$10.00 Games!

I received of my least favorite types of emails yesterday. One of our customers purchased an upgrade to Snow Leopard for his Intel-based…

I am love with my iPad. It is easily the coolest gadget I have ever bought. After having spent the last few days playing with it non-stop, I have a much better sense of what it is and what it isn’t, as well as what its potential can be. I think the best way to explain my sense of this devil is to tell you about how I’ve been using it.

This is hands down the best device I’ve ever browsed the web on. The other night My roommates were out and I spent the evening chilling on the couch with my iPad just surfing my usual sights and listening to some iTunes. There was no TV in the background or anything. It felt every bit as intimate and cozy as curling up with a favorite book and enjoying peace and quiet. I’ve never had that homey feeling with my laptop.

The potential for games is also amazing, especially social games. The iPad was made to be passed around. Some friends and I were chatting in the living room while idly passing around the iPad and playing Worms HD. Each person would simply take their turn and then pass it to the next while the conversation simply filled the spaces in between. It didn’t have the dominating presence of a TV.

I’ve been using the Pages app as much as possible to see what kind of working potential this device has. I’ll admit that if I needed to really get a full paper done, referencing lots of sources and actively researching at the same time, I would choose a full computer anytime. But I have my iMac or MacBook Pro for that.

However, for writing a simple review like this one, or responding to quick emails, the iPad is a pleasure to use. Basically I’ve learned that the iPad is not a laptop. If you need to multitask with lots of windows and things going on, you want a computer. But if you just need to be able to reference or adjust documents, or keep in touch, or search the web on the go, the iPad has the possibility of replacing a laptop in a multiple computer set up. I have not opened my laptop once since I got this thing, though I did use my iMac once to write up a paper for school.

Most of all though, I’m loving the simple things. Listening to programs with the NPR app, or browsing the gorgeously simple New York Times editor’s choice app is great over breakfast, and feels much more natural than sitting in front of my computer. Streaming ABC or Netflix videos is incredibly easy, as is downloading and reading Marvel Comics.

It may sound like this is turning into just a list of my favorite apps which all do things I could do before, but that’s the point. The iPad is not about innovation in content, it’s about the experience and that experience is provided by the apps that developers put out. I hope developers keep up the good work, because so far the experience has been simply wonderful.

I arrived in the office this morning around 8:30, and Rob must have seen me drive in. My phone was ringing as soon…

Let me ask you a few questions: Do you have a digital camera? How many megapixels does your camera shoot? How many years and how many photos do you have on your computer? Now imagine this… tomorrow morning you wake up and turn your computer on. It boots slower than normal and all you see is a flashing question mark on a gray screen. Your heart drops and you start to think about all of the memories that made up your iPhoto library.

The purpose of all this is to get you thinking about how many pictures you take every week and what would happen if one day you lost all of them. Could be 10 days or 10 years of photos; either way your losing all of those precious memories. Your best solution is to backup your files. The key to a true backup is to have your files in two places. My suggestion is to purchase a pair of identical external hard drives. Several hard drive units ranging from 250 gigabytes to 2 terabytes are becoming more and more affordable.

Click here to see Small Dog’s selection of external hard drives.

When you’re finished with your photo shoot, birthday party or vacation, store your photos on your computer and then back it up to your external hard drive. It may also be good to store your external hard drive in a different location than your computer and pull it out once a week to backup your new work. I like to go one step further and backup my backup. My setup includes my MacBook which is backed up onto an external hard drive which is then mirrored to a second external hard dive. This allows me to delete some photos off my MacBook to free up space while still leaving my photos on two different locations.

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