1. I got the iPad WiFi version not 3G. The reason is simple – without paying $130 for the 3G version, you can tether the iPad over wifi to any 3g wireless access point. So you could get Sprint MiFi, a jailbroken iPhone with MyWi (note: I don’t condone this, carrier charges may apply, bla bla bla), or any variety of wireless access points, and as the technology gets better you can always tether to 3G, 4G, 5G, and on and on. So no point in spending extra cash for 3G in the iPad, imho. Besides we all know AT&T is a complete fail when it comes to 3G, although that might be improving soon-ish, one would hope.

2. Reading on this screen is an absolute pleasure. Reading the web, and especially news with something like the Early Edition RSS reader which turns your feeds into a newspaper style layout, is a hell of a lot more efficient than doing it on your computer. I have a 27″ iMac. I prefer to read feeds on the iPad. Nuff said. I do have some concern with reflections in some lighting conditions so I’m considering getting an anti glare film cover.

3. Music apps. I completely didn’t think about this when I bought the iPad but it’s incredible for making music. Already tons of awesome synth, sequencing, drum machine, and other apps have been put out. Many of them as accurate emulations of very expensive hardware. A $500 device whose UI can be morphed to that of any music making machine (and beyond) is pretty incredible. For just a small taste check out the video here of just one of the midi controller Apps available. Having the iPad is like having a minimoog, a kaoss pad, a multitude of sequencers, and all kinds of apps that aren’t even possible with real hardware. All in one portable device you can take on the go and work on music. The music apps tend to be $3-$10 a piece which is very reasonable considering their multi-hundred-dollar hardware equivalents. Actually being able to touch the buttons on screen works a ton better than trying to play an onscreen keyboard with a mouse on my computer. What’s more, people have actually come with some great apps that let your iPad control your computer via MIDI/OSC, over WiFi. With computer to computer networking the latency can be reduced to 2-5ms (I haven’t tried this yet), which is apparently below perceivable threshold.

4. Feel in the hand – it’s a little too heavy to be held with one hand. Very comfortable for two hands, or while sitting down and resting in your lap area. But we still have a little ways to go until we have Star Trek style tablets that don’t seem to weigh anything at all. I expect Apple to be releasing an iPad TNG sometime in the next five years as technology improves, so no worries there :). What is absolutely certain is that this form factor is the way of the future 90% of tasks you do on your computer don’t require much typing, and for interacting with content, a touch screen is a lot more efficient and of course more fun, than messing around with a computer. I wish it had a brightness switch that was easier to access than through the settings menu. But I’m sure a jailbreak will solve that soon enough if it hasn’t already.

5. iPad as radio and tv – this is pretty great. I have it docked next to my computer so while I’m working I can listen to radio separately on this screen. Yes it’s an expensive $500 radio, but the touch interactivity and browsability of the excellent Pandora and NPR apps makes it worth it. You can also stream Netflix and ABC videos to it so it works great as a small desktop TV. The only thing I wish it had was proper iTunes video streaming (on my computer I can start watching a movie while it downloads). Couldn’t figure out how to make that happen on iPad. Probably something that will be fixed in a future software release.

6. It’s *fast*. I mean blazing fast, apps open instantly. Even though we’re getting multitasking in 4.0, it almost feels unnecessary with the speed of switching between apps. Safari opens with the last page you viewed instantly, so does Mail, and other apps. Third party apps are a tiny bit slower but even the most demanding ones like a software synth only take about 3 seconds to open.

7. Games are z-o-m-g. I’m not a gamer, but I just had to download NOVA (that’s basically Halo for iPad). The graphics are amazing and because the UI is not limited by any physical controller you get innovative things like being able to drag your controls around the screen to place them where it’s comfortable for you. There’s also the ability to use multitouch gestures in games, for example two finger swipes to throw grenades or opening doors by turning their locks with three fingers. Graphics are gorgeous and fast. Another cool game that’s completely free is GodFinger which lets you control a little world. I bet people who are into farmville will fall in love when they see this app. This is by the same people who made Rolando. Very clean vector style graphics and a great physics engine.

8. The popular apps that I’ve downloaded so far, by and large show a level of UX thoughtfulness and clean design that goes beyond most anything I’ve seen on desktops or on the web, even among apple software. It’s just a pleasure to use all these apps. Most every app that has an equivalent website (amazon, ebay, npr, weather.com, bloomberg, etc). All these apps are designed better, work better, and are easier and faster to use than their web equivalents using a keyboard and mouse. Either it’s some kind of UI guidelines that Apple has put out, or maybe just people stepping up their design game, but I’m really happy to be using these apps. There’s an incredible design renaissance going on here and in large part it’s thanks to Apple for providing a device like this.

9. Battery life. Is pretty much awesome – in standby mode it can live seemingly forever. Two days without any charge, with very moderate use (15 minutes per day) and it’s still at 95%. If you do intensive things like gaming the battery goes down significantly. But I believe the 10 hour advertised battery life is not far from the truth, with ‘standard’ use (internets, and such).

10. It pairs nicely with the bluetooth keyboard that shipped with my iMac. The only problem is that many of the ‘shortcuts’ you’d expect (like apple-L to get to the search bar of safari) don’t work. So you have to use your finger to select stuff, and switch back to the keyboard for typing. A little more thought put into interacting with iPad via keyboard would be awesome. For example having shortcuts to go to the home screen, ability to select an app from homescreen using arrow keys, a shortcut for getting to the search screen, etc. All these would make keyboard usage instantly more pleasant. Hopefully something like this will come in a future update.

On the lack of Flash: um..really haven’t noticed it. YouTube works. TED.com works. Netflix works. ABC shows work. Vimeo works. Flickr videos work. CNN, Reuters, and NYT videos all work. Customized news apps deliver even more video content if all that isn’t enough. And honestly I don’t miss any of the evil flash ads. Look at all these sites who rushed to embrace HTML5 video because of Apple’s abandonment of Flash. I applaud this effort. Good riddance to a crashy, cpu-hogging, outdated hack for cross platform video.

That is all for now.

My policy of buying stocks is simple. I pick the companies that are market makers, and are or will be the market leaders ten years from now, and then I hold them, and buy more when they go on sale.

This post – it’s just my view of the future. I’m going to start by analyzing one company we all know and love – Amazon (AMZN).

This is a company that permeates our lives (even my grandpa has ordered things from Amazon), but most people have only a vague idea about their real business. Amazon has two core businesses (again, this is all my opinion and understanding and has no specific basis in financial data).

The first business which we all know and love is their retail store network. You can get anything under the sun there — and I have. I live in a city and I don’t have a car. It may drive the mailman nuts, but I get packages delivered almost every week. When I lived in a big apartment building with mostly older people, I was known as the package guy. They thought I was running some kind of shady business – but I was just shopping for my daily essentials. Whether it’s some knicknack I need for one of my many hobbies (photography, music, etc), household items, art supplies, and of course books – it all comes from Amazon.

Now let’s look at my generation – Millenials, Gen Y, Echo Boomers, whatever you wanna call us. Second largest generation in history (after our Boomer parents). More of us live in cities. We’re more affluent. We drive less. We lead busier lives. We’re phenomenally Internet savvy, and thus empowered to be market mavens. We’re connected 24×7 — some of us through multiple mobile devices. We desire customized shopping experiences. We carry a strong sense of entitlement combined with a lack of patience and an expectation of on-demandness (I want it now!)

Shopping online, whether at a desktop or on the go is the perfect solution for us. It wastes little time, it offers vast choice, and it gives us a customized experience based on the recommendations of others. What this adds up to is lots of money lining Amazon’s pocket as we choose to do our shopping with one click. And let’s not forget that many of us are starting to have kids. And that these kids are going to be ten times more connected than we ever were.

The second business, which most consumers just don’t know the first thing about – is cloud computing (cloud infrastructure, to be more precise).

Somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the traffic through Amazon Web Services (this is all of their APIs, or interfaces for programmers who build services on top of Amazon infrastructure) exceeded the traffic of their entire global retail network. Read that last line again, it’s important.

Is this (going to be) a *huge* business for Amazon? You bet your sweet behind. Amazon has been expanding its cloud business by leaps and bounds, providing many a startup and a few very savvy enterprises a way to save significant money while gaining lots of flexibility, by moving their infrastructure into the on-demand cloud.

With four years in the running, Amazon is pretty much the undisputed heavyweight champion of the cloud infrastructure market. Now, yes – Google is probably building something to truly compete with Amazon’s offering (App Engine was just a taste of things to come). But with enough lead time, market presence, and enough cash on hand (more than six billion) to buy up and coming startups in the space, Amazon is looking strong to remain the leader in cloud infrastructure, or at the very least a very strong second if it starts getting more heat from Google.

Amazon is up 338% over the last 5 years (that of course includes the recent financial crisis and recession). How’s your index fund doing?

Update 10/26/2011: I sold Amazon right around $220 because despite my continued belief in everything I wrote above, it’s P/E ratio is just way out of control, so I felt it was ripe for a correction (and in fact, it corrected recently quite a bit). You can own AAPL for less than 7 times the P/E (amzn PE at 104, appl at 14). I’m not stock analyst but amazon has one of the highest P/E’s in the tech industry, and Apple has one of the lowest. Meanwhile Apple is now the biggest company by market cap in the world and continues to deliver quarter after quarter of incredible performance. If AMZN comes down to a P/E in at least in the 50′s, I will probably buy again. This page has some more information on why AMZN’s P/E is so high, and maybe they’re right, I just don’t think it’s worth the risk when you have such a tasty low hanging fruit (AAPL).

It doesn’t run all my programs! So what? I’ve seen netbooks running Windows on their tiny screens – the user experience is awful.

General purpose apps run on a smaller screen just don’t work. You’ll spend more time squinting at the screen than getting anything done.

It doesn’t multitask! I’ve had a phone in my pocket for the last year that doesn’t multitask.

Here’s a secret – humans don’t multitask. Not really.
Maybe we can context switch quickly but it’s actually counterproductive according to a lot of studies.

Let me tell you something else: I agree with Joe Hewitt – using Facebook on the iPhone is already a better user experience than the site itself, and on the iPad it will be significantly better.

Reading feeds on the iPhone with the NetNewsWire app – a better experience than my desktop NetNewsWire, or Google Reader.

I know, for example, I can’t read feeds on my laptop, I’m distracted after 5 minutes. When I read feeds on my phone, I am engaged, I am interested, I am learning things.

Generally, the UI for apps on the iPhone: reading email, browsing the web, watching video, looking at photos — focusing on one thing at a time — are all more pleasant, and mostly more productive than the laptop counterparts.

The only thing that’s lacking is the screen size.

So let’s really consider. Does it make sense to take a general user experience like Mac OSX and shrink it down to a smaller screen, so that the user experience sucks?

Or do we take a user experience optimized for small mobile screens, like iPhone OS, and expand it, enlarge it and make it better?

Which is really the smarter choice in moving forward in experience, happiness, productivity? I’d rather have a device that does the 10 things that make me productive really well, than one that does 1000, and all poorly. Because for all the apps, and crapps, and software that’s out there, I use about 10 of the same apps and pieces of software per day. Choice seems like a good thing, but choice actually makes you less happy.

P.S. Apple not supporting Flash on the iPad is a bold and correct move. Just like the web developers who are finally standing up to IE6 and dropping support, we must make aggressive moves to drop technologies like IE6 and Flash. They are holding back the progress of the web, and the only way to deal with them is to quit cold turkey. When the iPad gold rush hits, developers will be forced to move away from Flash, and thus the revolution will have begun.

• Watching movies and surfing in bed without annoying MBP fan noise and overheating.
• Taking it with me instead of the MBP when I go on vacation. This will depend on whether light dev work is possible on it (jailbreak + terminal + vim?). Or a TextMate port?
• Using it as a photographer’s tool – if it’s easy enough to offload from SD card to iPad, then it may become a very nice tool for getting large screen previews during photo shoots.
• Sharing photos with friends, family, and clients (on a photo shoot). Again, this implies that iPad will have some type of Lightroom Lite that can handle my photo albums, because iPhoto doesn’t cut it for me.
• As an accessory screen to my normal desktop. For example – leave a twitter client running on it, or something with news headlines. It could work as a non-disruptive peripheral vision information accessory to my normal desktop/laptop setup.
• Reading books? This one I have doubts about, because of the stupid glossy screen. Have you ever tried to use an iPhone without a matte cover? It sucks. Now imagine applying one of those matte covers to a 9.7″ screen. Welcome to air bubble and finger smudge hell.

Other thoughts

• With its lack of multitasking and inability to run native OSX apps (rather than native iPhone apps) – surprising given its powerful processor, I can see the iPad may not be targeted toward power users per se, but with a bit of jailbreaking, I bet it can be made quite useful.
• Where to stick it? Am I going to carry my big laptop bag around for the iPad? If not, where does it go? Doesn’t fit in my pocket, and seems too small for a bag of its own. Will we see the return of the eHolster? Will I have to acquire a Jack Sack man purse?
• The 3G versions are probably going to be useless. AT&T can’t even handle the iPhone. In San Francisco, I’ve had Edge outside the city work faster than 3G inside the city. When the iPad hits, the network will crumble completely unless AT&T steps up its game significantly. I wouldn’t mind paying $20 more per month if it means they get the network infrastructure right. I know they’re kind of in a rough spot having to maintain competitive data plan prices, yet supporting Apple’s mobile devices which get very heavy use. Anyway, I am convinced 3G and mobile broadband in general is a general fail, and with city-wide WiFi around the corner, and WiFi on planes, frankly there’s just no need for it.

• 30 second spots interrupt you right as you’re watching a show so your annoyance factor is high.
• With a 2 minute spot, the advertiser has to work to capture your attention. This is a key aspect. One recent commercial I saw was a 2 minute short film about Honda racing. The film was actually relatively interesting to watch and a lot more palatable and engaging than a 30 second spot involving jingles and a radio announcer voice.
• The 2 minute spot will give advertisers more creativity to deliver content that is actually interesting to users, rather than resorting to traditional 30 second spot limitations of drilling messages into your brain.
• I am more likely to associate a positive experience with a brand if they’ve earned my respect. By showing me an interesting clip and then leaving me at peace to watch my show, the brand wins.

I found one blog that claims an 88% response rate in favor of the 2 minute ads. They also talk about how it would be potentially hard for advertisers to come up with good content, making a point that a 2 minute long commercial about Wal-Mart may be hard to swallow. This is a Good Thing. Advertisers should work for our attention. If they can’t muster up an interesting 2 minute clip, then they don’t deserve our attention.

The age of push marketing is coming to a rapid close as our primary content delivery method shifts to the Internet and on-demand technologies. We’re not going to sit there and wait for our shows to come on, we’re just going to click a button and watch what we want, when we want.

But we need to make ads just as pullable as we do our content. If I’m gonna have to watch a 2 minute ad, why shouldn’t I choose which ad I want to see? If I’m presented with 2 or 3 choices I might click on an 2 minute long ad about rock climbing because I’m really into that, or a funny short advertising The Office, but I’m not really into shopping at Wal-Mart so I’m going to ignore that one whether they like it or not. With pull advertising, the publishers also get my attention data, because I chose to watch their ad over several others. They get data about how they’re doing demographically, and they get data about how they stack up against competitors.

Hulu would also get an interesting idea about advertising demographics and determine ad popularity. Eventually they could use this data to figure out which ads people would like based on ads they’ve watched in the past and attention data from the rest of the community. This could usher in a new age of advertising where crappy uninteresting ads float to the bottom and out of sight, creating a competition for quality of ads by the publishers.

When the ad content gets interesting, user attention is captured, users aren’t annoyed by bad and irrelevant ads, everybody wins.

In the dawn of time–before blogging, before social networking, when under construction pages ruled the web, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat was an amazing place where you could talk to anyone about anything. Of course cybersex and software piracy were the dominant topics, but in this primordial soup were the beginnings of true Internet communities. IRC channels offered people a way to socialize around a particular topic, even if this was taken rather loosely. Often plagued by trolls and script kiddies, channel operators would act as police, kicking out the unwelcome elements to make life better for everyone else. On IRC, it was not uncommon to share cool links, talk about new ideas, get help from the most knowledgeable people, or just goof around and waste time.

Looking back on those days now, I took a guess that the userbase of IRC must have been in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. It seemed like the whole world was online. Of course, the Internet being so new then, I should have realized that I was one of just a couple million people online, and just a tiny sliver of those new netizens had enough know-how to run an IRC client. IRC was an echo chamber of geeks, nerds, and wizards. As it turns out, one of the larger networks (EFNet) boasted a userbase of only 50,000 people by the year 2000.

By that time, I was already off of IRC, visiting only occasionally to tap specific user groups for help. Devastated by DDOS attacks, political squabbles, and the skyrocketing popularity of the Web, IRC servers began to go the way of the dinosaur. While IRC channels still survive today, their tiny userbase is eclipsed by the many forms of socializing happening predominantly on the web.

Enter twitter. Because you choose who you follow on twitter, you create a channel for yourself that doesn’t contain any of the trolls, bots, spammers, and script kiddies that plagued IRC. You can even create custom ‘channels’ by subscribing to keyword feeds on services like summize and tweetscan.

Having only 140 characters to express yourself forces you to write creatively and concisely, leading to a higher quality of content than most other forms of communication. It’s limiting, but it’s also liberating. There’s also a sense of responsibility that comes with having followers. While IRC was a room where anyone could shout random nonsense, knowing that my update will be delivered to hundreds of people who follow me, I now feel responsible to produce something worthwhile and valuable to retain my followers and gain new ones. And followers are the name of the game. Whether it’s building a network that can get you out of jail or simply having people to poll or bounce new ideas off of, creating social capital is increasingly important in today’s Internet-driven society.

So twitter is my new IRC. I’ve been hanging out on twitter more and more. I’ve got a desktop client (twhirl) fetching the latest tweets from people I’m following, and I’m actively participating in conversations. Because twitter is still a very small early adopter minority, the quality of thoughts and ideas expressed can be very high, if you can figure out who to follow (this is where things like summize, hashtags and twellow can be useful). And even though twitter adoption is still a tiny minority of the Internet population, it’s growing rapidly and is already much bigger than IRC. It’s going to be interesting to watch the twitter community transform as it gains mainstream adoption.

Want to join the conversation? follow @skwp on twitter