I checked out the iPad at the Apple store for 15 minutes and was not impressed. Was it really more than a giant iPhone?

Then my birthday came along and my business partner bought me one. I’ve been using it or a good month now and have found it indispensable. The iPad is a multiple use device that kills a bunch of birds with one stone.

Who cares about a tablet PC when the iPad can control all of your desktops?

Over the past several years I have gone through a handful of mobile computing devices. There was the Fujitsu U810 which looked so unique I had to get one (screen and keyboard too small to use more than 15 minutes.) Later on I got the Macbook Air with an SSD which was thoroughly usable but went in the closet when I downsized from a 15 pound Alienware to a more modest Asus laptop.

What I think most people are missing about the iPad is its ability to remotely connect to just about any internet connected PC or Mac. Leave your laptop or desktop running 24/7 and remote to it in an instant to pull up a file or check something else out.

You can use LogMeIn Ignition ($30 one time app fee) or any of the numerous apps that use your desktop OS’s native remote connection feature. Try iTap RDP remotely connected to a Windows machine running at 1024×768 resolution (the iPad’s native res) and it will look like you have a PC in your hands.

My 3G iPad’s remoting capabilities have boosted my mobility even more than the almost instant-on Macbook Air SSD. Now I really have an always on internet device (other than on flights I never turn it off.)

The iPad’s ebook capabilities seem adequate to me. I’m about 500 pages in to a 1000 page book. Because Amazon has a Kindle app for the iPad I didn’t have to repurchase any books.

My expectation is that by gen 3 the iPad is going to be a must have device. Competition should start to show up from Google Chrome/Android making things real interesting.
Don’t bother waiting for a Windows tablet unless you are waiting to be disappointed.

So is the iPad most than a giant iPhone? Not really. What it does have is a bigger screen that won’t make you go blind. If you don’t have a iPhone or iPod, especially if you’ve never had one, the iPad is a must. Just make sure you can budget a few hundred more $ for the apps in order to fully push its potential.

As for web business owners, never before have you been so close to being able to lay out on a beach and do business (Apple just needs to make a bright sun friendly screen.)

As a percentage of all advertising revenue in the United States, newspapers have been steadily shrinking for the past 50 years. It was only recently that things tipped to the point where newspapers were losing money instead of turning a profit.

An old hierarchy wants the newspaper industry to survive. Whether from personal business interests, nostalgia, or an inability to use the internet, there is a subset of individuals who want things to stay the same. In fact, the FTC is holding preliminary discussions on how to put the industry in to cryostasis.

The web has been the best thing to happen to investigative journalism. While critics regularly claim that bloggers just regurgitate and repost articles from traditional news organizations it is bloggers and web publishers who regularly have their stories jacked without any citation or credit. No longer are stories “sat on” by editors for weeks or months, stories are released instantly for people to make up their own minds about.

Here are some of the “considerations” the FTC is currently looking at:
- Restricting news aggregators. Good bye, Google News.
- Preventing others from republishing facts from a news story until after an extended amount of time. Good bye, live search results from Twitter.
- Limiting copyright fair use. Good bye Google Image Search (FTC specifically notes the Perfect 10 case.)
- Surcharges added on to all monthly ISP bills.
- Exempting news organizations from anti trust laws. Hey, if we all block Google in robots.txt then no one will go there when they want news, right?
- Government subsidies.
- Tax breaks.

In the FTC’s defense, they give pretty strong counterpoints to everything but additional government subsidies & tax breaks. Whats scary is that someone at a government regulatory agency which is supposed to protect consumers would take any of these ideas more seriously than cracking down on abductions by aliens in flying saucers.