1 Reason why the iPad will always be better than the competition

If you're offered a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Honda Accord, and they both cost the same, which would you choose?

Intriguing question right?  Read on and you'll see where I'm going.

I got the original iPad a few months after it came out, and then when they released the iPad 2, I upgraded to that.  I then bought a second one with 64 GB and gave my previous iPad 2 to my wife. I've had that since, about 18 months now and through two upgrades to the iPad 3 and then the "new" iPad.

Ever since the iPad became a sensation, the competition has been playing catch-up. We've had numerous attempts at it.

Here are the biggest competitors, not in any particular order.

Google Nexus 10

Amazon Kindle Fire HD

Blackberry Playbook  (no, really)

Samsung Galaxy Note

Microsoft Surface


Now, I know that there are many others, but in my opinion, these are the biggest players so far.

If Google, Blackberry, Samsung, or Microsoft (not Amazon) want my free advice on how to make their product more popular, here it is.  PRICING!

Let me say that again, one more time, but louder. PRICING!

All of these priced their tablets, with the exception of the Kindle, at or within $100 of, the same price as the iPad, starting out at $499 which is the base price for a 16 GB model of the iPad.  Big mistake.  Let me tell you why.

Now, let me ask you my first question again.  If you're offered a Lamborghini Gallardo or a Honda Accord, and they both cost the same, which would you choose? 

This, to me, seems to be a no-brainer.  You'd go with the Lamborghini any day of the week, right?  This is the comparison, and until Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and others figure that out, the iPad will continue to run circles around them.  Its all about the user experience and the ecosystem with iTunes which is incredibly powerful.

I've seen all of the other tablets, some I've played with, some I haven't... And none can hold a candle to the iPad.

HP had a TouchPad which was a complete and utter flop, so they discontinued it. As a result, Best Buy then cut the price of it down to $99, and they flew off the shelves.  You can see the story here.  This shows that if priced below the iPad, people will buy it.  But when shown two different products at the same price, people will buy the better one every day of the week.  Until they figure that out, the iPad will continue to sell extremely well.  Especially now that they've come out with the iPad mini which moves the entry price down to $329 from $499.

Look at the Blackberry Playbook. They priced it initially at $499, which I was surprised at. I saw the release, and saw the features, (or rather, lack thereof) and knew it would flop. And it did. They ended up cutting the pricing to $199, but it was so roundly criticized that I seriously doubt they sold many of them.  They sold as many in a year that Apple sells of the iPad in a month.  If Blackberry had sold this initially at $199, they might have had a chance. 

Amazon has a very good product. The Kindle has revolutionized reading e-books for years to come.  They expanded it with the Fire, which I thought was fairly decent. They're smart, they're selling it at a break-even price to get it into as many hands as they can, but the app store which greatly enhances the functionality and usage of any given tablet, seems somewhat limited compared to Apple's App store.  As long as they keep pricing well under the iPad, they should continue to sell well.

The market is fragmented. However the iPad and iPad mini will still continue to sell well until a competitor undercuts their prices.  They will not win on the features. Whether you have an USB slot or a SD slot or this or that is not gonna matter. It's all about pricing.

Do you want a Lamborghini or a Honda?

Reasons why I love the Pebble watch!

Wanted to write this review of my new watch, the pebble, now that I've had it for about 2 months.


For those of who are uninitiated, it all started on Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a website where if a specific project can't get enough investors to do it, they'll put it on the website, and if enough people agree to fund it, then the project will get made.  Projects can be as varied as a movie or video game or art installation to watches or other consumer products.

Many successful projects have been launched off of Kickstarter. A recent notable one was the Veronica Mars movie.They asked for $2 million, and raised $5.7 million.

Now, there has been a lot of other types of watches that try to take you to a whole other level. Many people have improvised the ipod nano into a watch, which has since been discontinued by Apple.

However, there are rumors of the iWatch coming out this year by Apple, but nothing has been confirmed yet.

In the void, came the pebble.  Last year in April, they were unable to convince VC's to fund the company so that they could develop this watch, so they posted it on Kickstarter. It became a sensation. They were looking for $100,000.  They had 45 days to get that much to be funded.  They raised that in TWO hours! They raised $1 million in 28 hours after Engadget wrote a story about it. They ended up raising a total of $10.7 million from 69,000 backers and had to close the project early. I funded on April 18th.  They initially said we'd have them by the summer.  They were way off, about 7 months off.

I finally got mine in late March. My wife made the mistake of ordering white - while I got black. I don't think they're even shipping white just yet, so she changed it to a black and received hers a month ago.

Now, here's my review after having it for a couple of months.

1.  It allows me to leave my phone in my pocket longer and I'm not constantly checking it every time I feel it vibrate to see what the deal is. It pushes some notifications that show up on your lock screen to the watch.  So if you get a text message, then it'll vibrate your Pebble and you can look and see what it is and deem if its important to reply or just to leave it.  If you have the iPhone, then it only allows you to do email and text messages, and a handful of other apps, on the watch via bluetooth. My phone is jailbroken, so there's a special app called BTNotifier which is unbelievable for this.  It pushes ALL notifications that show up on your lock screen to your watch.  This can vary from a notification of rain from the Dark Sky app to an alert from the ESPN app of a game score to twitter/hootsuite/facebook notifications to anything else you have your phone set to.

I ended up turning off the email notifications because it would drain my battery significantly.  It took a couple weeks of tinkering with the notifications to get it right.  They say 7 days, but I've never seen that.  With me, depending on how active my notifications are on a given week, can be 3-4 days.  With email on, it'll be 1 day.

Funny story about facebook. I posted about it on facebook. Here's her reply. I took a picture of it and posted it on facebook in response.  BOOM!  She was blown away.

It comes in 5 colors, black, white, red, orange and grey.  But you can get a GadgetWrap for it for dozens of other colors for a few dollars.

The watch does feel a bit flimsy, however its held up well so far. Its somewhat waterproof enough to wash my kids in the bathtub, but not to go down 100 feet scuba diving.  However I did hear about someone who did do exactly that (by accident) and it worked just fine. Not sure I'd test it that way yet though, but its intriguing.

The best thing about the watch is that you can install different watch faces. There are currently more than 900 available on My Pebble Faces.  There are even some that are modeled after games, like tetris or caterpillar or others.  Some are unbelievable.

Here are a few just to show the capabilities of it.

This is my personal favorite - it shows it using the Star Trek motif. Really cool!

This on the right isn't quite enabled, but eventually will be - which can show the current weather if you program it right, and the time.




This watch gets a HUGE recommend from me for anybody with the iOS or Android platforms.  You have to download a free app from both to enable the watch and I hear on the Android side its even better.

Reasons why I like the iPhone and won't switch to Android

This blog is not a techie blog... At least not yet.

However, I will be posting the occasional blog about technology related stuff.  My house has, at last count, 5 iPhones, 2 iPads, a couple iPods somewhere in a drawer.  But we're all PC people for our desktop computers.

I'm hoping that the new iOS 7 update will be decent.  However, even if it sucks, I won't switch to the Samsung Galaxy.  I do acknowledge that the OS on that phone, Android, does look real slick.  However, we've got hundreds of dollars committed to apps that we've purchased already for our array of iPhones/iPads, and it'd just be too cumbersome to switch. There's something to be said about syncing with iCloud, and being able to download the same app on multiple devices, and pay only once.

While the Android phones do look slick, I'm already committed to the iPhone in a big way, and if I got the Galaxy IV, then I'd be out of the eco-system.  I also know some of my favorite apps are not on the Android.

For example, Action Movie FX. This app, if you like action movies, is a MUST for any aficionado of that genre. It is ridiculously simple. You select the FX, (recent FX - Star Trek warp or transporter) take a short 10 second video, then scroll the FX in, and load. Takes 2 minutes and some of them are unreal.  Take a look at some of my videos. This playlist has several.

I do wish that the photo stream feature included video, because we like to do video a lot and want to input it into iMovie.  Hard to take it on the phone and then put it in the iPad without a huge cumbersome process. I've tried uploading it into dropbox and putting it on the iPad, but its a hassle.

I jailbroke my iPhone (the only one of all five) and with that, increased the functionality significantly.  I don't know how I could go back to a non-jailbroken phone now. With the jailbreak, I'm able to put more programs on the lock screen. I'm also able to make the lock screen look different, like fold up rather than slide to the right.  There are other programs that allow me to slide up the screen to see the active programs rather than having to double-click the home button.  I can also slide from left to right or right to left from one app to another (like using four fingers to slide on the iPad). This comes in real handy and numerous others.  It really adds to the customization of the phone in a big way.