[Leica] iPad angst

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

*Like Henning, I too am a little disappointed in the iPad. Apparently Wall
Street is ambivalent too. Apple's stock price only went up $1 after the
announcement. We photographers are almost irrelevant. Everyone is waiting to
see if the teen agers, gamers, and e-text readers bite. Not that it isn't a
technological achievement for Apple but it isn't quite what I wanted. But
then neither was the Leica M8 or M9. What I really wanted was a somewhat
smaller and faster replacement for my venerable 12" Powerbook, say netbook
sized but able to run all the latest Mac and PC software. The iPad screen is
big enough. It is even slightly bigger in area than the size of my first
128K Mac screen. I used that one happily for several years and then my
daughter used it in college. A workable compromise would seem to be hinging
a small keyboard to the iPad, both to protect the screen when closed and
make typing easier. I'll bet some after market supplier is working on that
right now. In the meantime I've maxed out the memory of my 12" Powerbook,
replaced the HD with a 320 gb version, and loaded the bulletproof OS 10.4.11
software. It runs Photoshop, MS Office and GraphicConverter just fine. It
should last until the iPad of my dreams appears.*

**

*A year ago my kids gave me an iPod Touch as an Xmas present. That satisfies
my needs for reading e-mail at MacDonalds. It is certainly portable enough
and connects reliably to most wi-fi networks. I have yet to buy any music
from the iTunes store but have loaded most of my classical CDs into its
memory. Now I can eat my french fries while listening to a stirring concert
of Luciano Pavarotti and Cecilla Bartoli. *

**

*As far as reading e-books goes, I've been doing that for the last 15 years
on a HP 100LX palmtop. For free. The first generation family of HP palmtops,
the 95LX, 100LX and 200LX, were IBM XT computer workalikes which could run
any MS-DOS software. They were about the size of two packs of regular
cigarettes and sturdy as a hockey puck, Also they could run 40 hours on 2 AA
batteries. The books are provided gratis by Project Gutenberg.*

www.*gutenberg*.org/catalog/* *

*Project Gutenberg is a volunteer organization dedicated to putting all
books in the public domain into digital form. The catalog now contains over
30,000 downloadable volumes. I can load 800 of these at once on a 1 gb CF
card and have enough reading for a long, long summer vacation. No Kindle, no
iPod, no laptop. Just a cheap, very outdated palmtop. There is also a free
iPod Ap for reading Project Gutenberg books on the iPod. I may eventually
try that but the screen seems too small for my aging eyes.*

*
*

*Incidentally, the introduction price ($495) of the iPad is exactly what I
paid for my HP scientific calculator half a century ago. Given inflation,
the calculator was twice as expensive in purchasing power than the iPad. So
it's a real bargain. Buy one. Give one. Help my Apple stock rise enough to
buy an M9 and kit of lenses.*

**

*Larry Z*