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I went through a painful iTunes experience. Had to. I try to avoid iTunes as much as possible, but since I wanted to update iOS version on my iPad, it was not possible to avoid it. The bottom line is that it sucks as a device management tool. Here's why: iTunes is not a device management tool It is a media management tool. It was made to put music and videos to iPod which started as an MP3 player. Some say it sucks there as well. I don't care. I copy photos as files, I transfer music with MediaMonkey and use mail and Dropbox to manage documents. iTunes is patched to be a device management tool with key functions obscured by the media-optimized interface. Sync doesn't One of the most scary checkboxes in the Apple universe is the " Sync Apps ". User is warned that if selected, all apps installed by the user on device will be removed. And they are. The trick is that before one does that, it makes sense to " transfer purchases ". So that after ...

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my iPhone form iOS 4.1 to iOS 4.2.1. The process nearly bricked it. It would not even restore (Figure 1). It took me some three hours to make it work again. Something to do with the etc/hosts file. The good thing was, I had phone silence for a few hours. Figure 1: And BTW, it is not an unknown error. It is error 1013! I do not get intimidated by gadgets Today, I decided to upgrade my iPad from iOS 3.something to 4.2.1. There are quite a few new apps that want iOS 4.2 and there is a long weekend in Slovenia, Tuesday being the Culture Day. Time to do a complicated and lengthy surgery. Remembering what happened yesterday, I decided to do a backup of the iPad first. I would really hate to reinstall and reconfigure all the apps or lose documents, slides, magazines, books, movies ... The backup started, but did not look like it was doing anything. The progress bar was not moving at all (Figure 2). Figure 2. On a side note: these guys at Apple a...

Now that I got everything I wanted from Santa, let me write down what I want in iPad II. Software Shared file system for (some) apps. This has in fact nothing to do with iPAD. It is an iOS thing. As it stands, iOS is lobotomized . Each app only has access to its own files. I want for example Dropbox app and Pages app to have access to the same files. I will use one to read and write documents and the other to sync them with the could. Is this really too much to ask? I mean, really! Decent Safari. I want Safari to work with "destkop" versions of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. This has nothing to do with new hardware either. It is just a wish to make iPad a better client for the cloud services. More iPAD specific features in the iOS . iPad has a larger screen. It could be managed differently then the iPhone. Like switching among apps Expose style, for example. Keyboards with smaller keys, but more of them. It is really a pain to type anything that is not...

This post is about two issues that are troubling me on the iPad. None would be worth the trouble writing about in the first place, but together ... First, this is a test if one can blog using Blogpres . Obviously it is not impossible, but this is no major achievement. In fact it is another reminder of how brain damaged the Safari for iPad is. Blogger has a very good browser editing interface which includes spell checking, insertion of images, links etc. Blogpress is little more than a text editor. Lucky that I remember how to code HTML directly. But I am not going to. Blogpress is not worth to be a commercial app. Period. Secondly, I am really unhappy with the Twitter clients on iPad. Twitterrific would be my favorite. It treats lists quite similarly as any other feed. But has a poor update algorithm and does not report what feed has new items to read. Also, at $5 for the multiaccount version, it is quite expensive. Osfoora has perhaps the most powerfull management opt...

What is your relationship with the world of objects, the countless things that surround you and that you handle ever day? The chair you sit on, the pen, the car, the cup? Are they to you merely a means to an end, or do you occasionally acknowledge their existence, their being, no matter how briefly, by noticing them and giving them your attention? When you get attached to objects, when you are using them to enhance your worth in your own eyes and in the eyes of others, concern about things can easily take over your whole life. Not really. Tolle wrote this before iPad was invented. But I guess iPad, for some, is the extreme case of what he writes about. Agree?

We've seen the iPad. The best thing about it is that it will start a trend of cheap, affordable, useful tablet devices. Here is the tablet I am in the market for: Tablet format. It is a good idea, but hasn't been done right yet. It does not create a "laptop wall" at meetings. Draws less attention, makes you less pretentious than if you put a laptop on your restaurant table or open it up on a train. You can hold a tablet while doing a talk, discussion, lecture ... but not a laptop. A4 size exact, like all the paper I carry around. Reason: so that it does not draw attention if I put it with a stack of paper on the desk. 15 hours declared, 10 hours real battery life. I want to make one day trips to Brussels without a power supply. Would sacrifice color for longer battery life greyscale screen, usable in bright sunshine, 720p resolution minimum, 1080p optimum. Pixel density is everything if you want to read books or newspapers. I will watch movies and play games on a ...