As you may remember, I'm a big fan of eBooks. My plan was to buy the nook, but ended up with an iPad instead. It's able to read books from all the major eBook companies (which finally includes eReader.)

My last few eBook purchases have actually been Kindle books, because they were titles Mary wanted as well. It was very cool being able to read on my iPhone and my iPad, and have my place come along with me.

The one downfall of the iPad as an eReader is sunlight. The screen is really washed out, even in the shade, and is absolutely unreadable in full sun. Of course, this is where the Kindle, and other eInk based devices really shine.

The new Kindle pricing makes me wonder when I should pull the trigger. $359 (what we paid for Mary's Kindle) is way too expensive to have as a secondary reading device (secondary to my ever present iPad.) But $139? Maybe. I think $99 will become a magic price for a lot of people. I don't know what it will take for Amazon to cut another 40% from the manufacturing costs, but I'm sure they're working on it. It's obvious to me that they are selling Kindle's as a means to selling books, not for the sake of the hardware.

After upgrading my iPhone to iOS4, I did run into a problem with my voicemail.  Attempting to access the Voicemail tab would cause an endless series of Password prompts.  I tried several different passwords I thought it might be, but none of them worked.  In the end, I ended up calling my number, jumping into voicemail, setting a new password, and then entering it on my phone.

It looks like the same thing happened to people last year.  Carl had the same problem on both of their phones.

Of course I'm talking iOS4.  Yes, I'll update, but I'm giving it a day or two.  RunKeeper, which I use, posted that their iOS4 compatible update hasn't been approved yet.  Many other apps I do use have been updated in the past couple of days, especially Evernote.  The only critical app I'm not sure about is eWallet.  Their edition is ancient, and they are silent on their blog.  I tweeted a question to them, so we'll see what they say.

[UPDATE]
I upgraded.  As reported, RunKeeper Free crashes on startup.  I usually only run on the weekend, and I hope their update goes through by then.  No issues with anything else so far.

While eating lunch one day in London, I pulled out the iPad to do a bit of surfing on the restaurants free WiFi.  When the waiter brought my food, he said everyone was "quite jealous" of my iPad.  I said something about only having to wait another week until they would be available in London (28th launch - another Friday).  He said he was waiting for the iPhone 4g, but was concerned that there might not be a UK phone provider ready with a 4g network.  I decided not to correct him.

I know that all the tech sites have reverted to an iPod naming scheme without a better name for the supposed 4th generation iPhone, but I do have to wonder if this misconception is widespread.

If is is what people really think, Apple has a bigger problem with the leak than I previously thought.

I just got back from a two week business trip in Europe, London and Moscow.  On this trip, I've found the iPhone to be a bit odd in terms of time zone support.

I synchronize my iPhone with an Exchange account.  All of my calendar entries come from this account.

When I arrived in London, my phone changed to local time, but none of my calendar entries moved.  At first I thought it had only changed times, not time zones, but after some searching, that turned out to be incorrect.  You see, Apple has an odd way of describing its calendar settings.

This is the setting that was specified in my phone.  This explained why my calendar entries didn't switch.  It turns out I had to switch it to Off to get the calendar entries to honor time zones in the entries.


The second problem arrived when I got to Moscow.  My phone didn't automatically change time.  It was set to Set Automatically.

I set the timezone to Moscow, and everthing worked ok.

The only bad thing was the last night.  I plugged my phone in to charge, and it set the timezone back to Houston (which my computer was still set on.)  I use my phone as my alarm clock, which didn't work so well when it was set to Houston time.  Luckily my departure was late that morning, so I didn't miss anything.

My mother joined the Cult of Steve shortly before I did, buying the same Spring refreshed BlackBook.  She has been a long-time Palm user.  She recently retired from her public school district job, but will be continuing working as an educational consultant for National Geographic.  Upon her retirement, her IT department took back the most recent Palm that she was using, and although she has an older one she could use, she mentioned buying whatever the current model was.  I suggested that an iPod Touch may be a better choice as a stand-alone PDA.

My initial thought is that an iPod Touch will sync with iCal and Address Book.app without any Third party software.  I believe the Palm still needs Palm Desktop/HotSync manager to sync using iSync.  It seems that a bunch of people are doing this, so I need to read a bit more on it before suggesting a little more strongly.

Now I couldn't even get one if I wanted one.

Carl is considering purchasing a Mac, so we decided to pop down to the local Apple Store while out at lunch.  Much to our surprise, there were approximately sixty people in line waiting for their iPhone 3G.

After looking at the iMac for quite a while, we were able to spend a bit of quality time with the display iPhone's (white models) and it does feel a bit smaller than the old one.  Unfortunately the placement of the security cable, made it really difficult to get a good understanding of the feel in the hand.  Once again I was reminded how nice the software is.  I still had a very hard time with the keyboard.  The other thing I wonder is if the volume control buttons are available via the SDK.  The are placed quite nicely for use as an eBook reader, but it they don't work, it means flipping pages by touching the screen.

I'm still not buying one.

No, I didn't buy one, however I'm really starting to see them out and about. Saturday, I saw two obvious ones, both browsing in Safari, and using all the nifty touch abilities those things have.

Interestingly enough, they both had bump type cases on them (one clear acrylic, and the other a black rubber.)  I guess thin isn't as important as protection.