Sunday, January 31, 2010

Getting Intimate with the iPad?

It was well below zero yesterday morning, and the fire in my woodstove had burned down to only glowing coals. The temperature was probably about 45 degrees in the house. So, with a cup of coffee in one hand and my iPhone in the other, I stayed in bed and cruised the web and got all the Saturday morning news. All my favorite sites...Fox, Drudge, RealClear Politics, Roger Pielke Sr. ...

The interesting thing is that I had my laptop with me as well, and could have been using that. I would get a bigger image, but I would not really be as comfortable. With the iPhone, I could move around at will, and of course the image orientation followed me.

Two eureka thoughts. The first one was, hey, wouldn't a slightly larger version of the iPhone make this picture even sweeter? Yes indeed it would. A nice light device, with a large screen, and one that would allow me to multitask easily from a website to maybe a book that I had been reading? Thank you Steve Jobs -- I can see an iPad on my wishlist.

Second, I had jumped around to myriad news sites, including the WSJ, BBC News, Washington Post, Washington TImes -- :), New York Times, but I had not paid anyone a single dime for all that good reading. Sure, a few advertisements were somewhere in my screen occasionally, but on an iPhone one hardly notices them.

I am still waiting for Steve Jobs to figure out some way to package news content with the iPad, and charge me a monthly fee for it. Yes, that will be painful, but I am willing to do it. How much? Let's see...if you gave me the Economist, WSJ, New York Times, Shooting Illustrated, Washington Post and maybe one or two others...I already pay a hundred dollars per year each for the first two...how about $50 per month?

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