OMG I love my iPad so much. I got the bottom-of-the-line version a couple of weeks ago, and it is just so fun. Why didn’t Microsoft ever try to make Windows a joy to use as Apple did for their products? I finally understand why Apple computer users have been so loyal over the years.

One of my favorite apps is Flipboard. It has made browsing blogs, Twitter and Facebook a breeze. I have been more prevalent on your blogs these days because of Flipboard. It presents the most recent blog (or twitter, or facebook) articles in a magazine-like format, and I just touch the articles that catch my eye. Google Reader no more!

I also experimented with some mind-mapping software, and none of them were free-form enough for my purposes. So I went to the computer and downloaded Freemind on my laptop, an open-source application, and even it wasn’t what I wanted. So I went back to my old Wiki, TiddlyWiki, and I guess I’ll stick with that for my storybuilding needs.

I also downloaded the Dragon Dictation app, where Nuance software gives you a very nice dictation app in the hopes of selling you the 100 dollar Dragon Naturally Speaking. I am VERY tempted …

Pages is promising but it doesn’t have track changes. A big drawback, but it WAS ten dollars as opposed to one hundred and twenty. I plan to use it to finish reading my long-suffering critique partner’s manuscript, and hopefully find a way to write notes at the same time.

My daughter and I are having fun with the Treasure Seeker puzzle games. We are on the first game. I can see buying up and playing the other games in the series.

The native apps are where the iPad shines. The email, calendar and contacts apps are very elegant and make even browsing email fun. The new iMessage app is fun, but not very useful because of a dearth of people I have to chat with. Same goes for FaceTime. (I know my sisters have iPhones, but none seem to be using these apps.) An annoyance was the newsstand, which you couldn’t even tuck away in a folder–except I found a semi-hack to do that, so now I don’t have to look at it. The Safari browser is a bit of a letdown because it doesn’t seem as easy as the version I have on my iPod Touch (??), and the resolution of the built-in camera is not quite up to the standards of the iPad’s own screen resolution.

But on the whole, I have few complaints, and lot of phrase.

So I’m finding that the IPad works well for some thing, but not very well for others. One thing it’s great for is social networking, but it’s not so great for writing blog posts. You can pull the keyboard apart so you can easily thumb-type while holding the ipad, but you can’t pull the keyboard apart at some nice midrange to allow you to more comfortably touch-type.

Will it help me be more productive? Absolutely! Will it help me goof off? Absolutely! Will I read books on it? Probably not. (Too heavy. My Nook is much better for book reading.) Should you get one? I don’t know. Steve Jobs has died and he was a big reason apple made such great products–he was a brilliant designer. I remember being wowed by the NeXt computer — which was also his brainchild — years and years ago. Do they have another designer as brilliant? I don’t know, but I suspect something will be missing from future Apple products–a part of his designer voice, for lack of a better word. Android tablets aren’t even in the same league. That’s why I waited until a bit of a windfall put an iPad in my price range.

(Actually, I think I did just give you a good reason to go out and buy one–it might be the last great Apple product.)

Bottom line–I love it. If you’re looking for a tablet, you might want to hold out for one of these rather than getting a cheaper Android tablet. The difference is worth it.

Yes, I finally have an ereading gadget to review–the nook!

The nook really wasn’t on my ereader radar until they came out with the less-expensive wifi version a few weeks ago. At that point, I was eyeing the Borders Kobo. But Borders made a critical error–they failed to install Kobo kiosks in their stores so would-be customers could try it out. Or rather, the kiosks were there–but only with Sony Readers and flyers for the Kobo. I know lots of people bought the Kobo over the internet, but I’m just not that trusting. I wanted to try the device for myself before buying.

Barnes & Noble did not make this mistake.

Armed with a recommendation by Liz Fichera, I went in the B&N store and there it was–a lovely kiosk with an entire row of actual nooks to play with, along with a friendly and enthusiastic salesperson. I left the store that day with my nook along with a lovely green protective folder. To my delighted surprise, the wifi version was much lighter than the 3g samples they had on display, which for me, is quite the perk.

The Display

We buy ereaders for their paper-like display, and I must say I love the display. The first time I saw e-ink, I actually mistook it for a cardboard covering over the screen–right up until I  saw something blink. Words cannot do it justice. It looks like paper–right until the page turns. Then, you have this ugly chaos of black flashes–if black can ever be said to flash–until the next page resolves on the screen. I’m told that this is a limitation of e-ink and we’re just going to have to live with it until they improve the technology.

The text is very easy on the eyes, and each line is nicely spaced apart. You can have the text anywhere from absurdly huge to absurdly small. And the resolution on the absurdly small font is absurdly good–no sign of pixellation unless I take off my glasses, hold the nook in front of my eyes, and peer at the top of an e or an o. And even then, I can only see an extremely faint hint of fuzz if I strain my eyes. And since I can see microprint on a five-dollar bill without my glasses (one of the few benefits of being extremely nearsighted), then it’s safe to say that you won’t see any pixellation whatsoever.

There are only six buttons. Four identical buttons on either side turn the pages back and forth. A button on the top of the nook turns the display on and off (where you get a screensaver that displays continuously). The sixth button isn’t really a button–it’s a touch zone to fire up the touchpad.

The Touchpad

One of the features of the nook is there is a separate color touchscreen display. And here is where I have my harshest critique. The color touchscreen display is rather shoddy. The resolution isn’t great and the screen’s reaction to your touch has a noticeable delay. Seriously, my ancient Palm Treo 755p has a better touchpad. It’s obviously an area where the manufacturers decided to save a little money. Had I spent the original price for the 3g nook, I might have been a bit more miffed about this than I am. It’s servicable, but not much else can be said about the quality of the touchpad. Let’s hope it’s durable.

One thing I do like about having a touchpad rather than a bunch of buttons is that it makes the nook greatly expandable. The interface is not limited by buttons. Barnes & Noble has already added features to the nook such as a web browser, which would never be your browser of choice, but gets the job done in an inventive way.

In-Store Features

B&N has tried very hard to make nook ownership quite clubby. If you go to the store with your nook, you can read books for free for up to an hour. And, you always have free access to AT&T wifi hotspots. I also currently have a coupon to bring my nook in and settle down in a corner of the coffee shop with some free coffee. Too bad I don’t drink coffee. There is also a free ebook featured every week. I guess they were worried that if you had ebooks, you would never feel the need to walk into the store. Even with all these club features, I think this is a valid concern.

The Experience

I read Liz Fichera’s Captive Spirit on my nook, and it was a very satisfactory reading experience. And not just because it was such a good book! I used medium sized text and was not having to turn the pages too often. It was cool to be able to close my book folder, leave it lying on a table somewhere, and to come back a few minutes later to find it waiting for me without having timed out. The default time-out before it goes to the screen saver is 10 minutes, which was quite reasonable.

One thing I have not found is free public domain books, except for three that come preinstalled (kind of–you still need a B&N account to open and read them). Kobo comes installed with 100 free classics, and you can download a bunch of them at the Stanza store with the Stanza iPhone software. I should think B&N would provide some free classics as well.

I was delighted with how it displayed pdfs. Jennifer Estep sent along her e-ARC for Venom, and I promptly loaded it into my nook. The text flows beautifully and the only way you know it is anything other than an epub is occasionally you have a page that is not filled all the way with text. Which considering how badly my iPod mangled pdfs, makes me happy.

I have only charged the batteries one time since I purchased it on Friday the 2nd. It wasn’t fully discharged when I bought it and I had to discharge it (through use) before I could charge it up to 100 percent.

I highly recommend getting a folder for it. I have a folder for my iPod touch as well, and such folders protect these devices very well. I have included a picture of the folder I selected.

I love my nook and I’m so glad I waited before getting it. If you’re looking for an ebook reader, I truly think it’s the best deal out there.

The only thing I wanted for Christmas this year was an iPod touch.

Why did I want an iPod touch? One, I recently upgrade my old Palm Treo to a Samsung Exclaim, and it turned out to be a downgrade. The Samsung Exclaim is a nice phone, but it’s just not a PDA phone. That’s when I realized that I missed having a PDA that was not attached to a phone. My old PDAs were standalone Palm-based PDAs.

I also wanted a device that could double as an e-book reader. I don’t intend to do a lot of e-reading, but I do want to do some, especially electronic versions of fiction magazines. I did not want a dedicated e-reading device. I needed a device that could be multi-functional. One of my dearest online friends, Lisa Nevin raved about being able to read do some beta reading on her iPhone for our mutual friend, Kristy Baxter. Ever since then, I wanted the iPhone’s poor cousin, the iPod touch.

Now that you know my reasons for buying an iPod touch, you should know that I do not use this for music. I have plenty of room on my 8 gig version because I only have apps and novels on it, plus my contact data, my calendar, and everything else you’d expect from a PDA.

The iPod touch is both visually and texturally appealing. It has some nice heft without being heavy. It comes with a charging synchronization cable (which is rather short) and a set of earplugs (which I’ve never used). When you set it up, you have to download the iTunes desktop application in order to sync. I don’t have a lot of experience with Apple-based applications, so some of the things the iTunes application did wasn’t exactly intuitive for me. For example, it turned out to be much easier to purchase any apps from the iTunes store directly from the iPod using WiFi, and then letting it download a backup version of the app when I sync later.

We used our router’s WiFi feature for the first time with this device (and belatedly realized we could have used it all this time with our Wii), and naturally, I love it. I knew that the iPods were capable of WiFi, but I had not imagined all the possibilities. Nowadays, I browse my RSS feeds from Google Reader using my iPod. It’s great.

Setting up contacts, calendar and mail was a little involved, but in the end I used a combination of gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts. (I went with this route rather than Exchange because my work’s version of Exchange was not playing nicely with my devices when I set it up. I’ve since restored my Exchange on my Samsung Exclaim, and I decided to keep things as they are on my iPod) I use the Google Calander Sync to sync between my Exchange and my Google Calendars, and then my iPod downloads the calendar. This allows me to get to both my family calendar and my work calendar in the same app. Handy. Updating contacts is a bit more involved. I email a vcard for the contact to my gmail account, where I can open it and add it to my contacts with just a few taps.

Here’s some quick app reviews:

Stanza. This is a free e-book application that was recommended to me by my iPod touch-using sister. It doesn’t reflow .pdf files very well (it ignores paragraph breaks), but it nicely turns the pages of properly formatted ebooks. I would like to find a .pdf reader than can handle reflowing text while preserving paragraph breaks. But for ebooks, Stanza seems hard to beat.

Docs to Go. I paid money for this. I use this to edit my stories. No more am I tied to a computer while editing! Any heavy-duty text entry has to wait until I’m at my computer (or I can use my Neo), but if I have an initial draft, I can easily use my iPod to do some fairly intense editing.

Although I was able to create Word documents from scratch, Excel spreadsheets turned out to be much more difficult. In the end, I created the spreadsheet from my PC, and I do all my major edits there, but I am able to use it from my iPod.

Planets. This is a free app showing the constellations and the locations of the major planets. It also gave my exact latitude. All of this is important for stargazing, so the last time I took out the telescope, I had my iPod with me. The 3D Sky feature is wonderful. However, somewhat vexatiously, all the planets are now clustered around the sun, leaving only Mars and Saturn in the night sky.

Safari. This comes pre-installed, but I wanted to mention it because I really like the way it handles multiple browser windows. It was all very intuitive — even when working with other applications. However, it appears that Apple is flexing its muscles and will not allow competing browsers — such as my beloved Firefox — to grace the iPhone store. (Boo! Hiss! And besides, how Microsoft-like!)

I have also downloaded the mobile versions of Echofon (for Twitter-ing), WordPress, Amazon, and Facebook, all of which are free, and all of which are well-realized versions of the desktop application. I also got the Constitution, Bible and My Gov apps, plus a lot more (two screens full so far.)

A complaint? The accessories are very expensive. I still have not found a reasonably priced charger, even at Wal-Mart. Most of the chargers are designed to hold multiple i-devices. And we only have one in the house. I don’t want a car charger. Even the plastic covers for the screen cost more than I expected. Since the iPod is not exactly a new device anymore, I really can’t expect the prices to come down by very much.

Another complaint is only one application “runs” at a time. However, they sometimes work together very well. When I open a webpage from Echofon, it opens Safari quite nicely, and returns to Echofon when I close the browser window. The email client isn’t that friendly, because I have to open the email back up once I close down the browser.

My verdict? I love it. There truly is an app for almost everything, and I’ve even toyed with the idea of developing a completely useless application just to see if I could make money off of it. Kind of like the many lightsaber applications, or an app that weighs jewelery, or an app that tells you whether or not you are a moron. Now maybe one day I’ll actually put music on it.