxes, piles of Sega Genesis games, and peripherals--had to be thrown out. Electronic board games and puzzles, too. I could put together an amazing slideshow of what was gotten rid of, but it was too painful, and the humidity downstairs was overwhelming. That's not the point.

My real reflection, or observation, came when dealing with notebooks and papers that also had to be thrown out, and albums of photographs that were soaked. Not to trivialize matters, but I had just purchased an iPad the day before--in itself a thing, too, but one that represents the current and coming all-digital and cloud-based lifestyle where books, photos, videos, and even possibly memories are digitized and made intangible. The attack levied on a lifestyle of digital goods is that you don't get to own "the thing," the object that is somehow more valuable than the e-good it's replacing.

Well, tell that to my waterlogged games and books. Right now I'd prefer to re-download the games over PSN, or sync back up to my Kindle app. Yes, digital files can get corrupted, hard drives break, clouds can go haywire and erase mail or documents. But our physical possessions can be destroyed, too. Everything falls apart eventually. I told my parents, who were distraught with losing so many things they saved over the years, that if you think about it, we really don't own anything in our lives. We come, we go, and everything--physical or digital--decays.

So, I'm making a concerted effort more than ever to go digital. Here's how.… Read more