Uncategorized

So, after a little while waiting, we now have an iPad wifi+3G 64gb version for our main portable. While all our development work has to stay on the Mac, our Macbook Air will go our to pasture.

At this stage we are using the iPad on wifi 99% of the time, but it has a prepay SIM loaded for that occasional use. There is a school of thought which says to hack your iPhone and use a tether system, no point, and who wants a hacked phone when a simple prepay data SIM is so easy to get!

So far, it is just an iPad, walk out onto the street, and it still an iPad! The wifi version without a data connection is kinda like a dataless piece of glass.

Its been done to death on the internet – the iPad and who would want one? The iPad represents the first real chance of a change in the way we compute. The smartphone showed us how mobile phone can change from those terrible Nokias from the 1990s to something which is always connected and is actually useful.

The iPad may well be the first real Macintosh. In 1984 the Mac was released as a computer for the rest of us – a kind of computing toaster appliance. Trouble is, it has disks, a OS which you had to work with and this keyboard/mouse combo. My mother could use it, but it wasn’t natural. And if you got a system error, you had to know how to diagnose and fix it. Too hard.

The iPhone showed how we can use a small handheld computer with a huge AppStore library. Make the screen bigger and add a few new ways of interacting with content, and you have a new platform. A true Macintosh. No visible OS. No System Errors. No mouse. Just swipe the unlock and you are away.

Of course the geek is going to not like this device, they want to see the bits and bytes, climb into the kernel, hack a bluetooth keyboard into it. Go ahead! But for the user who just wants email, web, Facebook, Twitter, a bit of word processing, update the budget spreadsheet, a few recreational games, an eBook or two – this is it!

grepsoft.net will become…????