Dear Friends,

I love summer. Maybe it is because I live in Vermont where summer is such a welcome change from winter but being able to ride home on my motorcycle, taking the long way home through the mountains, and then getting home while it is still light out is such a pleasure. Combine that with the smells from the flowers and the ability to graze on blueberries, strawberries and raspberries in my garden and it is pure heaven. If you add barbecue and corn on the cob to this mix, not even an iPhone 4 bumper can improve the reception!

I am heading up to the University of Vermont this evening to speak on a panel of CEOs at their Institute for Global Sustainability summer program, Sustainable Business: Practices in Support of People, Profits and Principles. My panel is called “Visionary Leadership for Sustainability” and I will be joined by Alan Newman from Magic Hat Brewery, David Blittersdorf from Earth Turbines and NRG systems and Beth Sachs from the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. These are all friends and we should have a good time talking to the students about how Vision is an essential part of sustainable entrepreneurism.

The blogosphere has seeped into the mainstream as the concerns over the iPhone 4 antenna design have found their way to a controversial Consumer Reports test, David Letterman’s Top Ten and I even got interviewed about it by the local talk show host, Mark Johnson! Personally, I have not noticed any antenna issues; I get great reception and my iPhone 4 is an elegant device. As I said in my interview, I have put a case on it (the prototype of our upcoming Hammerhead Aura cases for the iPhone 4). I put the case on mostly because I am scared that I’ll break the glass on the back the way Ed did when he dropped his about 15 minutes after getting it (the aforementioned “fumble fingers” in Kibbles #678!).

Apple has a press conference scheduled to talk about this issue today and I am sure that their response will be well thought out. The frenzy about this situation is a bit hysterical. The iPhone works great, it might need to be tweaked to address this issue but believe me, if Apple hadn’t raised everybody’s expectations for product excellence, this would have been old news by now.

We currently have all six models of the iPad in stock at our retail locations (as of this writing) and sales are surprisingly strong. We are getting our next shipment of Verso iPad cases in next week—most of which are already sold—so we are bringing in more a couple of weeks later.

Small Dog’s man in China, Simon Xiao, is doing an awesome job in overseeing production, packaging and keeping things on schedule. Simon and I use iChat to talk several times a day. It is a good thing we are both night owls because we are 12 hours apart and I am surprised sometimes to see him still online and working at midnight. There were a lot of people I could have used in China, but Simon is also a Celtics fan so that made the choice easy.