Daily Archives: March 12, 2010

Waiting for the iPad

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The iPad is coming (beginning of April in the US, late April in the UK) but nobody has the faintest idea what will happen when it arrives. All over the computing industry, manufacturers are frantically trying to get their own iPad-lookalikes ready. HP has got one, apparently. No doubt ASUS has too. Google is rumoured to be working on an Android slate. And so on. Up to now, there’s only been a niche market for tablet devices (despite Bill Gates’s historic conviction that they would be the New Big Thing.) The $64 billion question is whether the Apple product will rescue the industry by creating a whole new product category — between the netbook and the laptop/desktop.

The content industry — especially the publishers of high-end magazines — is also waiting with bated breath to see what happens. Will the device rescue print from having to go down the cul-de-sac of web paywalls? That’s why publishers are so interested in putting out their publications as Apps rather than sites: doing it that way means that there’s a way of charging for content that consumers apparently find acceptable. The problem, of course, is that that gives Apple another chokehold on online content: everything has to go through the iTunes store, and Apple gets a cut of all the action thereon.

So this is a strange time: a huge industry is holding its collective breath to see if a single company will change everything. Will the iPad be a game-changer, as the iPhone has proved to be? Or will people buy it and then wonder — after the novelty has worn off — if it was worth all the fuss? Nobody knows.

LATER: It seems that Apple is barring UK customers from pre-ordering the iPad.

You could make it up — but who’d believe it?

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Lovely story from Sean & Nicci’s blog.

J.P.R. Williams, a celebrated Rugby international from my youth and now a 61-year-old orthopaedic surgeon, is stopped by police and breathalysed. But he has a bright idea. Someone, somewhere, has told him that you can cheat the test by putting copper coins in your mouth. The problem is that it's an idea that you need to be drunk to believe. The further problem is that PC Plod tends to get suspicious if you start shoving small change into your mouth. The even further problem is that it doesn't work.

He's been banned from driving for seventeen months. They should also make him take a GCSE in Chemistry.

Reading this scene in the manuscipt of a novel, an editor would surely object: funny idea, but do we have to make him a doctor? Nobody is going to believe that.

If only J.P.R. had read the entry on the subject in the great urban legends website, snopes.com.

Digital-to-analogue, 2010

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Hmmm… Just when I’ve been experimenting with escaping from the tyranny of ‘perfect’ digital imagery, I find that one of my sons has been heading off in the same direction. Except that he’s been doing it the hard way. “As a counter-balance to the increasingly digitised world of photography”, he writes, “I have decided to explore the analogue printing methods of yesteryear. Specifically I am focusing on screen printing, a process that was famously popularised by Andy Warhol.”

In true Warhol spirit, his first experiments have focussed on a quintessential British brand — Marmite! What’s nice about them is that no two prints are the same, which in a way is like an implicit definition of analogue media. A gallery of images of the resulting work can be found here, and a downloadable flyer [pdf] here.

Now, where did I put that tomato ketchup?

Later: You think I jest about Marmite being quintessentially British? An English journalist friend lived and worked in New York for a couple of years and he swore that the thing he missed most in all that time was… Marmite.