Where I work, things are loosing up. Camera usage is still prohibited, but nowadays personally owned cell's (with or without cameras) are prohibited only inside "Specially Limited Areas".

The one surprising exception, very recent, is that gov. owned Blackberrys are permitted just about everywhere, with some exceptions varying from "Must be turned off" to "Not Permitted at all".

I guess that last shouldn't be really so surprising given the scrutiny given to Blackberrys after the Pres. insisted on keeping his.

We were forbidden all cameras which meant no personal phones in the secure rooms at work until mysteriously the rules got relaxed for iPhones. Apparently the remote wipe feature is good enough that you're allowed an iPhone and not that my boss had just got an iPhone around that time. Just a random coincidence I'm sure

We are now allowed cell phones with cameras also. However, iPhones are still not on the approved device list (even though our telephony provider is AT&T) because of the requirement of using iTunes with it.

I doubt any device capable of recording or transmitting will ever be allowed in our closed areas. Pretty much the only things we are allowed to take into our areas are CD players (with only factory stamped CDs) and pagers. MP3 players aren't allowed because of the ability to store information on them.

At last--a policy from upper management that makes sense. It must be a morale thing, figuring the employees will be much happier if they don't have to deal with iTunes.

tanstaafl.

I had no idea having iTunes on one computer in IT was so dangerous to an organization.

There is fear that 'company information' will be accidentally leaked having something like iTunes on each person's machine. It is hard to tell which organization came up with that, IT (which still has us on IE6) or security (who thinks everybody is out to get us).

iTunes though doesn't have to be installed on everyones machine for an iPhone to work in a corporate environment. It just needs to be activated once. Then IT can manage the device in a similar way to Blackberries. Configuration profiles and certificates can be loaded to secure the device, and updates can be pushed over the air.

I know, logic doesn't always work with the IT or security departments at these places, especially when as you said, IE 6, one of the most security vulnerable browsers around is still the standard browser in the organization.

Timely: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/09/consumerization.html

Amazon admits (on video) that the iPad is drastically affecting its ability to sell Kindles.

It's possible to own both, but this sends a strong message that people have been going down the Apple path. I think Amazon really need to get the Kindle down at $99, stat.

Some recent analyst rumblings predict Apple will sell over 20 million units next year and that those sales are going to hurt traditional PC sales from other vendors. I don't put much faith in analyst estimates, but it's interesting to see these guys going bullish on this device when initially everyone was simply dismissing it as a future failure.

Amazon's Kindle business is interesting to me due to their internal team structure. They have the Kindle hardware team responsible for these units, then a second independent team that does all the software versions for the iOS, Android, Windows/Mac and so on. So on the hardware side, you have Amazon going after Apple's iPad. On the software side, they are adding value to the platform the hardware side is targeting by releasing Kindle for iPad. Really interesting way to hedge your bets either way.

By doing it this way, they may pull people into the hardware side based on being on the iPad in software form. $99 (or even cheeper) gets to the point where people justify one alongside the iPad. Reading outside? Kindle time. Reading at night in bed? iPad time.

When these things get down to $50 people will just pick one up instead of a book. That's when we'll see the revolution. Providing of course the device is at least as good as the current Kindle. Hopefully a lot better.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a sub $100 Kindle eventually. I'd bet we'll see one before a sub-$400 iPad (and no, $399 doesn't count). And yeah, I agree that at that price they could sell like crazy.

Tom, I find that split of the teams interesting too. On the store-team side, they've decided to get on as many devices as possible, and that's been a great tactic. On the hardware side, they're improving the devices while getting the price down, and now they're going to sell them in Best Buy, which I think is huge for them. I can't imagine someone looking at the Kindle 3 next to the Nook and the Sony readers and deciding to go with the latter two, especially considering it's cheaper.

I'm not surprised that the iPad is hurting their sales, but I also think that the current market is going to even out, and as the price drops the market will grow. I think the evening out is coming from many people who bought the iPad instead of a Kindle, but are now getting the inexpensive Kindle for the uses that Tom mentions.

Well, I got an iPad yesterday despite my loathing of iTunes.

So far it is pretty decent. I wanted an easy way to read PDFs around the house, as comfortable as I can be reading a hardcopy manual. The laptop was out as too unwiedly, the iPod Touch was out as being just a pain to try to read full manuals with it. The iPad feels like it will be perfect for that.

It is a lot faster than the Touch. It is able to render the full website of the sites I checked yesterday (NHL, Second City Hockey), and ridiculously quicker, which was an awesome improvement over the iPod Touch.

I ran into a few things that I didn't like yesterday. First was syncing. There is a known issue, to everybody but me apparently. For some reason iTunes thought I synced an iPad in Aug 09. That caught me off guard. However, it seemed to transfer my paid for apps and music (I only tried with a couple CDs worth) without a problem. It will be fun to see if it pukes and tries to delete them off my iPod Touch next time I sync it (I have four new CDs that I need to transfer over).

One was an issue with the WiFi. I don't know if it was a problem with my router or with the iPad. I didn't have any problems when I was originally setting it up and downloading some things I needed (some straight from the App Store). A little while later, the iPad somehow got disconnected while not being moved from the spot where it was happily downloading stuff earlier) and refused to reconnect. My work laptop was the only other wireless connection and it didn't lose connection or even have a hiccup during this time. I ended up having to reboot the router before the iPad would talk to it again. Once I did that, I was able to use the iPad around the house and it did not get disconnected again.

Finally, the browser. I would refresh a forum (Second City Hockey) and inexplicably while scrolling down occasionally (more often than not), Safari would puke and reload the page, sending me to the top again. At first I thought I was killing it by scrolling down past where it loaded (those forums get a lot of traffic during games). However, a few times it happened while I was scrolling through rendered areas and the downloading looked like it was finished. The page doesn't autorefresh, so I don't know what was causing it. One of my friends said she sees that quite a bit, usually on forums. I never saw that before, she uses Macs though, so no telling if it is a Safari issue or what. It was obnoxious having to rescroll through all few hundred replies to get to the bottom every time that happened.

One thing that has me excited is supposedly the NHL is working on getting GameCenter working on the iPad. That would be awesome for watching games when I'm on the road (which looks to be the majority of Jan-Mar of next year) and away from my TV.

Overall, I'm really happy with it so far. I think it would be fun to dork around with the SDK, but I can't really see buying a new machine just for that. That is subject to change, I guess.

I've never seen anything like that happen on any sites I've visited on my iPad.

Any iOS device is seen as a valid restore target from any other iOS backup. iTunes offered to restore my iPhone backup to my iPad, but I chose instead to set the iPad up as a new device. Also, the licensing on apps and DRM content allows unlimited iOS devices, as long as they are bound to the same account. You can also use Home Sharing to transfer DRM content (apps/video) between iTunes accounts. This is how I gave my grandmother some basic apps I had bought. For any DRM free content (like newer iTunes songs or your own ripped collection) iTunes will gladly sync that to any device without restriction.


Some people have reported WiFi problems with the iPad, and Apple has tried to address them a little bit with the minor 3.2.x updates. 3.2.2 is currently the latest release, make sure your iPad is updated. Does your router offer both 2.4 and 5.8 GHz wireless? Thats also sometimes been known to cause issues on the iPad if the router is broadcasting the same SSID on both networks. It's a valid setup, but for some reason causes a few issues.


Never had this happen before myself, but I tend to only browse this forum on the iPad, and definitely never seen it on the desktop Safari. I have heard of low memory related issues in Safari similar to what you are describing, so it's possible the forums there are going over the low limits the iPad browser has. Not really sure of a solution to this one as it's not something I've looked in.


I hope they do this too. I've heard from a few people on podcasts that they really enjoy the MLB app on the iPad, and even found the AirPlay icon when it was running on 4.2 beta, allowing streaming back to an AppleTV. I'm not a huge sports fan, but I do hope more franchises go this route as it's the last hurdle for a lot of people to be able to dump cable.

I wasn't aware it was just linked by account and not number of devices. That is awesome and clears up my fears about resyncing the iPod Touch.


The iPad is the latest version, at least iTunes said it was. I didn't verify the minor version numbers since I had no idea what the latest was My router is 2.4 GHz only, it is an older Hawkings Technology router - I've been thinking about ditching it for something that would play nice with the Wii, but it hasn't concerned me enough to actually pull the trigger yet.

You would have to be really bored to look into the browser thing, but here is the information The site is www.secondcityhockey.com (no sensitive eyes - lots of cursing, especially after goals against). During games the forum has threads set up for each period. The 3rd period thread had over 500 posts during the game (90 between the end of the 2nd and start of the 3rd - 15mins, so pretty active). It was while refreshing those threads during a commercial and scrolling down to the most recent posts that the browser was having issues. The next game is Saturday starting at 8:30pm EST. I imagine the forums will be on fire since it is the first home game (raising the banner) and against Detroit (lovingly refered to as Scum by Hawks' fans everywhere).

Falling right in line with my predictions from early this year, the iPad has taken off and is beating adoption rates of all other gadgets. All-time fastest selling gadget ever if you believe Information Week.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/stor...mp;itc=ref-true

I saw a ton of people with them last week at GDC Online (formally, and more properly named GDC Austin). Heard they were pretty big around VMWorld too.

I had one guy ask me about the iPad when I was sitting in the expo area. 30 seconds later he was sold, simply by me pointing to the battery indicator and explaining "This morning when I got here, it was at 80%, now it's at 50%, after 6 hours of note taking and internet browsing".

Looks like things are going to start moving a little quicker, with a few new stores either just starting or about to start selling the iPad: Walmart, Target, AT&T and Verizon.

I wouldn't hold my breath to see any of the knock-offs so widely available.

Selling iPads through Verizon is a very interesting move. Verizon will only be carrying the WiFi models, but priced at the 3G model level when bundled with a MiFi. If a customer goes for the bundle, they get 1GB a month service for $20, 3GB for $35, or 5GB for $50. All without a contract.

Apple is probably doing this for two reasons. First, they ensure the iPad is sitting next to potential competitor tablets even in AT&T and Verizon stores. It also allows Apple to get the ball rolling with Verizon for a future (and persistently rumored) CDMA iPhone.

That CDMA iPhone rumor has really been heating up as well. If I were a betting man, I'd be ready to put some cash on the line that it's going to happen, barring any last-minute decisions.

Without risking taking this thread too far off topic, here's a question... It's been a long time since I've used anything but a sim-equiped GSM phone... So how does one move a CDMA product from one carrier to another?

Most likely the new carrier just says "We don't do that, pick one of our products, with the attached contract."

It's totally a software thing. There are things called Number Assignment Modules. The NAM is the electronic memory in the cellular phone that stores the telephone number and an electronic serial number. Phones with dual- or multi-NAM features offer users the option of registering the phone with a local number in more than one market.

I have this set up so I can switch to NAM1 for Verizon when in the States and NAM2 for Smart when in Belize. Any cell phone shop here seems to be able to do the programming, so it doesn't seem like CDMA phones are locked.

Many CDMA phones are locked, odds are the local shop just knows how to unlock them. The tools appear to be pretty widespread, much like the tools to unlock most GSM phones.

Ok. They didn't have any problems with my Casio G'Zone Boulder or my wife's Moto Droid (original) - both on Verizon. I'd already rooted the droid, so I'm not sure if that helped them out or not. I don't think so.

It looks like the CDMA lock is done with something called a MSL, or Master Subsidy Lock. It's similar to SIM locks where the carrier can provide an unlock code. The MSL is generated by using the ESN (Electronic Serial Number) and an algorithm that varies based on carrier.

I found information on two different ways to unlock the MSL. The first is via a program that knows the algorithm for the original carrier and spits out a proper MSL code to use. The other method involves reprograming the phone somehow to change the MSL code to all zeros.

Since it's so trivial to defeat the locks on both GSM and CDMA, I wonder if LTE introduces anything new to make it harder.

(and yes, I'm a bit bored tonight, trying to take my mind off the interview a bit)

I wasn't actually asking about moving phones with regards to the lock, but simply the method os setting up the device for a different carrier. The sim swap is by far the most intelligent and straight-forward process on the planet, and it's one of the reasons GSM has just always made sense where every other technology seemed like it was created by a caveman.

John's NAM setup probably answered that question. I suppose locks can come into play as well if you can't reset the NAM on a particular phone.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled on the iPhone, especially a potential GSM/CDMA iPhone. IMO, it doesn't make sense to make a CDMA-only iPhone.

Over 4 million iPads shipped this past quarter. And Apple sees the demand increasing dramatically.

Even though Apple doesn't want to be the biggest player, they just want to make the best devices, they're currently the number one computer maker in the US in terms of market share.

Some analysts have been incorrectly reporting Apple as having jumped to number 3, but in fact they've missed counting the iPad which has helped Apple shoot to number one.

Other manufacturers count their netbooks running alternative OSes, and by all accounts the iPad is eroding their market share as well as starting to take a bite out of more traditional notebooks in Enterprise and K12 according to Apple.

I can honestly tell you that 10 years ago I would have never guessed that Apple would be the biggest tech company in the US both in terms of capitalization and computers shipped. They now also have over $50 Billion in cash and their stock is almost at $320 US per share (that puts their market cap at almost $70B more than MSFT). WTF.

"Incorrectly" meaning "not in the way that casts Apple in the best possible light." There are very legitimate problems with lumping the iPad in with PCs for the purpose of making a sales comparison, and the news reports (e.g.) have done a good job making the perils of this comparison clear. You, on the other hand have decided that it's simply "incorrect" to differ with the notion that the iPad might not be comparable to a PC.

You can't rightly say it's a "brand new category" to make a certain argument, then lump it in with Apple's desktops and laptops running traditional OSes with traditional OS features to make a different argument. If you're going to do that, why not count the iPad Mini, er, iPhone?



What "alternative OS" are these other netbooks running? Are you calling Ubunto an "alternative OS" to be compared with IOS? Again, it's either a new paradigm or it's not.

As a huge fan of OS X and Apple hardware, I'm very pleased with Apple's ascendancy to the #3 spot in *computer* sales, and their complete domination of the "tablet type thingies that run a walled garden phone operating system" market is admirable. But, iPads aren't PCs, and they're not "computers" in the conventional sense. That's a good thing for Apple's bottom line, but bad for someone who wants to try to stretch this unambiguously great news into something more than it is.

I think counting iPad sales as part of the PC sales is entirely the right thing to do. You can be sure that if other manufacturers had ever had success with Windows tablets that they would have been counted as PCs, even if they were mainly being used to consume media.

And sure a Windows tablet isn't exactly the same as an iPad, but they potentially fill the same niches for a lot of customers. I know alot of people think that the iPad is just a big iPhone without the phone, but I think history will record that it fits into a PC shaped niche, not a phone shaped niche

However, I think getting excited about Apple's PC market share including the iPads is a little premature. There are plenty of people out there who wont buy Apple or who will just buy a tablet if it is cheap enough and there is enough "buzz" without taking much care to think which tablet it is.

Until there is some competition there is no way of predicting what the Apple share of PCs including tablets will be.