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I used to be an Apple fanboy. A Machead. I would faithfully sit in awe, looking at all the keynotes, almost applauding at the screen in unison with the audience. Whatever Apple delivered, I wanted. I didn’t understand why anybody of sane mind would want any other kind of computer than a Mac. At some point that changed. I still have a Mac, and I kind of like it, but I would never again have it as my only computer. I see the marketing-BS behind the words of the Steve, and sometimes it almost makes me nauseous.

It started about the time the Steve referred to the iPhone (a device I initially craved, but now wouldn’t be caught dead buying…) as “three devices in one – a phone, an iPod and an internet device” I saw red flares before my eyes. That’s like saying my car is “a transportation enabler, a mobile music device and a diesel storage unit“. Now was again the time for Apple to change the game. The Steve descended with his might tablets – behold, the iPad.

Yeah, “iPad“. Isn’t a name like that just asking for confused customers and mixups? The name is both phonetically and visually ridiculously similar to “iPod“. But my problems with this device (no, I think “gadget” is more suitable, as “device” would demand it had an actual purpose) don’t stop there. “The best way to experience the web, email, photos and video. Hands down.” (From the Apple website) Better than doing it on a phone – even a smartphone? Probably. Better than on a full screen desktop, or even laptop? I find that hard to swallow. Better video experience than a Full HD-TV? That’s laying it on pretty thick, even for marketing-BS! Better web, without being capable of showing Flash? How would that even be possible?

Saying it’s going to “save the printing industry” is believing you’re a whole lot more than you are. Mainly – I don’t think that industry actually needs saving. It’s going through a change, yes, and some players are having problems reinventing themselves, but as an industry I don’t think it needs saving. I find the size of it a bit awkward. It’s too big to carry in your pocket, even if you had big pockets. If you need to carry a bag anyway – why not take a whole laptop, then?

Will it sell? Probably. Especially the way the (mainstream) media reports about it. Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet calls it a “supergadget” praising that it has “a browser, e-mail, music, video, audiobooks and podcasts“. Right.. Exactly what almost all mobile phones over a hundred bucks have, and have had for years? Is it a good device? At least not any worse than the competitors. Is it revolutionary? A game changer? The bees knees? The dogs bollocks? Hardly…

The biggest problem, however, is that I can’t see any situation when I would need/want this enough for the price (even if it’s about half the price of what was speculated beforehand). A situation when a laptop/netbook (that Nokia Booklet 3G sure looks sweet!) would be too big and a smartphone (itching for that Google Nexus One at the moment…) too small or limited.

We’ll see how this gadget will do on the real market. Will others than Mac fanboys buy it? Will Mac fanboys buy it? This ex-fanboy won’t. I’m not even sure I think it’s beautiful, which is the one thing you so far have been able to say about all Apple products. It just looks like a stretched iPhone, without the capabilities of the phone. Not even the hands-on video from Engadget got me to want it, even a little.

It was one of those days. At work, phones ringing off the hook (not that there are hooks on cellphones, but you know what I mean), seemed like all the people in the area got up on the wrong foot and all decided to call in. Out in the corner a TV was on, but since it was daytime it was just meaningless infomercials, so I wasn’t paying attention. Until I happened to see a commercial for the upcoming DIGIEXPO. “Ooh, gizmos and gadgets!“, I thought, spider-sense tingling. And since I had the weekend off, I decided to go.

I’ve never been to an expo like this before, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I was hoping for the aformentioned gizmos and gadgets. What most of it was, was rather unsurprisingly and disappoingly lightly dressed women wooing teen-age boys into stalls and stalls filled with X-Boxes, Playstation 3:s and Nintendo Wii:s.

Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate female beauty, and I do enjoy an occasional game, although my console is a dust-gathering original Playstation 2, and none of my computers are really gaming-spec, but I was feeling really out of place here. Sure, there were booths for all the major camera manufacturers and other major players, such as Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony and Microsoft, but these were all overshadowed by the gaming scene.

Microsoft had the probably the largest single stage, naturally pushing the brilliant Windows 7 operating system, and the recently updated Windows Phone. I sat in on a few presentations, but found it difficult to follow, partly because of the nearby Singstar (or other sing-a-long-game) stage.

I think I’ve become more sensible to noise pollution since I moved out of the city eight years ago…

But what I saw I liked quite a lot. I’ve had a Windows Mobile-phone not so long ago, and the OS in that was really really bad. Not user-friendly in the least and very unresponsive on the whole. But this new Windows Phone seemed quite  alright. They had a few, mostly HTC phones running the latest Windows Phone OS and the little I played around with them I quite liked. I think I won’t automatically exclude every single Windows Phone the next time I’m shopping for a new one.

Nokia also had a presence, not on their own (which I found a bit weird, this being Nokia-land and all…) but as a part of the Microsoft booth, showing off their new netbook Nokia Booklet3G, which seems really nice. I’ve concidered getting one of these netbooks but every time I come to the same conclusion. I want one, I don’t need one. If I moved around more I might get one, but as it is a normal laptop and a phone with a browser covers what I need. But would I get one the Nokia Booklet is the one that seems to make the most sense of the ones I’ve seen.

The only thing I found which could be classified as a “gizmo” was something called a “blobo” by a Finnish company called Ball-it. It’s a gaming device with specialised games. It’s a small ball, a little smaller than a tennis ball, with motion sensors. You control the games by throwing it around and squeezing it. I have to say it seemed kind of gimmicky, and the games appeared to be of the kind you’d get bored from really quickly.

I found a YouTube video presentation of the product and it didn’t convince me. I wonder if there’s a market for gadgets like this, since the so much more versatile Nintendo Wii?

Going into the Expo I though I would come out with a lot of bags and a new bank loan. This turned out to be an unwarrented fear. The only money I spent was the entrance fee, parking fee and a cup of coffee. The Canon-booth did have quite a good deal on a macro-lens which I thought about for a while, but I really want a zoom-lens instead for the kind of photography I want to do. There were some panels, for example about Camera RAW, I would have enjoyed, but since this was a last-minute-call I hadn’t had the time to plan properly and showed up a bit too late.

Overall it was an OK exhibition, but a little less than I had hoped for. I expect a bit more for a 13 euro entrance fee. Sure, that same ticket also got you into Skiexpo and Boardexpo, but I’ve never stood on a pair of downhill ski’s in my entire life…

Years and years ago I bought a Wacom Graphire 2 4×5 tablet. Every now and again I hook it up and look for drivers. A few weeks ago I dug it up again from the lurky boxes of unused electric gizmos and gadgets (it’s quite a large box). Photoshopping is just so incredibly much better with a tablet than with a mouse. Since then I’ve had three input devices connected to my iMac; an Apple keyboard, a Logitech mouse and a Wacom tablet… And I just noticed something – I haven’t touched the mouse since!

This means I’ve used the tablet not only for Photoshopping, but also for using the OS, as well as text-editors, internet browsing etc. Tasks you’d probably not think a tablet would be particularly useful for!

I have to say I am amazed at how little I’ve actually missed the mouse during this time. It makes me want to invest in a bit of a better (or at least newer) tablet, as the Graphire 2 was quite a cheap one even back when I bought it – yet still it’s still just as sharp as ever. The only sign of usage it has is a slight crack in the plastic pen, which I have very MacGyver-ishly fixed using duct tape.

But the most important and interesting epiphany I had about this is that I have so far always thought that the tablet PC:s that are appearing on the market as of late are little more than gimmicks without any real practical use. Now I actually want one! (The fact that I want an electrical gizmo is in itself not news in any way…)

I don’t see this happening with “normal” desktop computers, though – as the vertical and usually high screen would be quite uncomfortable to use, but a touchscreen laptop (or a Wacom Cintiq) would actually be sweet, and I would much prefer a touchscreen to the trackpads found in laptops today, which I hate with a passion.

One issue people always mention with touch-technology equipped computers (even cellphones before it became mainstream with touchscreen phones shortly after the unexpected success of the iPhone) is the fact that the screen would become incredibly cluttered quickly. I don’t see this as a problem. First of all, few of us walk around with very dirty fingers (as long as you don’t take the Discovery Channel approach and inspect your fingers on a microscopic level, at which we are all dirty, filthy slobs all the freaking time…). The only thing you’d need is a screen that is durable and stable enough to not take a beating from a microfibre cloth wiping.

Luckily I’ve just bought a new laptop, otherwise I might just head out and get myself a touch laptop and paid an arm and a leg for it… (the new laptop, BTW, lasted a whole two months before it gave up and is now spending some time in rehab, a.k.a. service…) But as with all other things tech things get cheaper at a record speed, and one of these days these touch-enabled devices will be the norm and not a luxury (or geeky) add-on.

…is what the Internet is build from. Or at the very least – a massive amount of good deeds and good people. At least according to Jonathan Zittrain.

I really enjoy a lot of the TED Talks (Technology Education Design), and this is by far one of the best. It has probably the greatest (simple) explanations on what the internet is and how it works. I’ve watched this a handful of times already but I can’t get over how brilliant it is – so if you haven’t watched it, please do.

Enjoy.

Being really into webdesign I try to have all the known browsers installed, if for nothing else simply to check my websites with. That also means I change my default browser setting about as often as a crooked politician changes opinions. All browsers have their own advantages and problems, and in my opinion, none is superior to any other.I haven’t had Internet Explorer as a default browser, probably since there was a choice. But sadly you still need to have it installed, as some services for some ridiculous reason demand it. It has improved greatly in it’s last few iterations, however and is no longer the spawn of Beelsebub it was a while ago.

Firefox has probably been the browser I’ve used the most – and in the vast library of extensions it still rules supreme. Firefox was originally inteded as a lighter version of Mozilla, which had grown to be a monster of an application. And in the years since,  much thanks to the alread mentioned vast library of extensions, Firefox too, has now become a monster. I deselected it as my default browser when it started to last too long to start up – even after I had uninstalled all extensions but the ones I used most. I still occasionally use Firefox – mostly when I need to use the brilliant Firebug-extension.

When Chrome appeared I switched over to it, because it was just so lightningly (if that isn’t a word, it ought to be) fast. And although I’ve heard rumours of extensions to it – it still remains light and fast, but a few weeks ago it lost it’s position as default browser on my Windows PC:s. ON my Macs it’s been mostly Firefox as well, and then Safari when I’ve grown tired of the weight and slowness of the Fox. I never really grew to like Safari though. I can’t really put my finger on why…

Opera has always been quirky. They have really freaky ideas like Unite, which I want no part of, but at least they’re innovating. I’ve used it before, and liked it. It manages to say reasonably light and fast even if it packs a punch. It’s quick to start and loads pages as fast as any others (I’m not counting microseconds here, because in daily use they really have no place) even if they have extensions – although they are called widgets – and an e-mail client. As the new version – Opera 10 – recently was released I decided to try it again.

Really, the usage of Opera is so marginal you don’t really need it for debugging purposes, so I was prepared to like it, but not use it. It has now been my default browser for about a month, and I don’t see any reason to change it. It’s not based on the WebKit-core like Chrome or Safari, nor the Mozilla-core like Firefox or Camino, so some pages will not render perfectly fine – but keep in mind that no browser shows all pages correctly – so don’t hold that against Opera.

The feature I love mostly in the new Opera is called Link. I have at present three computers in active use. One running Mac OSX, one running Windows Vista and one running Windows 7 RC. What Link does is simply synchronizing the bookmarks over the opera browsers over all these computers. There was some extension in Firefox that did this also, but this just works so simply and transparently. You create an account at their Social community called My Opera (come on, who hasn’t got a social community these days?!) and the browser stays logged in. Add a bookmark on one computer? It’s there on all computers. This saves me from the hassle of exporting and importing bookmark files. It also has a Firebug-ish component called Dragonfly, which I need to get acquainted with a bit better.

Will Opera ever become a major player in the already crowded browser-space? Probably not. It will just stay the quirky second-cousin  at the side lines. It’s not by any means superior to the others, but sufficiently different to warrant a try.