Skyrim: Character in the Elder Scrolls Series

Mountain Forest Path, from www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media

The game world of Skryim, from which the game takes its title, is one of the most beautifully rendered places I’ve ever seen.  Skyrim purportedly covers 16 square miles of in-game area, which is outrageous from a technical standpoint.  Within its many acres are more than 150 points of interest, from dwarven ruins to troll-infested caves, and not one of them is quite the same as the next.  Small villages and large towns also dot the landscape, and each has its own population of non-player characters with their own scripted lives.  Following any one of them, you might observe someone working his job during the game, visiting the pub at night, before turning in to his bed at home at three in the morning, only to do it again the next day.  There’s an incredible realism to Skryim, so much so that it becomes uncanny at times: at any moment, it can be so immersive that you forget you’re operating a video game and instead your mind hits a gear where you’re actually living in the moment as your in-game avatar.

One of the primary conceits of the Elder Scrolls series, in which Skyrim is the fifth major installment, is that you always start out as a nameless prisoner devoid of any background.  It’s during this process that you pick your race and gender, as well as your name.  There’s something exciting in this since you, the gamer, has such a hand in the identity of your character.

The downside of this is that your existence in the story’s narrative is tenuous at best. Since your character functionally begins existing the moment you start up the game with no backstory, there is nothing that grounds you into the world.  This is done sometimes in literature as the “mysterious stranger” story, but often that stranger’s past is eventually revealed or, if not that, the stranger develops such strong relationships with the other characters that this becomes the point of the story.  But due to the game world’s unbelievable openness, the protagonist (i.e. you) never gets a chance to develop any kind of complex relationship with any of the non-player characters.  From a narrative perspective, your character’s identity is paper thin.  One of the best methods of defining Character (capital C, as in the literary sense) is through the interplay between protagonist and supporting characters, and thus far in the Elder Scrolls series, this has proved impossible for the developers to create.

It’s no surprise then to hear the developers at Bathesda define Skryim as the main character in this eponymous game.  It’s a complex, varied world filled with mystery, beauty, and danger.  These are the hallmarks of a strong character, after all.

But it’s quite a different approach from another popular role-playing game series, developed by Bioware: Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, both of which are set in medieval worlds like Skyrim.

In the first Dragon Age, which is enormous by most game standards (except for the Elder Scrolls series, with which it is a peer for its magnitude), the developers forewent a complicated and beautiful landscape for repetitious design and graphics that were five years backwards at the time.  Instead, they gave the player the option of choosing among six backgrounds, each with a fully developed backstory for you to “live out” before entering the main portion of the game.  (These backstories coverage at the same point about 30-minutes into the game.)  You still have the ability to name your character and make him or her look as you please, but these are scripted events that throw you into the main quest.  You recruit multiple non-player characters throughout the quest, and you may develop fairly complex relationships with them.  Depending how they feel about you and the choices you make, you may get taken onto side quests that further develop your relationships.

In Dragon Age II, there is only one major background.  The game is considerably more linear than the previous entry, but the character interaction and development is also much more pronounced due to the time the developers are able to invest in the narrower story.  There are literally multiple acts to the story, as it takes place of the course of a decade, and many plot points are firmly scripted.  The game world is considerably smaller as well, taking place in one large city and its surrounding countryside, unlike Dragon Age: Origins, which takes place across a nation.  Despite the limits placed on the Dragon Age II, its structure leads to stronger characters and a more coherent plot, since all the game events happens in a prescribed order.

I prefer the latter, though I know many Dragon Age series fans enjoyed the enormity of the first game.  (Indeed, the first game had several sub-quests you were required to complete in order to unite the nation to stand against the game’s chief antagonist.  Each of these was complex and engaging on a story level.)  I’ve always preferred quality to quantity, however, so I was content with Dragon Age II’s runtime of about 20-30 hours, compared to Dragon Age: Origin’s 60 hours.

Moving back to Skyrim, it lacks the aforementioned plotting you find in the Dragon Age series.  That isn’t to say there aren’t an abundance of mini-quests and an overarching plot line that defines the entirety of the game.  (Heck, there are even interesting side stories associated with various factions in the game, any of which you may join.  I joined the Thieves Guild, which led me on its own twisted road for a while.)  But you don’t recruit a stable of characters to share in these adventures with you.  The best you can do is have a henchman follow you around to help you carry loot and fight off monsters.  They offer the occasional quip but nothing substantive otherwise.  In the Dragon Age games, your companions seem to experience your adventures with you — they often talked among themselves, too, which added a layer that made the game feel all the more tangible.  Most impressive, those characters judge you by your decisions, and best of all, they don’t always agree amongst each other.  One decision might make one very happy and the other angry.  This leads to important plot twists as those games progress.

But the lack of true characters in Skyrim leaves your avatar as an almost vaporous presence, a floating camera in a stunningly beautiful and complex game world.  After all, characters drive plot, for how can we care what’s happening if we don’t care about those to whom it happens?

That said, I think the technical prowess and sheer amount of Skryim still makes the game an almost unparalleled feat, and one which I’ve enjoyed immensely.  But if the developers ever introduce strong Character in addition to their many other achievements, they will hit so strong an artistic point it will place their work among the great works ever created, across the many storytelling media.

Camera+

There are a number of great photography applications for iOS, which is one of the leading reasons I chose the iPhone 4 over the BlackBerrys, Androids, and Windows phones out there.

My current favorite is Camera+, which is probably the most famous of the camera-replacement apps out there. I originally downloaded it because the filters looked really great on there, and I was pleased to see that the viewfinder features a crosshatch grid to help you observe the Rule-of-Thirds.

The greatest feature in the app is one that I found completely by accident. The funny part is that it’s a headline feature of the app if you read about it on the main website (http://camerapl.us).

What I’m referring to is what the developers, Tap Tap Tap, refer to as Touch Exposure. Apple introduced tap-to-focus when the iPhone 4 was announced, which is great, but Tap Tap Tap took this a step further by allowing you to tap out a customer exposure point independent of the focus point.

Example of Independent Focus and Exposure Points

Why is this significant? Because it’s rarely the case that the focus of your photograph exists right where you want the mid-tones to be. The Touch Exposure option lets you see a live representation of what each of the potential exposure points in your photograph can look like. This allows you to effectively lighten or darken your photo without losing any significant detail.

In a word, this is huge. For all the beautiful filters, for the handiness of Rule-of-Thirds lines, for the ease of the app’s Lightbox feature, the Touch Exposure is the most important important capability I have ever seen in a photography app.

In fact, it should be on all modern cameras. In the world of still cameras, the photographer would normally either use a standalone meter to get the numbers he needs to input manually into the camera, or he would point the camera’s viewfinder at what he thinks looks like a mid-tone, half push the shutter to lock it in, and then slide back over to the subject he’s photographing and push the shutter down for the shot.

The problem with the first method is that it’s time consuming and is really only the province of advanced photographers; the problem with the second is that you’re guessing at what’s an accurate representation of the mid-tone, and you’re gambling that the field of focus is the same for your mid-tone sample as the subject (after all, by pushing the shutter button down halfway, you’re usually locking that depth of field in as well).

Here are some examples of what I mean.  The first two photos were taken a couple of minutes before I happened upon the Touch Exposure feature.

Overexposed because the phone used the canyon wall to set its parameters.

Underexposed because the camera used the waterfall for its parameters.

I walked down to a different angle of the waterfall and accidentally activated the Touch Exposure.  My first attempt at using it yielded this:

This time I set the exposure point somewhere between the dark canyon wall and the bright waterfall.

A correctly exposed photo is considerably easier to deal with in post because it has much more information at each of the three major levels (high-, mid-, and lowtones).  The only thing lost was the sky, but the only thing that would have saved that was an HDR photo.  (The subject for another time.)

This photo allowed me to run it through some of Camera+’s beautiful filters and create an intentionally false-colored version that evokes memories of old 1960s photography:

Gibbon Falls

Quick Thoughts on Wireless Data

Disclaimer: I work for an authorized AT&T dealer.  My thoughts on this subject are obviously skewed by this fact.

As the industry stands right now, the big two (Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility) have smart phone data packages that look like the following:

Verizon: 1 option: $29.99 unlimited

AT&T: 2 options: $15 200MB, $25 2GB

I’ve had mixed feelings about AT&T’s decision to discontinue its $30 unlimited package because on the one hand, I like not thinking about how much I’m using the Internet on my iPhone, but on the other, most of AT&T customers I interact with really don’t need unlimited.  In fact, despite being a fairly heavy user, I only managed to go through 1.8GB last month, although I’ve already used 625MB during the first 8 days of this bill cycle.  I’m not sure how this happened exactly.

In any case, rumors are flying that Verizon is going to move away from that $30 unlimited data package this summer.  This got me thinking about how I’d like to see data charged in the future:

1. Don’t insult customers by charging them a lot for very little data, like AT&T does with the $15 package for 200MB.  I think a much fairer system would be to simply charge $10 per gigabyte, where most people would pay either the $10/month, or $20/month if they’re heavy users.  Even needier customers will pay $30 or more.  The carriers could throttle users speeds past 5GB if necessary.*

2. One of the problems presented by the first item on this list is that it will almost certainly mean reduced revenue for the carriers.  Since most users would be fine with 1GB or less, that would drop Verizon customers by $19.99 and AT&T customers by $5 or $10, depending on the plan.  An alternative would be to still charge a higher rate (say $20 for 2GB minimum), but allow the customer to roll data over into future months.  AT&T has done this with minutes going back to the Cingular days, but I’ve never heard of either company considering this feature for Internet packages.

3. My last thought on data is something Verizon is rumored to bring out this summer, and that is family data packages.  Both AT&T and Verizon offer voice and messaging plans that cover the entire family (up to 5 lines), but data has long been a per-line charge.  I think a $50/month for 5GB of shared data would play well with both companies’ pricing structures, especially if overages were only $10/GB.  (In fact, that is AT&T’s exact pricing structure for its MiFi Hotspot product as well as its 4G Internet Cards.)**

* I know it sounds odd that I’m okay with throttling, but I understand the capacitance issues the carriers are facing and why completely unlimited and uncapped speeds are impractical in large population centers.  Since Sprint and T-Mobile are already in the habit of doing this (if you pass 2GB even, from what I understand), we might as well not be surprised by it.

** Oddly enough, this rate is considerably better than what AT&T offers for it’s older 3G Internet Cards.  Those products (just like Verizon’s) are $60/month for 5GB, and the overages are $0.05/MB — which is obscene.  Effectively, every gigabyte of overage under this plan is just over $51.  I believe AT&T is phasing these cards out, which is perhaps why they have such an unfavorable plan.  Either way, Verizon has no comparable option to AT&T’s MiFi or 4G Internet Cards, which are priced at the aforementioned $50/month for 5GB with $10/GB overages.

What I’m Currently Watching

I watch a lot of TV.  That’s not to say I schedule my life completely around it like some, as there’s this amazing invention called the Internet and the shows I watch are available in different ways there for on-demand viewing, but I like ingratiating myself in both high- and low-brow stories, so this collection is fairly eclectic.

-Monday-
Chuck – cute show, goofball humor. For the most part, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and some of the guest stars of late have really made it fun (including Linda Hamilton, Timothy Dalton, and Scott Bakula). I hope this gets a fifth season.

House – when this show debuted in 2004, I thought it was one of the most brilliant television dramas ever. A few years in, the producers decided to mix things up and shake up the cast — the result of this was fine overall, but I have to admit that despite their best efforts, the show is still largely the same product it was 7 years ago. This is good and bad, in that each episode is usually well done but the concept has grown a bit stale. I feel seven seasons is plenty for a show, so I would be okay with it ending this year, but I don’t see that happening.

The Cape – well, I was watching this show, but word came down that it’s been cancelled. Most of the episodes were lame, I must admit, and I was never convinced that the cast had really found itself (except, perhaps, for Keith David (Max Malini) and James Frain (Peter Fleming) — these guys are pros and they really made it watchable — that, and Summer Glau is radiant as always). It’s too bad, though, since the last couple of episodes were actually pretty decent.

Castle – a part of me had a hard time watching Castle at first because it stars Nathan Fillion in role that’s NOT Captain Mal Reynolds. Alas, Firefly is dead, and Nathan has moved on. I’m thankful that he’s found a fun role in a show that strikes a nice balance between comedy and drama. This is probably the show I look forward to most on Mondays.

-Tuesday-
White Collar – most shows on USA Network are fluffy and this one is no exception, but there’s a pleasant tone on this one and it’s managed to not being annoying. The overarching plot isn’t as compelling as I usually like, but the individual episodes are strong enough that it justifies my continued viewing. On a side note, Matt Bomer (Neil Caffrey) is the silkiest and smoothest person I’ve ever seen — this lends anything he does a level of gravitas one normally wouldn’t associate with a “con-man”.

Glee – Sue Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch). Enough said. Seriously. (Although I should note also, fucking Lea Michelle (who plays Rachel Berry) is great.

-Wednesday-
Nothing currently on Wednesday for me. Usually I watch Human Target, but I believe it’s currently on hiatus.

-Thursday-
The Vampire Diaries – you know, I should probably be embarrassed by this, but I have a few good reasons that I’m still with this show: first, Nina Dobrev (Elena Gilbert/Katherine Pierce) is crazy beautiful and shockingly well-ranged. She plays a human, teenaged high school girl and also a centuries-old, vampire villain (the two are kind of twins in the show’s weird mythology). The other actresses (notably Katerina Graham and Candice Accola) are also pretty stunning, though they don’t play multiple characters like Nina does. That said, beauty rarely keeps me glued to a TV week in and week out, but I have another reason: Ian Somerhalder, who plays Damon Salvatore, is fucking genius. Fucking genius.

Bones – I often feel this is my favorite show on any given week. Despite its age (it premiered in 2005), it has managed to stay remarkably fresh throughout most of its run. That’s not to say that it hasn’t had its stretches of formula-heavy episodes, but the strong performances of its entire cast has really set this one apart from most of the other shows I watch. The fact that Emily Deschanel (Temperance Brennan) has still not won an Emmy is a fucking travesty; she better damn well win one for “The Doctor in the Photo”. It’s probably the best episode of the entire series, and that’s saying something.

As an aside, however, I feel I should mention that the show has attempted to create larger-than-life serial-killing villains three times in the series that I can recall: Howard Epps, The Gormogon, and Gravedigger. These have all been largely disappointing (with the first being borderline cheesy) — with the sole exception of the first Gravedigger episode that reached all the way back into season 2, “Aliens in the Spaceship,” which was AMAZING. There should have been many awards for the episode.

The Mentalist – I can’t decide if I really like this show or not. Most of the time I have a difficulty relating to the characters, and the jerk protagonist role has already been done so well by House (and to a much lesser degree, Lie to Me, which is another show I watch but is on hiatus). Really, the only thing that keeps me watching is Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker) and his quest to catch (and presumably kill) the serial killer Red John, who killed his wife and daughter. There is a scene at the very end of the pilot episode that literally sold me on the concept more than any other thing: through the course of the premiere, it’s revealed that Red John leaves a calling card in his victims’ places so that their loved ones know what’s happened before they even see the bodies: a large smiley-face painted in blood in plain view. What we discover at the end of the pilot is just how much Patrick Jayne is forever defined by what happened to his family: he sleeps on a simple mattress on the floor of his apartment — right beneath the bloody smiley face. He wakes up to it every single day.

-Friday-
Fringe – this is the other show that vies with Bones for being my favorite: most episodes are kind of X-Files like, and there is a lot of fun to be had with the character of Walter Bishop (played by the stunningly great John Noble), but there is a such a gloomy undertone to the whole series. The overarching plot that consumes the entire show is filled with about as much menace, treachery, twists, turns, and horror as is probably possible on television: it borders on being oppressive. And I love it.

Smallville – sigh, I’ve been sticking with this show for so many years now it’s hard to remember a time before Smallville, but The CW has announced this is the end of the line for the decade-long show. And do we need it to just end already. It has never recaptured the charm it had back in the early years when Clark Kent (Tom Welling) and Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) were good friends. Shame really. And where they’re going with the Lex Luthor clone, dubbed “Conner”, baffles the hell out of me.

Supernatural – this is kind of a remarkable series in that the premise seems impossible to sustain with any kind of sustained momentum through its six years — and yet, here it is. I know a lot of people feel the show hit its stride in the stretch between the second and third seasons, and they’re probably right, but there’s an amazing sense of wonder in the first season that is lost after those early days. That said, every other aspect of the show is great, from the acting to the writing, week-in and week-out. I actually welcome a 7th season, which is a rare feeling for me to express.

-When Nothing’s Been On-
Battlestar Galactica – honestly, this show is really amazing. For its many imperfections, hokeyness, ham-fisted plots, etc., this may be my favorite Sci-Fi ever — and that’s huge for me to say because I absolutely loved Firefly and Farscape. I just finished re-watching the entire series and now am listening to the podcasts. Just whoa.

The Daily

I think a lot of people will scoff at the idea of The Daily when they hear it’s a News Corp venture: one of the major News Corp properties, Fox News, is widely regarded to be soapbox for right-wing politics with heavily slanted coverage.  Whether this distinction is completely fair I find hard to say, since most people seem to cite the opinion shows in the (i.e. Hannity, The O’Reilly Factor, Huckabee, and Glenn Beck), as opposed to the regular newscasters during the day, but I have no problem seeing the station as being sensationalist and entertainment driven, just like CNN and MSNBC.

News Corp also owns The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and it feels like The Daily sits in between the two in terms of its integrity, seriousness, and quality.  The Journal one of the two premiere newspapers in the country (alongside of The New York Times), whereas the Post is only a notch or two above being a rag.

The articles in The Daily are well written if a bit random: I agree with others’ interpretations that it’s difficult to pin down just who this digital newspaper is for.  Another reviewer noted that it’s especially odd that it doesn’t even contain a true Tech Section, which would be wonderfully appropriate for this endeavor.  (There are nice iPad app reviews, however.)

Overall, it’s beautiful and ugly all at the same time, featuring a clever layout but serious lag in carousel mode.  The carousel view also features previews of the articles, but those are horribly compressed pictures.  This is also true of the video overview one sees at the start of each day’s paper.

The Daily is free right now, but it will be either $0.99 a week $39.99 a year, which is incredibly fair for a well-written, daily paper.  But this publication needs to find its focus and fix the weird issues it’s having first, before it can justify charging for its content.

To Rupert Murdoch’s credit, either way, he immediately bought into the credibility of the iPad and the future that tablet computing is ushering in.  I love that he believes that The Daily needs to combine the qualities of traditional journalism and marry them to modern technology.  We’ll see if he succeeds.

For now, I’m excited to download each new edition every morning and see where it goes.

Drobo

So, when I say, “I’ll have a write-up detailing my backup strategies in the near future,” I’m playing a little loose with the word “near.”  I originally wrote about The Importance of Backing Up on January 23, 2010, but I’ve only now approached a major goal in backing up my data.

In order to protect my data as well as possible locally, I finally got around to purchasing a Drobo.  I got the regular FireWire 800 model, with four drive-bays, in which I have filled two so far — both with 2TB HDDs.

Because this device offers built-in redundancy (even insofar as being able to sustain a sudden drive death), this sort of array is perfect.  But there was another reason I needed a large, redundant back-up solution: I’ve slimmed down my primary drive by quite a bit.

I finally took the plunge and got my hands on a 160GB solid state drive, which incredibly fast, but is so at the expense of storage space.  My previous HDD was 320GB, so I needed a place to put all of my large files.  Images and videos are the biggest concern (literally and emotionally), so the Drobo is where all those files now live.

I’ve only owned the product briefly, but so far so good.

Here are three ups and downs on it so far:

Up

1. Magnetically held front cover for easy drive access.  This is extremely cool, since the very idea of the Drobo is that you can pull drives in and out as you need to expand storage or replace bad drives.
2. FireWire Daisy Chaining.  What this means in that there are two FireWire ports on the back of the Drobo, which allows me to hook up my dedicated Time Machine backup drive (which is also FireWire) to the Drobo, which in turn passes that through to my MacBook Pro.
3. Relatively Small Size.  It still has to fit four 3.5” drives and the silicon necessary to control those drives, but as far as hard drive arrays go, this is pretty reasonable.

Down

1. Fan noise.  It’s not super loud, but that fan goes off and on quite a bit, and this is still very noticeable to me.
2. Drobo Dashboard.  The software is functionally very useful but kind of inelegant.
3. Cost.  Buying one of these and filling it with hard drives would be enormously expensive for a regular consumer to do.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to pay for my Drobo because I had rewards to spend from the company I work for, but the two hard drives I put in it ran me over $160.  And there are still two more bays for me to fill eventually.

In referring back to my original post on the importance of backing up, here is my strategy:

Primary: shared by the solid state drive (which is highly resistant to the problems regular hard drives are vulnerable too, especially physical shock) and the Drobo.

Local backup: shared by the Drobo (which is internally redundant) as well as a Time Machine drive (500GB in size, whose task is to maintain a history of all the major documents, applications, and music.  Larger media like photos and videos reside on the Drobo.

Off-site backup: important documents are kept in the cloud on Dropbox.  In the future, I would like to back up my music, video, and pictures in this manner, but I haven’t yet invested in a more robust service.

1st Gen iPad Verdict

I’ve now owned the iPad since the 3G model launched April 30, 2010.  Here is a list of things the iPad does really well, and some things it doesn’t.

Positives

1. Battery life is still amazing.  As a habit, I usually place my iPad on charge at night before I go to sleep; that said, it’s almost always north of 50% when I do, meaning I could usually get two days of life out of it.  Considering that I tend to use it a lot, this statistic is amazing.
2. Web surfing is more natural and comfortable than a computer.  I don’t often run into any limitations with it being a “mobile” browser (i.e. no plugins, like Flash), though I’ve noticed it has a hard time rendering all of the pictures in a photo album on Facebook.  It’ll give up after about 30 and just show pictureless boxes.  I’m not sure if it’s a bug in the way that mobile Safari handles the code on this page, or if it’s actually a matter of memory (only 256MB of RAM, after all).
3. It’s a perfect news aggregator for me.  I use NetNewsWire, which scrapes all of my RSS feeds to assemble only the news that matters to me.  I also check in with Flipboard and Pulse News, which are both lovely.
4. Multitasking and folders really take the iPad up a couple of notches.  These features launch with iOS 4.2, which comes out in November, but I’ve been using a beta build and I couldn’t go back.
5. The multitude of apps is a blessing (and a curse).  I’ve had to moderate myself on how many apps I purchase in a month to avoid going bankrupt.  The advantage of Apple’s curated store is that there seems to be a higher percentage of great apps for the iOS platform than others.

Negatives

1. Video playback.  This is a tough one to criticize because there is a lot of great video content available for the iPad, including Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, iTunes, etc.  If, however, you get video that’s encoded in some other way besides H.264, at a resolution the iPad is comfortable with, then you’re going to have to run through the sometimes painful process of transcoding.  I can’t fully blame Apple for this: there is dedicated H.264 decoding hardware in this device, which is how you can get away with watching 10 hours of video before killing the battery.  If you were to play any other kind of video back somehow, it wouldn’t be hardware decoded, but rather software decoded.  Which would peg the processor and eat the battery alive.  This was kind of proven by the VLC app, which does just that when viewing HD files.
2. It’s a bit heavy at times.  Not ridiculously so, and I rarely have a problem with it.  But this is one of the reasons why the iPad is only a good e-reader, not a great one.  Pick up a Kindle and you’ll see that it’s not only lighter and easy to hold in one hand, it also doesn’t get overwhelmed by sunlight.  And while it’s true that the backlighting on the iPad allows you to read in the dark, it can be eye-straining to do so.
3. That beautiful aluminum and glass design is striking, but you need to protect it.  I do not use a screen shield, but I have placed a carbon-fiber sticker on the back to protect the anodized aluminum from scratching (because it will).
4. The lack of a camera on the first-gen model seemed like a minor oversight to me.  Honestly, the idea of video chatting on the iPad seemed uncomfortable.  But now Apple has launched FaceTime on two marquee items (the iPhone and iPod touch, and even added the ability to Macs), so now it’s obvious the iPad will need it too.
5. Data throughput speeds seem to be noticeable slower than a computer (by about 38%).  Oddly, this has no impact on Netflix, which continues to deliver good looking video despite this fact, but YouTube has its occasional problems.  (I’ve read that Google has a different set of servers for mobile content, and that they get overloaded.  I’m not sure how true this is.)
6. The iPad requires iTunes to activate, and really, really wants to use iTunes to sync and backup its data.  I think this is an umbilical cord that needs to be cut someday soon, especially if Apple believes the iPad will be a kind of consumer appliance computer.

Overall, the iPad is a great device and one I highly recommend.  It won’t do heavy lifting for you, typically, but I have a hard time imaging a better Internet browsing device, especially one so portable.  And its media capabilities (namely video viewing) are unparalleled — the idea that you could view two feature length movies and still have several hours of web browsing ahead of you if truly amazing.

The one challenge I foresee if how it will compliment my future iPhone.  Since both devices do many of the same things, and indeed run the exact same software, I wonder if I’ll be compelled to not bring my iPad to work as often.  I will post my experiences in that regard in late January, once I have said iPhone.

The Revolution Will Be Televised… Or Not

Apple’s relaunch of the Apple TV excited me in a few ways: first and foremost was the price drop.  I was never willing to commit $229 towards the original, and neither were most people.  At $99, however, it’s dangerously close to being an impulse buy (at least insofar as impulse buys exist in the world of electronics).

I also believe going to the $0.99 TV show rental model was a good move, too.  I know there are some who say they’d rather own the individual episodes (a la the original $1.99 purchase model), but the rental setup makes a lot more sense to me.  I would buy a season DVD/Blu-ray set of a show, but I wouldn’t just own a few episodes from a given season, as if they were tracks on an album.

However, I think there are a number of things that need to happen before these specialty set-top boxes succeed:

1. Episodes need to be available as soon as possible on the iTunes Store.  Preferably before broadcast, or right after.  Not the next day.
2. Apple should offer a second model that features advertising (with reduced cost or free episodes).  They could even feature those high quality iAds.  Imagine a model where you subscribe to your five favorite shows that air once per week, and your Apple TV auto-queues those for you for streaming on demand.  And it’s free and ad-supported.  Or if not, you can pay the five dollars a week ($20/month) to only see the shows that matter to you.
3. Apple needs to land all the major networks plus a few premiums: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, and Showtime.  In time, they could add a few of the traditionally cable channels, like USA and TNT.  For the premium stuff, Apple could charge $1.99 for rentals (especially since premium shows are usually 12 episodes long, so a season would cost the same as a network television season).  The trouble is that networks like NBC say the $0.99 model is too cheap, but I’m not sure how they can justify charging more than $24 a season (assuming a season is 24 episodes) in a view-once model.  The DVD sets usually run $40 – $50 per season, which gives the purchaser the ability to view many times as well as access to special features.

An interesting compromise would be to allow developers to create iOS apps for the Apple TV, as suggested by Leo Laporte and friends on MacBreak Weekly.  One could have a homepage that had all of the different “channels” on it: an ABC app, CBS app, etc.  That would permit each station to come up with its own pricing terms.  That said, I think if all would agree to just co-exist in the iTunes Store, it would be more elegant and less wild west.

Either way, I’m highly tempted to purchase one, though I’ll probably give it to my brother.

On a side note, the Remote application that Apple updated works beautifully with iTunes.  I understand it also works very well with Apple TV and I look forward to trying that.

Two Days with 3G Data on the iPad

I might as well live in the land that time forgot, I sometimes think.  Lacking such basic life necessities like Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Best Buy, has left me feeling like a pilgrim in a savage land.

While I’m exaggerating, we do lack a few things I was used to having back East, including AT&T coverage.  This has meant that I can’t buy an iPhone for the last couple of years, and it also means that my iPad with WiFi and 3G has been useless in the latter regard.  This will all change at the end of this year or beginning of next, since the Montana portion of Alltel (my service provider) has been purchased by AT&T.

However, I took a short trip to Idaho Falls recently, a realm that actually has this coverage that I’m moaning about.  So, I went ahead and purchased the 250MB plan for $15, and here are a few observations:

• When I was in a 3G area, the overall Internet speed was pretty fast.  I didn’t think to do a Speed Test, but I found it more than acceptable.
• 2G areas (EDGE) were really slow.  At times unusable.
• 250MB goes fast when you have a lot of downtime, especially during a long car ride with the family.  I nearly used all of my allotment in 48 hours.
• Using the Core Location service (with an app like Maps) was a lot of fun.  The iPad has a GPS module in it, so it worked really well with the aforementioned Maps application: I was able to track where we were to as close to 30-50 feet or so.

I look forward to having this 3G service in Bozeman, MT, but I wonder how much data I’d end up using in a month.  The saving grace could that I’m usually around WiFi so much, at home and work.

Roundup of My iPad Accessories

Now that I’ve had the iPad awhile, I’ve managed to accumulate a few accessories that are worth describing.

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Griffin A-Frame
This is a heavy aluminum stand that can hold the iPad in either or portrait or landscape.  It can also be laid flat on a desk to create a “typing angle”, though I’ve never used it this way.  I decided to go for this product over the standard Apple iPad Dock, which my brother has and likes, because it can only hold the iPad in the portrait orientation.  It goes for $49.99 off the Griffin website, but I found it for less on Amazon.

Apple Wireless Keyboard
There are cheaper Bluetooth keyboards out there, but this one pairs nicely with the A-Frame stand (in that they look similar with that brushed aluminum look).  Also, the battery life on this keyboard is pretty spectacular.  I don’t use this often, unless I’m sitting at my desk and using the iPad as a quick lookup tool or instant message center.  Retails for $69.00 on the Apple website.

Griffin Elan Sleeve
I’m not a fan of cases that stay on a product, and I typically “go naked” with most of my stuff, including my cell phone and iPod.  The same is true for the iPad, so I found a case that is merely for transport, not one that you would leave on during use.  (I do also own the official Apple iPad Case, which is okay, but it’s not nearly as good as other options out there.  My brother uses a black Speck CandyShell, which is nice.)  This slipcover is elegant looking, but it’s softer than it looks in the promotional images: it actually feels slightly plush, which may actually provided better padding against external pressure.  The Griffin website has it for $49.99, but I was lucky to find it for half that much on Amazon.

SGP Carbon Skin
I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but I thought it appropriate to mention here.  While I do not use a screen shield (since scratching glass is actually more involved than many people realize), I’ve decided to protect the brushed aluminum back of the iPad.  That kind of metal is, unfortunately, prone to scratching, and since I don’t employ a case, I set it down on its backside at work all the time.  This has done a great job protecting it so far, and I like that it’s really little more than a nice kind of tape, so it’s easy to remove if I decided I don’t want it anymore.  Retails for $19.99 on the SGP Store.

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Overall, these accessories serve me pretty well.  The next item I have my eye on is the Incase Travel Kit Plus, which is a carrying case just large enough to fit the wireless keyboard (it also includes its own small travel stand).  While the Griffin A-Frame is very nice, it’s a little heavy to take, say, on a plane.