Dear Friends

I’ve been traveling a lot over the past few months and I think I clearly qualify as a road warrior. This week I traveled with Rob to Minneapolis to meet with a customer. My Delta flight had WiFi on board so that made it easy to keep up with email and get some work done. It was good to travel with Rob, who is one of the veteran Small Dog employees. He started out in the shipping department, rose steadily in the ranks to sales, to sales manager, to outside sales manager and now is also in charge of our two house brands, Chill Pill and Hammerhead.

My road gear has been highly enhanced by my 3G iPad. While traveling with the WiFi version was great in China, here in the States it’s nice to have Internet access anywhere with a 3G cellular signal.

I cannot rave enough about my Brenthaven ProStyle II XF bag. The simple fact that it’s TSA approved and can be easily zipped open to lay flat on the xray machine is a time saver as I go through security. The handy strap on the back allows me to securely attach it to my rolling overnight bag and it easily fits all my various adapters, cords and if I wanted, would carry both my MacBook Air and the iPad. I can wholeheartedly recommend this laptop bag if you do a lot of traveling. It has literally been around the world with me in real world stress testing and it looks like new and is with me almost all the time. Use coupon code ROADWARRIOR to get $10 off this great case.

I’ve found that my iPhone battery runs out of power a lot less now that I have the iPad. Where I used to use the iPhone to check stocks, scores or email, now I mostly use the iPad and with its beefier battery, my iPhone is ready to make calls almost all day long.

I have a few minor issues with iPad that I would ask Apple to improve. Right now the most inconvenient is that it does not know how to handle iCal invitations sent in email. We use iCal for all our meetings and schedules and even for friendly wagers on sporting events so the inability to simply click on an iCal invite attachment to add it to my calendar is an inconvenience. My assistant, Kerry, has access to my calendar (actually I have given her complete control) so the work around is for her to add stuff and then MobileMe syncing takes care of the rest. I am confident Apple will address this in later updates and it is a minor inconvenience in what is a great convenient device.

I am pleased to report that Small Dog Electronics was selected as one of three finalists for the Deane C. Davis Vermont Business of the Year award (more below). This is our second time to be in the final three and we have our fingers and paws crossed that the Governor announces our name when the winner is revealed at the Vermont Business and Industry Expo in two weeks. We are being joined at that Expo by many of our vendor partners for our Technology Pavilion, so if you are in the area stop by on May 26 or 27!