The iPad Is Unbeatable

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Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad—that there seems no good way to beat it. For your sake, my hypothetical CEO friend, I hope you’re frightened. He hopes, but I doubt it. If they were, they would be restructuring their entire companies in order to compete with this new market. As far as I can tell, they're still in finger-in-their-ears-saying-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you mode.

Why The iPad Has And Will Continue To Dominate The Tablet Market

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Matthew Panzarino, writing for The Next Web:

In a Neilsen survey from earlier this year it was shown that almost no respondents stopped using their smartphones after purchasing a tablet, while 3% completely stopped using their desktop computers and 32% reported that they were using their desktops much less. Consumers treat phones and tablets as separate entities, they look at them as different tools for different purposes. He goes on to discuss many other points, in a well written piece that does a very good job of laying it all out.

Google Forcing Android Developers To Use Google Wallet

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Allstair Barr, writing for Reuters:

Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods - such as PayPal, Zong and Boku - their apps would be removed from Android Market, now known as Google Play… Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering. Marco Arment aptly sums it up: "Open".

The Information Diet: You Are What You Read

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J. A. Ginsburg, writing on TrackerNews:

It is not a pretty picture. And, yes, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the insidious practice of using keywords to game search results, is driving this race to the inane. The only metric that counts is popularity. “The problem is no one is searching for the Pentagon Papers,” notes Johnson, “No one is searching for high quality investigative reporting.” The next time someone asks me why I dislike SEO, I'm going to direct them to this piece.

We Need To Talk About Android

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Frasier Speirs, an expert on technology used in education, chimed in on a question he gets asked a lot: "What's wrong with Android?":

You're either buying into a platform or you're buying gadgets. The fundamental disconnect between the apparently solid Android engineering that's happening at Google and the actual packaging and deployment that's happening to end-users is turning into a real problem. To my mind, it's a dealbreaker for schools or anyone thinking beyond their next carrier subsidy. I would argue that most, if not all of the points that he lays out in his article, also apply to Enterprise as well.

Additional iPad Haptic Feedback Details

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Update: Completely false rumor.

My colleague, Jacquelyn Erdman, writing on her website, Technolust & Loathing:

In Oct 2010, at the ACM SIGCHI conference in NYC, grad students presented on this technology and allowed people to demo it. See my conference notes at: http://technolustandloathing.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/acm-uist-notes-4-next-generation-touch-screens. They students mentioned that “someone” bought the rights to the technology, but wouldn’t say who. I then saw a very tiny blurb about Apple having the technology in the ACM Communications magazine several months back. I actually thought they would have this up and running for the iPad 3, (see prediction here), but I wasn’t sure how quickly it would roll out as I thought the iPad 3 was going to be out for last holiday season. So, enough of my rolling of the eyes on the release and self-congratulations and let’s talk about the technology! Jacquelyn goes on to describe what it was like to use it, and speculates on how Apple has probably improved it since then (if this all turns out to be true). She wrote this piece shortly after I shared the news from Apple Insider this morning about Apple using technology in the new iPad to be announced today from a company called Senseg. This could be huge.

Update: Apple patented this tech in 2010.

Jacquelyn dug up this 21 month old article on Apple Insider.