Why I won’t be buying an iPad any time soon
For the last couple of months now I've been holding back on a buying decision: Kindle versus Apple's New Goodie. Of course, when I first decided to hold back on my ebook reader purchase it was when news of the new Apple gadget first started cooking furiously and when it was still known as an iSlate. It looked like the New Gadget would be a Kindle killer so I decided to hold back to see what the future held.
Now, thanks to Steve Jobs, we now know that the new Apple goodie is called a iPad 
and it seems very cool with lots of great technical specifications described in detail all over the net.
But I have to explain why I won't be buying an iPad anytime soon - and why I think Amazon's Kindle will get my hard-earned dough.
Don't get me wrong. I think the iPad is droolicious.
It's got everything that Apple is known for: great design and clearly some pretty whizz-bang functionality. But, having watched the launch videos this morning and read through the early morning hands-on reviews from those who have already played with the iPad, I have to wonder if, this time, Apple have foregone function for form.
According to Jobs, the iPad is positioned as a bridge between smartphone and laptop. It's not a netbook (which he clearly disdains). It is clearly intended as a serious player in the ebook market. But, this in-betweenness could well be its greatest flaw. If we evaluate it on the terms Jobs' offered the consuming public, then we can see that this may not be the device to be celebrated as converged media manna from heaven that we all expected:
- It doesn't have a USB port - this just seems to be a crazy oversight. The beauty of any portable device such as this is to be able to connect other gadgets to it like your camera, videocam, a keyboard (should you not want to tap away on a virtual keyboard on the screen). I write constantly as a media professional and as an enthusiastic blogger. I can see myself using a virtual keyboard for web searches and brief emails, but for serious work you need a serious input device. (Update: apparently they sell a separate custom adaptor which gives you the functionality of a USB port. Looks like a keyboard docking station also sells separately. See point 7 below and watch how that price is going to bloat rapidly)
- The browser doesn't support flash apparently because Apple simply do not like the technology. So why would I want to use a device with a browser which eliminates my ability to view large swathes of web content? I wouldn't.
- It doesn't utilise e-ink technology or any analogue which provides that ink-on-paper feel for which the Kindle is famous. I would imagine this is pretty crucial to it being considered a serious ebook device, even more critical for Apple considering that the iBook store that launches with the device is clearly central to Apple's revenue and business plan with the iPad.
- The entry-level models don't include 3G, only wireless connectivity. I have a home wireless connection so I could utilise this quite comfortably there. But what's the point of it being so portable if I am unlikely to be able to use it practically anywhere else as an internet device? For most South Africans a device like this without 3G would be pretty useless.
- The solid state drives offer limited size with the largest being 64GB - pretty puny by today's standards and expectations.
- No multi-tasking!
- Price: the entry level model is twice as expensive as an entry-level kindle. The top end - with 3G and thus more useful - costs four times more than a Kindle.
- It's three times heavier than a Kindle 2, weighing about 700g.
So, that's my 15c worth. The iPad seems to be the first step towards total media and functional convergence for a portable media device. It's a big first step, to be sure, but there's still plenty of distance to cover, I think.
For now, I think I'll stick to my laptop as a workhorse for my day-to-day needs, my blackberry for true mobile web connectivity and email - and I think I'll buy myself a cheap Kindle so I can cart my favourite reads around and consume them comoftably.
At least until generation two of the iPad emerges. Then I'm in!
Semenya: The media's to blame? Huh, am I missing something?
Caster Semenya listens as Julius Malema mouths off against the media
I read with amazement the reports coming from JHB yesterday on the arrival back into town by golden girl Caster Semenya. There were Winnie Mandela, Julius Malema and others dishing out the insults left, right and centre. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.
After all, where in the world would a politician not leap at the chance to stick their nose into a trough full of limelight? But what got me annoyed were the sweeping statements that somehow the South African media were to blame for Semenya's ordeal.
We are apparently everything from white-owned (a sin greater than incest it would seem), to racist to unpatriotic to, well, simply wanting to sell newspapers, heaven forbid!
Winnie even threatened to take my freedom away in revenge. (My colleague at the Times, Ray Hartley has nicely dealt with that one so I won't go down that road)
Scridb filterThe art of nothing
I simply don't get it. How can a person dashing up and down a corridor in a gallery be considered art? Think I'm making this up? Well have a look at this story from the UK Times which reveals how artist Martin Creed has "installed" a piece in the Duveen Galleries of the famous Tate Museum in London which entails various people sprinting up and down the 83m-long space at 30 second intervals. That, my friends, is the art, brilliantly entitled Work No 850.
You've got to be joking.
I think I will stand outside our building tomorrow morning and wave randomly to passing pedestrians. I will call myself Work No 1 and my art, like Creed's, will be about nothing.
Scridb filterShoot to kill madness
The deputy minister of safety and security Susan Shabangu is getting a lot of press and a lot of popular kudos after her exhortation to police to shoot to kill.
“When a criminal is pointing a gun in the face of our members, there’s no way they can shoot at the feet or the toe,” she said. “It’s government policy, it’s within the law. Police, when under threat, must protect themselves.”
“We are saying police must not be apologetic. They must shoot them,” she said.
At the risk of opening myself to tirades from the hang-em-high brigade, I have to side with the sane minority who think her comments over-step the mark. Police going around blowing away bad guys would soon find us with a society run by Dirty Harry. When the bad guys dead who is to say if he was posing a deadly threat or not - or even if they were a bad guy. We have courts to determine guilt, we don't need badged and uniformed vigilantes running around our streets and towns.
I also have a huge problem with this casual promotion of even more violence in our society as if we don't have enough problems with this already. The day Shabangu made her first comments they were broadcast on radio as we were preparing to take our three-year-old daughter to school. Our daughter (obviously mishearing and misunderstanding what was said) chirped from her baby seat: "Why is the lady on the radio saying I must kill my mommy and daddy?"
Maybe our daughter thinks her parents are the bad guys but she was really upset at what she heard such is the violence in that message. Is that the kind of world we want our kids living in?
Scridb filterZimbabwe – South Africans do care
I've watched the events taking place in Zimbabwe over the last couple of days with fascination and amazement - and so to have many, many South Africans. For the first time since we launched our new website we have been actively covering and updating a breaking international story. Our ethos on the DispatchOnline website is to be proudly local but there is something about this Zimbabwe election, even though it is taking place thousands of km from the Eastern Cape, that touches us all.
Our readers seem to agree too because their has been immense interest in the Zim elections with hits flooding into every update we gave posted. Justice Malala writing in The Times and the Dispatch criticises the apparent apathy of South Africans towards the Zimbabwean tragedy, but reading responses to this coverage I have to think that we South Africans care more than we let on.
We posted a selection of blogs from Zimbabwe on our web site and it is moving to read these posts, posts of hope for change, hope to bring Zimbabwe back into the community of nations. It is also moving to read the responses of people from around the world to these blogs.
Like this one:
Im a South African mother from the suburbs, who has been following your elections every minute i can get. I am holding every finger and toe that you get your victory and freedom. For every mother,woman and child your side, Peace be with you all.
((hugs))
A Concerned friend.
Yes, I think South Africans do care. Our foreign policy regarding Zimbabwe may be ambivalent and naive but, as is the case in many countries where leaders lose the foreign policy plot, ordinary citizens can see a simplier truth in these complex affairs and identify with the struggle of Zimbabweans to have a better life, free from tyranny.
Scridb filter