The first episode is called The Penal Zone and it’s full of all the high-brow intellectual humor that the title implies. We’ve made a subtle shift to the puzzle-solving in this season: there’s a little bit less emphasis on using inventory items together and more emphasis on using Max’s new psychic powers and eventually, figuring out how they work together. The idea is that instead of a lot of random objects that have one specific use that you have to figure out, there’s a smaller set of powers that you can use in multiple places and multiple ways. I’ll be interested to see how people like it.

I already know how they’ll like the other change, which is all the improvements to the visuals. The artists did an obscene amount of work on the environments, characters, and character animation. Plus we got a bunch of lighting and rendering improvements, including real-time shadows.

Plus there’s an evil space gorilla named General Skun-ka’pe, you know, for the kids.

Check out the trailer in high definition because Telltaler Shaun Finney spent a lot of time on it and it came out really good and I’m not just saying that because he could kick me in the head without breaking a sweat. And then you can pre-order the whole season because really, you know you’re going to buy it anyway so why delay the inevitable?

1. I haven’t had much free time.
2. The only character/actor I cared about any more left “Lost” for another series.
3. I don’t know what the hell is going on this season.

It bugs me to say “I don’t know what’s going on” because I get the creepy suspicion there’s some Echelon-style technology that some executive at ABC is using to scan the internet for “Lost” confusion and present a spreadsheet explaining exactly why the series should be dumbed down. I can’t think how else to explain the “pop-up videos” thing they do for the previous week’s rerun, which does nothing more than explain the scene that you just watched as you’re watching it. This is indeed a series that plays around with varying timelines and packs a ton of detail into each episode; that’s a big part of why people love it. And I’ve seen every episode of the series, and I still can’t remember all the details and side characters enough to pick up on all the call-backs and cameos (e.g. the “Always Sunny” guy was on “Lost” before, apparently). It’d be helpful to have something pop up and say “this guy appeared in season 3″ or “this is the book that was used in Juliet’s book club.” It’s not helpful to have something pop up and say “Claire is Jack’s half-sister!” or “Claire just killed a guy with an axe!”

But even though I’ve never been able to keep up with the details, I’ve at least been able to follow the meat of what was going on. And although the biggest complaint about the series has always been with how they withhold information, that’s also one of the best things about the series. (The other is the enormous range of reference material they draw from, including numbers stations and 70s science communes and horror fiction and introductory-level philosophy). They mastered the art of telling stories in parallel, and then went on to throw in a twist in subsequent seasons: the flashbacks turned into flash-forwards turned into outright time traveling.

With season 6, though, they’ve kind of broken it. Anybody could understand the concept of flashbacks to before they landed on the island. And the reveal of the flash-forwards was done with a brilliant season-end twist; we all started out the episode believing we were seeing more flashbacks, and then realized at the end of that episode that we’d jumped forward in time. And later, when they introduced the time traveling, there were a ton of complaints that the show had suddenly “gotten weird.” But it was easy enough to ask, “Where the heck have you been?” and point out that the show’s always been weird. Time traveling, I can handle, especially with weaselly Dr. Faraday (whose name I already had to look up, see above re: my faulty memory) acknowledging that that’s what’s going on.

Now, the big two remaining mysteries of the series, the only ones that we’re going to get real closure on, are: 1) Who are Jacob and the other guy, exactly? and 2) How do these flash-sideways connect to the ongoing storyline? Lindelof and Cuse have claimed, repeatedly, that we’re going to get answers to both questions, and I don’t doubt that. They also acknowledge that it’s a risky move, and it can be confusing, and that it’ll require patience, and that’s where I have a problem.

Not that it’s risky — I think a huge part of why the show is so successful is that they rarely let it get too conventional. Or that it’s confusing or requires patience — it’s too easy to counter with “they shouldn’t dumb the show down” or, if you prefer, “maybe you should go watch ‘NCIS’.” My problem is that it’s unnecessarily confusing; I think it’s withholding the wrong kind of information. When you strand people on an island and tell me that I’m going to have to wait to find out what the island is and why they’re there, that’s fine; I’m intrigued. When you hold out on the entire premise of the season, though, that’s where I just get annoyed, because I don’t have any context as to why I should care.

I make a habit of not reading too much of the online chatter on message boards or fansites, both because it tends to be kind of lame (that whole ARG that supposedly explained what the numbers were turned out to be a massive disappointment), and because I don’t care about the extraneous details and would rather let the show speak for itself. But this season, there’s a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the story that you can’t get just by watching the show. You’ve got to read interviews and watch extra-content videos, stuff that used to give an “extra dimension” to the show, but now is a prerequisite. In that Entertainment Weekly interview, they casually drop that alternate-Kate killed someone other than her stepfahter, which was revealed in some Comic-Con video. But then they claim that that’s not important. Well, yeah, guys, that’s pretty damn important if we’ve got any hope of making sense of what you’re expecting us to watch each week.

I’d seen a mention somewhere that they were refusing to call the flash-sideways an “alternate reality.” I took that to mean that it’s all part of one reality, that the bomb detonation had somehow rewritten history, and that the parallel storylines would converge in 2007. There’s a recurring theme of fate and determinism, so it seemed fitting that even wildly different histories could somehow play out to bring about the same events; e.g. even if Oceanic 815 hadn’t crashed, they all would’ve found themselves on that island somehow. It wasn’t until last week’s episode (“Sundown”) that suggested that wasn’t the case (Dogen’s story in the present conflicts with the version we saw at the piano recital), and then this week’s (“Dr. Linus”) all but confirms that’s not the case (Ben talks about stuff that happens in the “real” timeline that directly contradict things we saw in the “sideways” timeline).

So in short (too late): each week, they’re broadcasting 30 minutes of clean-up on a series, mixed in with 30 minutes of a different series that I don’t really care about. The clean-up sections are still “Lost”-style frustrating — did we really need to introduce yet another character who refuses to answer questions? Haven’t the castaways learned by now that if you ask somebody a question and they don’t answer, you punch them repeatedly until they answer? And what possible reason could there be for not just looking to see whose name was on number 108 in the lighthouse?

The other series would be like if Marvel had replaced their entire comic line with “What If?” stories. What if Jack had a son with his own daddy issues?! What if Rose worked at an employment agency?! What if Ben had been a history teacher?! You can’t tell me that I’m going to care about these things, later on; I need to care what’s going on right now, when I’m trying to make sense of the whole thing.

I will say this, though: Emile de Ravin has been really good in her limited appearances. Claire was always in the running for least interesting character on the island, but as it turns out, she plays kind-of-crazy really well.

Or more likely, it’s evidence that not enough people watched it; this movie is a very tough sell. I can’t point fingers at anybody else, since I passed on seeing it in theaters, and I’ve let the Netflix disc sit on my table for a week as I dreaded having to watch it. I’m a huge fan of the Coen brothers, Miller’s Crossing is my favorite movie of all time, and if I were being honest with my list of favorite movies, it’d be full of their work. But “black comedy about a suburban Jewish physics professor in 1967 who’s besieged by personal and work problems” never called out to me as something I’d be excited to watch.

I’d imagined it as a more Hebrew version of The Man Who Wasn’t There, one of the only movies by the Coens that didn’t work for me at all. Instead, A Serious Man is a little bit like what you’d get if No Country for Old Men hadn’t taken itself so seriously. The latter movie was plodding, relentlessly bleak and humorless, but was brilliantly filmed and had a genius script. A Serious Man is plodding, bleak, brilliantly filmed and written, and very, very funny. Even to a total goy like me.

As soon as I finish watching a movie, I can’t help but check out the reviews. What’s remarkable about A Serious Man is that few of the reviews I’ve read — even the positive ones — seem to get it, or at least they’re not able to describe what makes it work. Every one trivializes it or diminishes it in some way, almost as if describing the thing out loud makes it lose its power. Scenes that work perfectly in the movie seem trite when described with a simple synopsis. Each of the characters can be described in a single sentence or even a short phrase, but doing that doesn’t explain how even the simplest and broadest character becomes more than just a caricature when combined with everything else. So I’m reluctant to say much about the movie for fear that it’d be like trying to describe a painting or a piece of music: you’ve got to see it for yourself.

I will say something about the negative reviews, though, because several of them are unintentionally hilarious.

Ella Taylor of the Village Voice works herself into apoplexy over the film’s rampant anti-Semitism. She includes an Emperor’s New Clothes paragraph calling out every film critic who didn’t hate the movie as much as she did, accusing them of trying to hard to be cool or being anti-Semitic or both. And she all but directly calls the Coens hacks for dredging up material much better handled by Philip Roth and reducing the rest of the cast to broad, negative caricatures. That’s right, the film critic at the Village Voice who cries racism and anti-Semitism, name checks an author, and tries to out-smug every other film reviewer, is calling out someone else for using a caricature.

David Denby at The New Yorker is less shrill, but no less immune to irony. He hits most of the same points as Taylor’s review (including the name-checks and use of enough details to prove that he read the press packet), claiming that the Coens are in their “bleak, black, belittling mode,” making an “intolerable” movie filled with horribly unlikeable characters that exist only to be punished and mocked.

This kind of thing has been standard operating procedure for reviews of Coen brothers, through Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? all the way back to Raising Arizona and Blood Simple. And it amazes me that people are still so dense about the Coens’ work; they still don’t seem to appreciate that their reviews say more about the reviewer than they do about the film they’re supposed to be reviewing. They call the Coens smug and sadistic for presenting them with such horrible characters, when the movies themselves rarely, if ever, pass judgement. These movies tend not to have heroes and villains, at least not in the way reviewers want them to. The “heroes” are always sympathetic schlubs or perpetual fuck-ups. The closest they’ve come to an outright “hero” is a pregnant cop who talks funny. The “villain” is always life itself, or misfortune, or some undefined force of evil. The closest they’ve come to an outright “villain” is Anton Chigurh, who’s basically just the personification of chaotic evil.

It always seems painfully clear to me who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are in a Coen brothers movie, and there are more good than bad. They have a genuine affection or at least sympathy for their characters, and not in spite of their flaws, but often because of them. It’s usually clear which characters the Coens have no sympathy for, as well: being racist or anti-Semitic like the boss in Raising Arizona or the cops in Barton Fink is a sure-fire way to get cosmic come-uppance in the Coens universe. Taylor mentions that the fact the teenage daughter in A Serious Man is stealing money for a nose job is a tired example of anti-Semitism, when of course it’s not: it’s a very real and effortlessly vivid reaction to the rampant anti-Semitism in America in 1967, where an already self-conscious teenaged girl would be desperate to fit in. The Coens convey all of this with just a single line of dialogue and a subtle bit of casting (the daughter’s friends are all very Midwestern-looking gentiles), whereas I have to give a belabored explanation of it in text.

The Coens are profoundly populist, there’s almost always a moral center to their movies (even if the characters spend most of their time miles away from that moral center), and they almost never tell you what to think. But critics are so desperate to be in on the joke, to be a step above the movie and its characters and even the directors, looking down on the characters as they move around and say things before looking back up to the audience to sum up the story and deliver the final message. So they assume that everyone else is scrambling up right along with them. And they get angry when they can’t get to a high enough vantage point, where they can see what it all means and wrap it up with a pithy review and collect a paycheck and pat themselves on the back for being legitimate cineastes. They accuse the Coens and their fans of being arch and smug, completely unaware of their own hypocrisy: the thing that’s really frustrating them is that the Coens refuse to be arch and smug. They refuse to draw lines and make it clear who is supposed to be mocked — everyone is supposed to be mocked — so critics get angry and defensive because the Coens are mocking them.

Yet another point that Taylor gets completely wrong: she says that “either by accident or grand design, [Larry's] life seems to get better all by itself.” Either she’d started to write her review before finishing the movie and she didn’t want to edit that paragraph, or she’d worked herself into such a blind rage that she didn’t see anything that happened after the bar mitzvah. Or, more likely, she was so intent on the movie’s having a “here is what it all means” moment that she didn’t understand how much meaning was packed into the end of the film. Much like the end of Fargo. Or Raising Arizona. Or Barton Fink. Or even Blood Simple*.

In fact, it’s happened so often that I can’t help but wonder if A Serious Man were made partly in response to it. If I had to sum up the movie’s message, I’d say that it’s all about a man struggling to find a message where there’s none to be found. He looks for it in rational science, others look for it in faith, or mysticism, or dentistry. But there is no convenient summary or neatly-described message; we can never see the whole, just bits and pieces and try to make sense of those.

But then, I’d have to realize that I’m over-intellectualizing it myself. In one of the special features, Joel Coen himself describes A Serious Man as a story that’s not about anything. At the end of the movie, after the ASPCA warning, is the note “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture,” a gag that Denby caught, but decided to try and work into a pithy accusation against the Coen brothers instead of taking it for what it was: an acknowledgement that the movie is a comedy, and the surest way to ruin it is to over-think it. The quote that opens the movie is “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

* I’ve been waiting years to tell people what I think the ending of Blood Simple “means,” but nobody’s ever asked.

That’s basically all Alice in Wonderland is: some memorable scenes and characters; a few great nonsensical turns of phrase; and some fantastic, unforgettable imagery. Add in Johnny Depp and a soundtrack by Danny Elfman and you’ve got all the necessary components of a Tim Burton movie. He’s practically spent his entire career looking for an excuse to string together a bunch of weird images without regard to a coherent story; Alice in Wonderland is such a perfect match that the only surprising thing is that he didn’t already do it years ago.

They still made a token attempt to provide some kind of continuity to the movie, so a story occasionally asserts itself. It’s not a particularly interesting story — it’s just a straight line from a rabbit hole to the Jabberwocky — but it’s more substantial than just the “a bunch of weird stuff happens and it looks cool” story of the Disney animated version.

Unfortunately, even a marginally substantial story is not Alice in Wonderland, which was, intentionally and happily, a bunch of clever nonsense. This movie is a version of Alice that’s been Peter Panified and Narniated. Now Alice is 19 and runs after the white rabbit to escape the demands of Proper Society, and she finds herself in the dreamworld of her childhood, where she has to find the vorpal sword and become the Champion of the White Queen to defeat the Jabberwock. (So I suppose the story’s been Wizard of Ozzed as well). The original seems like a dream a little girl in England in the 1800s might have; the new version seems like a dream a Hollywood executive who’d just fallen asleep watching a bunch of big-budget children’s movies back to back might have.

But again, you don’t go into Alice in Wonderland expecting a solid story, and you definitely don’t go into a Tim Burton movie expecting a solid story. It’s all about the imagery, and the movie does a fine job. I can’t imagine wanting to see it in 2D, since the whole thing is pure spectacle and you want to pile on as much gimmickry as you can. And the 3D is done well, as are all the animation and effects. There are more talking animals than a compilation reel of Superbowl commercials, and that’s just the “base level” of effects work going on. They’ve got a main character who changes size randomly throughout the movie, and almost every other character is digitally manipulated in one way or another. And then, they throw them all together in the same shot just because they can. So you end up with Giant Alice sitting down next to a table held up by monkeys while an animated pig lies down at the feet of the tiny body/digitally-enlarged head of Helena Bonham Carter while Crispin Glover walks in on digitally-lengthened legs (watch out, David Letterman) and kisses her hand. It’s really just an excuse for the effects guys to show off.

Which is the other big problem with the movie. The backdrops and costumes are impeccably done, and the look of the main characters is imaginative and memorable, and it’s the job of the effects to take all these disparate fantastic things and combine them with live actors to make them look real. Which means: it probably cost them as much money as I make in a year to make the shot where the Red Knight kisses the hand of the Red Queen, but that moment was pretty inconsequential to the rest of the movie. The same goes for the shots of Alice riding the back of the Bandersnatch (oh yeah, it got Never Ending Storied, too), or fighting the Jabberwock, both of which ended up being fairly straightforward fantasy movie monsters. Alice in Prince Caspian armor is a much more interesting and memorable image than the fantastic things she’s interacting with.

And there aren’t enough new fantastic things to interact with. Everything becomes either a main character or a major plot point, and is referenced repeatedly — there’s an awful lot of dialogue dedicated to how big the Red Queen’s head is, so I’m assuming that was the most expensive and difficult effect in the movie. Apart from a couple of rocking-horseflies early in the movie, there’s not much that exists just for its own sake. There’s not quite enough wonder in Wonderland.

While the movie and the marketing materials are desperate to convince you otherwise, the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen aren’t the standout characters of the movie. That would be the Cheshire Cat, and Alice herself. The Cheshire Cat has a great design, is full of little flourishes in the animation (my favorite is how he kneads the Mad Hatter’s hat, as a cat would), and almost imperceptibly solid voice work from Stephen Fry. I picked up on Alan Rickman’s and Christopher Lee’s voices immediately, but didn’t recognize Fry until the credits at the end. And Mia Wasikowska takes a pretty thankless part — Alice is kind of boring, to be honest — and keeps the audience’s attention and sympathy. Everybody else is fine, but they’re all trying a little to hard. You can always see the wheels turning: I am a highly-paid movie star who embraces quirky character roles and I will be the most distinctive thing in this scene, dammit!

In the end, I’d give it a “good but not great.” I enjoyed almost all of it as I was watching it, and I got my requisite amount of spectacle out of it. (Plus, there were 3D trailers for Toy Story 3 and Tron Legacy). I liked it more than the last few Tim Burton movies I’ve seen, and the last few Disney family blockbusters as well. There are several interesting images in there, and the overall design of the movie is beautiful, and there are enough small touches of dark humor to keep things moving, and there’s a tone of female empowerment that’s probably more healthy for little girls to be seeing than the typical Disney princesses. But more often than not, it feels more like a demo reel for a special effects house than like a timeless classic.

I have to wonder if it would’ve been more amazing if it’d just sprung up out of nowhere, and we hadn’t been bombarded with marketing images of the main characters for the past year. But then, I have to wonder if not having Disney’s marketing budget behind it, it would’ve been made at all.

They’ve always been out of my price range, though, and I never could rationalize getting an expensive new computer instead of a $10 pad of drawing paper and some colored pencils. And I was certain that Apple would eventually release one — a real one, not a third-party mod that charged $1700 to take away your keyboard, so I could wait a few years. This year there was finally a perfect storm of incentives: first Apple let me down and made it clear they just weren’t into they stylus in that way, and a decent-powered tablet finally broke the $1000 price barrier. So I decided to take the leap, defect from OS X, and order a HP TouchSmart tm2.

Spoiler alert: I ended up returning it. I couldn’t find a demo model in a store, so I had to order one to try it in person; being able to get some hands-on time with one would’ve saved me and HP both a lot of time, money, and effort. That Mobile Tech Review site has a lengthy review and three great video reviews of the computer, but they’re comparing the machine to other Tablet PCs, and they’ve already gotten used to the quirks of tablets and Windows laptops in general. (Plus, even video reviews as exhaustive as the ones they made can’t give you a perfect idea of what it’s like to actually use one).

I’d been hoping to find a review of the computer written by someone with closer to my background — a longtime Mac devotee and amateur artist wanting to take a stab at drawing on the computer but too cheap to shell out for a Cintiq. Hopefully, this will give more info to anybody else who’s in the same boat. For the record, the specs of my machine, straight from the order form:

• Intel(R)Core(TM)2 Duo SU7300 (1.30GHz, 800MHz FSB) w/512MB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 4550 Graphics
• 4GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• 12.1″ diagonal WXGA High-Definition HP LED Widescreen (1280×800) with Integrated Touch-screen

Pros

• Price: As I mentioned, the only reason I finally took the plunge was that HP had finally broken the $1000 price barrier. And with their rebate and free upgrade deals (2GB to 4GB of memory was free, as was the 250GB to 500GB hard drive upgrade), I was able to get a decent-spec machine for right at a thousand bucks.
• Build Quality: The last Windows laptop I had before making The Switch was a Dell Inspiron that was a huge hunk of black plastic that ran at about 1000 degrees, had fans that sounded like jet engines, and seemed vaguely as if it’d been smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. I’ve had that impression of Windows machines ever since, so it was a nice surprise to see the brushed aluminum and comfortable keyboard and nice rounded corners of this one.
• Battery Life: I didn’t think to do an actual timing test, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the exaggerated claims of battery life (HP quotes 9.75 hours) common to laptop manufacturers turned out to be true here. The first thing I did is try to power cycle the battery, and I had a hell of a time getting it to run out of juice.
• Tenperature and Noise: Unlike my ancient Inspiron laptop, this machine was dead silent no matter what I ran on it. I think I heard the fan come on once, and even then I could only tell because I was listening for it. And unlike every Apple laptop I’ve owned, the HP never got hotter than “pleasantly lukewarm.”
• Netflix: HP ships a TouchSmart suite of multitouch-enabled programs in addition to the OS; I’m assuming it’s the same one that comes with their desktop models. It includes a webcam client, music player, photo viewer, simple painting and note-taking programs, Twitter client, Hulu desktop, and a Netflix Instant Watch player. Most of them were unremarkable, but the Netflix player was excellent. It’s the nicest I’ve seen, and seeing as how I’ve somehow gotten eight devices that all have their own flavors of Netflix player and I’ve tried them all, that’s saying something. You could swipe a finger to scroll through your queue, tap to get details on movies and start playing, scrub through the movie relatively efficiently with your fingers — it’s as nice an experience as all the claims about touch-enabled computes want you to believe.
• Handwriting Recognition: It’s apparently common knowledge that Microsoft poured tons of money into their TabletPC initiative and it mostly failed, but when you try handwriting on a Windows PC, you can definitely see where all the money went. (And on the flip side, you can plug a tablet into OS X and try Apple’s “Ink” input to get a clear picture of just how much they’ve given up on the stylus). A little window pops up pretty much anywhere that accepts text input, and it’s attractive and more importantly, eerily accurate. I was looking for excuses to keep playing with it, to the point where I was even enjoying filling out web forms.
• Windows 7: On top of the handwriting recognition, Windows 7 in general seems to be tablet- and touch-friendly, or at least more than I’d expected it to be. It could be just the Mojave effect, and it just looks better because Vista was such a disappointment, but Windows 7 overall strikes a decent balance between a real, grown-up operating system; and a necessary evil for backwards compatibility. I’ve already gone on about how much I like Windows Media Center, and the stand-out piece of software on the Tablet was Microsoft OneNote, a thoroughly well-designed program that’s actually kind of fun to use.
• Kitchen Sink Mentality: I’d been in the Mac world for so long that I’d forgotten how much PC manufacturers let you configure a machine. Instead of Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs’s vision of The Only True and Proper Ports Necessary For a Computing Device, you get whatever the hell HP decides to throw on there. The tm2 has an HDMI port that I probably never would’ve used, but still appreciated it was there. And the options were so fast and furious and cheap that I just tossed them on during the order — do I really need a fingerprint scanner? Nope, but what the hell, it’s only 25 bucks!

Cons

• Flaky Driver Support: This will no doubt get improved over time, but the out-of-the-box experience with the tm2 was a big hassle. There were several things that just plain didn’t work, the most annoying being that the tablet had absolutely no pressure sensitivity. (Which is the main appeal of a Wacom tablet, of course). It’s a common problem, and there are suggestions on the extremely helpful TabletPCReview.com forum, but none of the workarounds worked for me, and there was nothing on HP’s support site that helped, either.
• ATM-quality Touch Support: Having an affordable tablet that accepts touch and stylus support is the main draw of the tm2, but the touch recognition seemed a little half-baked. It was a lot like using an older ATM: several touches required to get something to register, swipes would go completely unrecognized half the time, and a general lack of responsiveness throughout. I’m not sure if it’s a hardware or a software issue, but after having seen the iPhone in action for the past couple of years, I imagine it’s both. For better or worse, iPhone OS was designed specifically for touch input, so every time you touch or drag on the screen, you get an immediate response.
• Touchpad: In addition to the screen, the tm2 has a real laptop-style keyboard, and a touchpad that also supports multi-touch gestures. At least, in theory. Again, it would frequently fail to recognize a gesture, or interpret right-clicks that I hadn’t intended, or just not detect that I’d tried to move the mouse.
• My Big Meaty Hands: Related to all the issues I had with touch sensitivity: there’s supposedly some kind of “hand detection” going on with the tablet, so it can distinguish my hand resting on the screen from the pen I’m using to draw on the screen. But in my short experience with it, it failed more often than not. I couldn’t use any piece of software for more than a minute without inadvertently causing a line to be drawn across the screen, or a big black smudge obscuring the drawing. There’s a way to switch it to accept pen input only, but it struck me as an unnecessary hassle for something that promised to “just work.”
• Weight: The tm2 is a little over four and a half pounds, so it’s by no means “heavy,” but it’s just heavy enough to be inconvenient. My dreams of lounging Roman-style on the couch while propping the thing up with one hand were dashed as soon as I realized there was no real comfortable angle to hold the thing while drawing. And it’s not just the weight, but the weight distribution. The whole thing feels off balance because of…
• The Hump: The battery, unlike those of Apple laptops, is easily removable. Also unlike those of Apple laptops, the battery on the tm2 is huge. If you can set the thing down on a table, the hump actually provides a nice tilt that makes it easier to draw, at least in one preferred orientation. But holding it, my experience was that it just made it impossible to find a comfortable position.
• Screen Angles: With the iPad, Apple’s been making a big deal about its IPS display for wider viewing angles. I didn’t get what all the fuss was about until I tried the tm2. Looking at the screen dead-on, it’s got a reasonably good picture. But tilt your head or move the device (again, while trying to hold it in your lap, for example) and the display gets grainy, the colors washed out. Making a laptop with a base price of $900 is difficult for a reason.
• No Optical Drive: Like a netbook, the tm2 doesn’t come with an optical drive, I’m assuming for weight and price reasons. (You can use an external USB drive, and HP offers one as an add-on). This obviously makes installing software difficult — I installed SketchBook Pro over the network from the drive on my desktop machine, and it worked although it took twice as long as it would normally. (I’d dread installing something that spans multiple discs, like the Adobe Creative Suite). As digital downloads get more prevalent, that’ll be less of an issue, but we’re not quite there yet. What worried me more was that I couldn’t make a backup or recovery disc. HP includes recovery software, but it refuses to work with anything other than an external USB drive. The tm2 ships with a recovery partition, but even in 2010 and working for a company that sells digital downloads, the prospect of being without a physical boot disc made me nervous.
• No Accelerometer: The screen on the tm2 flips up and rotates easily to switch between laptop and slate modes. Every time you do so, though, you have to press a button to cycle through all the available screen orientations. Even worse, the button is at the right side of the screen, so every time I held it vertically, I’d inadvertently hit the button and have to cycle through everything again. The iPhone is proof that the accelerometer doesn’t fix everything (have you ever tried reading something on the iPhone while in bed?) but it’d be a nice start.
• Bloatware: That TouchSmart Suite that I mentioned earlier had cool stuff like Netflix, but a lot of useless crap as well. (Including two astoundingly lousy touch-enabled games). It’s unavoidable with Windows, no doubt, and it helps keep the cost down. But I had to spend my first night with a new computer just uninstalling software. Also weird is the inclusion of Hulu Desktop: however you feel about Hulu’s business practices, there’s no denying that the desktop software is really slick and well-designed. But it’s well-designed for remote controls. For fingers, there’s an awful lot of stuff that just plain doesn’t work.
• CPU: CPU speed is becoming less and less of an issue, especially with dual cores and on a machine with a separate GPU and ample memory. Plus, the tm2’s low voltage CPU is a big part of why it has such great battery life and low heat. But still, it felt wrong buying a brand new machine in 2010 that only had 1.3 GHz.

Push

Or, as videogame review sites used to describe it: REVIEWER’S TILT! This is the part where my bias shows through, so it’d be unfair to describe it as a straight-up “con.” Your mileage may vary.

• Build Quality: I mentioned this as a “pro,” because the machine itself (minus the battery) is solid. But it’s still functional instead of genuinely sleek; it’s hard to look at it and just get excited about using the machine. Like, for instance, the feeling I get whenever I see the new unibody MacBook Pros scattered about the office. Or for that matter, even the HP Envy. Granted, there’s only so thin they can go with a Wacom tablet built into the screen.
• That Damn Etching: The lid and half the handrest are covered with this etched pattern that I kept hoping would grow on me but never did. It’s that unnecessarily swirly flourish that covered every VH1 ad and concert poster or website about website design five to ten years ago. I tried to intellectualize it as a minor complaint, but I just couldn’t help looking at the thing and thinking that it already looked a little dated now; what was it going to look like in five years?
• Windows 7: I marked it as a “pro” up above, and if all things were equal, it would remain a “pro.” But I’ve got OS X software I want or need to keep using. Some of it is just personal preference like NetNewsWire or Tweetie, and I could probably find a decent Windows equivalent. But I may be one of the only people with a legitimate personal license for Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve got the Mac versions. I briefly considered going rogue and trying to turn the thing into a Hackintosh, but even if it weren’t a little ethically shady, I didn’t like the idea of being stuck with a broken laptop and no recovery disc (see “No optical drive” above).
• It’s Not a Mac: And finally, it has to be said: I’m a Mac guy. Yes, it’s largely personal preference, and yes, I’ve got no doubt that a big part of why I don’t like using Windows is just a matter of my getting accustomed to OS X for almost a decade. But that’s not all of it. I’m still using a four-year-old MacBook Pro — to be fair, an entirely different class of machine than the tm2, even without the “Apple tax” — and it’s showing no signs of stopping. The industrial design is excellent, it feels lighter and thinner than it really is, the touchpad is smooth and responsive, and it runs everything I want to throw at it with no problem. My only complaints are the ridiculously excessive heat and low battery life. Apart from that, it’s not just marketing speak; Apple stuff “just works.”

A New Hope

And that last bit is what has me convinced that I’m doomed never to be able to buy an affordably-priced computer again; I’ve been spoiled by the Mac. Assuming the reports about the iPad are true (and based on what I’ve seen of the iPhone, I can totally believe that they’re true), Apple’s attention to detail is going to pay off. You can do a component-by-component comparison and find a tablet that’s got more features or more power, but the appeal of these devices is more than their individual components. When I got the tm2, I’d imagined that in addition to the art side of things, I’d be able to use it for all the stuff I wanted an iPad for: reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing the web. But I quickly realized that it was a little too heavy and took too long to boot up for that to be convenient, the touch screen was too sketchy for that to be enjoyable, and the available software was designed with touch input as an afterthought.

It’s there that you see how Apple’s obsessive control over everything pays off. They’re not going to release a touchscreen unless it’s super-responsive. They’re not going to release a casual computer that takes a long time to boot up (or more accurately, that needs to be shut down as frequently as a laptop). And Jobs’s compulsion about making everything thinner and with fewer buttons seems slightly less obsessive when you start thinking of the thing as an electronic magazine.

I can still hold out hope that Apple and Wacom start to play nice and there’s a future version of the iPad that works like a portable Cintiq. Until then, I’ll be fine with the old Intuos 2 I got off ebay a few years ago and have allowed to collect dust ever since. Or that $10 pad of paper.

So it’s great to see The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom turn the “experimental game” idea into something really fun and exciting. In concept, it’s similar to Cursor*10 and Time Donkey: you solve puzzles using “clones” of your character that have been unstuck in time.

But comparing this game to other games (which is going to be inevitable, unfortunately) is just shorthand for explaining how the game works; this is still a genuinely novel project. The tutorial is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the game, so you dive right in and start playing and most importantly, having fun while you’re figuring out how the game works. Presentation throughout, including the art and especially the music, are excellent. And the puzzle design is genuinely clever, forcing you to combine everything you’ve learned how to do instead of rote repetition of a concept. It’s just a fantastic idea well executed: it doesn’t sacrifice production values for “experimentation,” it doesn’t let itself get pretentious, and it doesn’t sacrifice fun for intelligence. I love it.

The game was started as a project at USC, and the creators are now calling themselves The Odd Gentlemen and have released it on Xbox Live Arcade through 2K Play. (And it’s only 10 bucks!) As much fun as I’m having with the game, I’m even more excited to see a project that went from idea to execution to publishing without anything getting lost along the way.

I’d bet that plenty of people saw the problem with that immediately, but it took a while for it to occur to me. I’m not talking about the most obvious problem of paying 500 bucks to play chess or poker; I’m assuming that the simpler traditional games will quickly give way to fancier projects, like variants on Magic: The Gathering-type games or Real-Time Strategy or tabletop roleplaying or that global war game that Bond played against the bad guy in Never Say Never Again.

The more interesting problem is that almost every card and board game I can think of requires you to have a hand that the other players can’t see.

Even games like Settlers of Catan, where most of the action takes place on a shared game board, has an element of strategy in what you hide from the other players. When Big Huge Games did their Xbox Live version of Catan, they assumed that everybody counts cards anyway (obviously they’ve never seen me trying to count cards in a game), so they made that information publicly available. But as far as I can remember, the number and type of victory cards each player has is still kept secret.

A cooperative game like Pandemic would be an obvious candidate. And from what I understand, D&D campaigns have players cooperating against a dungeon master. (I’ve been writing this blog for six years and I’ve finally used the phrase “dungeon master.” It’s been a good run). But cooperative games are a niche category even for board games.

Now, I admit that it did occur to me that players could view their private info on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and use the iPad as a central game board. And I do admit that the idea of that gives me a geek boner like you couldn’t imagine. But it still feels deeply, fundamentally, morally wrong to even suggest such a thing.

So two questions:

1. Are there any existing competitive board games that don’t require players to have a “hand” that’s kept secret from other players?
2. Using a shared device like an iPad or a big touch-sensitive video table, what would be some good ways to keep player-specific information hidden from other players?

I’ve mentioned the “Clone Wars” series on here before, but it’s always along the lines of “No really, it’s better than you’d think.” It’s been pushing my buttons, but you know it’s still a cartoon TV series aimed directly at kids.

This week’s episode was called “The Manadlorian Plot” and had Obi-Wan Kenobi going to the planet Mandalore (Boba Fett’s home world!) and engaging in some The Thin Man-style banter with a duchess there before uncovering a terrorism plot staged by a suicide bomber, after which they flew to the planet’s moon and took speeder bikes to visit a long-abandoned mining station that was taken over by a renegade guerilla force of Boba Fetts plotting to bring down the government on account of its neutral stance in the war. After a series of near-miss escapes and explosions, Obi-Wan gets in a lightsaber duel with the head of the rebel group, who’s using a black, katana-style lightsaber that he got as a spoil of war from a raid on an ancient Jedi temple.

That sound you hear is 12-year-old me having an aneurism.

I’m not sure anymore that this series is aimed at kids; I suspect it’s aimed directly at teens and pre-teens in 1983, and it’s just taken them 27 years to broadcast it.

my whole issue with the ipad is pretty much summed up by my tweet of “a better name for it would have been the Segway.”

Like the Segway, the iPad fell victim to unofficial, unverified rumor mongering and bullshit hype. The ipad has a forward facing camera for videoconferencing. The ipad has a revolutionary input mechanism. The ipad cures rabies.

At the end of the day, fanboys will say “but none of that was confirmed!” … but alas, hype is hype, whether official or unofficial. Apple is a big boy, and ultimately responsible for their own rep, for better or for worse. Same with the Segway. And note: just like the segway, there were plenty of nerds who still loved it when it finally debuted. I’m not trying to claim the iPad isn’t lovable. Only that it didn’t live up to its rumored reputation.

So this time, there wasn’t a fanboy in the house who could legitimately claim they were blown away. Everything Apple showed us was fine. It was good. It just *didn’t match the hype*.

[...]

That’s not to say the iPad won’t be a success. I’m only saying its launch goes down in history as one of Apple’s most botched. This time, an apple product will truly live or die based on it’s qualities, rather than its hype. Because in my mind, the hype failed.

Whether you like it, hate it, or are indifferent, saying that the iPad announcement was “botched” is completely ludicrous.

The main mistake is over-inflating the importance of “fanboys,” just like all the end-of-open-computing Cassandras are over-inflating the importance of hackers. You (or technically, “we”) have to come to terms with the fact that Apple’s Just Not That Into You.

The iPad is targeted squarely at a “casual” audience. Not even casual computer users, like I’d originally typed, but people who don’t even think of what they do in terms of “computing.” It’s the consumer-level appliance computer that Jobs has always wanted. It’s the original Mac that required a special tool just to open it, but you don’t have to teach people how to use the mouse. It’s the iMac that advertised only having to plug in one cord, but you don’t have to plug in anything. It’s not aimed at people who would be buying a Linux netbook or even a MacBook; it’s aimed more at people who would be buying digital picture frames or portable DVD players or Kindles.

The most telling line from the whole keynote was when Jobs said Amazon did a great job with the Kindle, and Apple was “standing on their shoulders.” It was specifically about their new bookstore, but you can extrapolate that to the whole product launch. Ebook readers existed before the Kindle. There are, and were, other models that have “better” specs and features, at least on paper. But Amazon succeeded on three counts:

1. Backing up the device with a distribution model that already had tons of content.
2. Marketing the product not based on features but utility.
3. Understanding that their target audience wasn’t people shopping for ebook readers, but people who wouldn’t even have thought of getting an ebook reader.

The hard part wasn’t convincing people that their ebook reader was better than the other ebook readers — in a lot of ways, it probably was, but not in such a dramatic way that anyone would instantly rush out and buy one. The hard part was convincing people that they needed an ebook reader at all. And because they understood that, they ended up Kleenexing their product name — everybody knows what an ebook reader is now, and more often than not, they call it a “Kindle.”

And by that measure, calling Apple’s iPad announcement and the build-up to it “botched” is nonsense. It’s already done most of what it needed to do, and for free. Everybody was talking about this thing for months before its release, and Apple had officially said nothing. After the announcement, every blog had a reaction — not just the tech ones, either, but every blog. What you call “hype” I call “genius.” They only had to spend about the same marketing budget as they’d have spent on a new iPod release, but they instantly became the major player in a market, without even doing anything.

They didn’t have to live up to any hype. The hype had already done its job, which was convincing people that this was something that they needed to pay attention to. All Apple had to do was not blow it. The thing could’ve been priced out of the range of people who just want a “casual” computer, but it wasn’t. It could’ve been running OS X, convincing a lot of people that it was just another Mac or that they’d have to “learn” a new operating system, but they don’t. It could’ve been announced with just the built-in apps and come across as a glorified ebook reader or video player with no real indication of what apps for it would be like, but it comes with the App Store. They could’ve tied it to an expensive data plan, but you can get it Wi-Fi only or you can pay a monthly fee with no contract.

Compare it to the HP Slate, which is closest in terms of form factor, and which had its own mini-keynote announcement from Ballmer at CES. You could look at a side-by-side feature list and quite reasonably assume that the HP Slate is a no-brainer, and that Apple’s product launch was “botched.” But you’d be missing the point to a colossal degree. The people that Apple is trying to reach don’t care about feature lists. I’m not being condescending or patronizing with that, either — I’m one of those people. I’m a nerd with a CS degree, so I’m ostensibly supposed to care about feature lists, but I don’t unless I’m buying a “real” computer. I don’t care what kind of processor is in my DVD player, I don’t care what fuzzy-logic ever-brown crispness sensor is in my toaster. I just want them to do what they’re made to do.

What does the Kindle do? It lets you buy and read books, in grayscale on a non-backlit screen. I don’t read enough to spend $250 for that. No sale on account of limited use.

What do any of the Android tablets do? Web surfing, e-mail, date book, contact list. I’ve already got a phone that handles some of that stuff and a laptop that handles the rest. Presumably there’s an Android app store, but I haven’t heard much about it or seen any specific examples of Android apps. I’ve never seen any screenshots or video of an Android device that didn’t look like a pre-iPhone cell phone display. I keep hearing that it’s an “open” platform, and keep being reminded how great that is, but as far as I’m concerned it’s like any Linux distribution — yeah, great it’s open, but there’s nothing I really want or need to do on it since all my favorite apps are for another OS. No sale on account of vague usefulness.

What does the HP Slate do? Everything that Windows 7 does, in a thin and ultraportable form factor. Unlike Android, I know exactly what Windows is and how it works. Which browser do I use? Any one I want. Where do I get applications for it? Anywhere I want. Are those apps going to run well on a machine this small? Try it and see. What about viruses? Windows 7 comes with a free virus scanner that works well. So I have to run a virus-scanner on a handheld computer? No sale on account of a surfeit of choices.

What does the iPad do? Not everything, but a lot of things. I, like millions of other people, know exactly what iPhone OS is and how it works. Which browser do I use? Mobile Safari. Where do I get applications for it? From the App Store. Are those apps going to run well on a machine like this? They will say “designed for iPad.” What about viruses? Apple controls the App Store. Here, I’m tempted, because what over-heated tech bloggers describe as a closed system with a lack of choice, I see as something that keeps me from having to make choices I don’t care about.

That focus, combined with the “it just works” philosophy, is why Apple can branch out into consumer electronics with more success than other companies. Even companies with technically superior hardware. It’s subtle enough — or people just fail to “get” it — that a lot of people dismiss it as the “reality distortion field.” They blather that Apple “fanboys” will buy anything with the Apple logo on it and then insist that it’s the most awesome thing ever created, even when confronted with objective proof that brand X has more storage/Flash support/a camera/open source operating system/whatever. But for a lot of people, I would even say most people, it’s about getting something that does exactly what we want, no more and no less, and doing it well.

Again, all Apple had to do was get people believing that a computer in between a phone and a full-size laptop or desktop machine is a useful thing to have. And it’s not just that they didn’t “botch” that; they succeeded beyond the level anybody could’ve imagined or predicted. People who’d never have considered getting a netbook (like myself) are now debating the merits of a $500 “casual-use” portable computer, and everybody in the target market at least knows the name “iPad” and has an idea of what it does. (And again, they got much of that for free). Marketing material aside, they didn’t make a revolutionary device that absolutely no one else could make. They made a very good device that does exactly what it needs to do. And where Apple succeeds while others fail is that they didn’t stop with the hardware or even the OS: they presented the entire thing from processor to form factor to how people will actually use it and to how they can extend it.

At least, that’s if you believe everything you read on the internet. If you’re still at all grounded in reality, you realize that Apple announced a big iPod Touch.

(That’s if you’re not still giggling over the name. And for the record, I never would’ve made the obvious joke had I known a) they were actually going to call it that, and b) it would so quickly become the 2010 equivalent of abbreviating Microsoft as M$ by YouTube & blog commenters).

iPhone Gigante

I still don’t understand why so many Internet types — both criticizing and defending — seem to think that calling it “a big iPod Touch” is such a devastating ice burn. John Gruber insists that the iPad is what Apple’s had in mind all along; the iPad isn’t a bigger iPhone, but the iPhone is a stripped-down iPad. Whichever way you want to look at it: the iPhone is pretty cool.

The iPad announcement confirmed my own worst suspicions of the thing — not that I’m particularly prescient or even in the loop of the tech world, but just because it was the most straightforward and obvious thing that Apple could’ve announced. It’s designed for consuming media, not creating it. And according to people who’ve had a hands-on with it, it does a really good job at that. I’m inclined to believe Stephen Fry’s claim that you have to see it in person to really appreciate it — not because he’s any more or less reliable than anyone else as a technology commentator, but because I had the same experience with the iPhone. I’d been trying to talk myself out of getting an iPhone, but was completely won over as soon as I used a display model and saw the clarity of the screen and all the polish that’d been given to the UI.

And the iPhone is still pretty damn neat. It’s already obviated a laptop computer for a lot of the “casual computing” stuff I tend to do, and the app store has expanded its functionality several times over. And yes, I have often thought, “a faster version of this, with a larger screen, would be ideal.” So what’s the problem?

Spoiled Children of the Revolution

The problem, as I see it, is that developments in consumer technology have outpaced both content providers’ business models and consumers’ common sense. It’s resulted in a ridiculously over-inflated sense of entitlement that’s only made worse when dropped into the echo chamber of the internet.

Two of the most ridiculous examples are, unfortunately, on the only two Gawker blogs I can still tolerate reading: Lifehacker and io9. Annalee Newitz’s screed against “crap futurism” is the worse of the two, a depressingly cynical view of tech consumers disguised as consumer empowerment. She accurately describes the iPad as a device for consuming media, not creating it, but then barrels forward into a self-contradictory conclusion that paints this as not just a condemnation of consumer-oriented society but as something that endangers the very future of computing:

I know a lot of otherwise-savvy consumers and hackers who are already drooling over the iPad and putting in their orders. They hate the idea of a restricted device, but they love the shiny-shiny. I’m not saying that they should deprive themselves of this pretty new toy. What I am saying is that this toy represents a crappy, pathetic future. [...] The only way iPads can truly become futuristic devices is if we hack them so that we can pour whatever operating system we want inside. We need to jailbreak these media boxes so we can install the apps we want, not the ones provided by the Apple shopping mall.

Or in other words: devices like the iPad lead us towards a future where we’re slaves to consumerism, unable to decide for ourselves but bound by some evil corporate giant’s decisions about what we’re allowed to watch and what we’re allowed to create. So the thing to do is go ahead and buy it anyway, and then violate the agreement you make with the manufacturer on activation. The genuinely crappy and pathetic future is one in which responsible adults actually behave this way and then attempt to justify it as noble.

Because, you know, you could just not buy it. That’s what Adam Pash advises us to do in his self-confessed rant on Lifehacker. But instead of seeming like common sense, it just rings hollow. For one thing, considering how much of Lifehacker is devoted to telling people how to take advantage of other people’s utilities or how to circumvent your ISPs policies towards downloading other people’s work without paying for it, I have a hard time taking their advice on making responsible consumer decisions.

But more significantly, it takes such a depressingly dim and cynical view of people by over-emphasizing the value of slabs of metal and glass and silicon. I frequently make fun of myself for being a slave to Apple, helpless to resist whenever they announce a new device. But it’s kind of depressing to realize that there are people who aren’t in on the joke. I guess I appreciate the concern, but it’s insulting to assume that we’re not responsible enough adults to decide for ourselves what to do with our own discretionary income.

10 PRINT “I’M BEING REPRESSED!” 20 GOTO 10

And in the world of people who don’t get paid to post, there’s Alex Payne’s flowery blog post of Revelations about the dystopian future promised by Apple’s control over the App Store. He says:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. [...] The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Which isn’t just overblown pessimism, it’s actually insultingly condescending if it you give it more than a moment’s thought.

My parents bought us an Atari 2600 — without the BASIC cartridge, even! — and I still became a programmer, for better or worse. Having a passive videogame-playing machine didn’t turn me into some mindless drone (any more than any other American kid in the 80s, anyway). In fact, it did the opposite: I wanted so much to see my own stuff up on the TV screen that I whined and pouted until they got me a Commodore 64. Saying that an iPad will discourage kids from wanting to create their own software is like saying that an iPod — or Rock Band, more appropriately — will discourage kids from wanting to create their own music.

It’s not even the case that people will be turned away by Apple and forced to resort to Linux or Android or something equally horrible to get their code on. Apple sells Macs. It’s kind of their thing. They didn’t draw a big X over the MacBook and declare that the future was the iPad; they deliberately put the iPad in a space between the iPhone and the Mac. And no matter how much tech evangelists go on about the iPad’s being the future of computing, Apple is going to keep on selling Macs, for the simple reason that they need people to write iPhone OS software. You can’t use “140,000 Apps Available on Day One” in your marketing material unless you’ve got tens of thousands of people diligently working on fart apps, and most importantly for them: buying Macs to do so.

The evil, technology-stifling corporate giant Apple sells a computer for about the same price as an iPad that comes with a professional-grade development environment absolutely free. That is miles ahead of anything I could get back when I started programming. (Although I remain convinced that HyperCard was the Greatest Development Tool of Any Generation). You can even download the iPhone OS SDKs for free, and write apps for them to your heart’s content. That’s not an accident, and that’s not just generosity on Apple’s part — it’s all part of their devious plan to sell devices that have software running on them that people want to use. And the $99 that Apple charges to distribute those apps on the App Store is still less than what I had to pay for Microsoft Basic on my old Mac Plus.

Or in short: if the App Store’s certification process, or the $99 annual fee, or hell, the lack of Adobe Flash support, are bothersome to you, then the iPad just isn’t made for you.

It’s just plain arrogant to assume that it’s not made for anyone else. There are plenty of people who want exactly the kind of “protected” environment that the iPad promises. And not just the “casual” users who Payne says would be completely flummoxed at the idea of saving a web link to a home screen — people like me, who are perfectly capable of opening Terminal or writing an AppleScript, but enjoy that we don’t have to every time we want to look up something on the web. And who appreciate that we never have to think about malware or viruses or even just a poorly-written app that locks up our entire computer. That is the audience the iPhone OS is aimed for, and just because that doesn’t necessarily include you doesn’t make it evil or ominous.

The only concession that I’ll make is this one: it is a drag that you have to fork over Apple’s $99 annual fee just to run apps that you write on your own machine. It was somewhat understandable for a device that piggybacked on another company’s already-feeble cell network; it’s less appetizing for those of us who’d be perfectly content to have a wifi-enabled web browser and e-book reader that we can write apps for. I think Pash’s suggestion of a “restricted” section for the App Store would violate the whole principle of the App Store as a protected environment. But it would be very nice if Apple added local code-signing so that you could write an app for a specific device — as far as I’m aware, that’s only possible currently by being a paid member of their developer program.

Necessity

Speaking of consuming vs. creating, I’ve written a treatise here just responding to what other people have said about the iPad, but haven’t yet offered up my own observations about the thing.

And that core observation about the iPad — that it’s designed for consuming media instead of creating it — is key to the whole conversation. But instead of presaging a dystopian future where we’re all locked into blind consumption, it does the opposite. It puts it squarely in the category of luxury item, where you have to be a responsible adult, and acknowledge that you’re buying one because you want one, not because you need one.

It’s a lot easier to justify “needing” a cell phone to put you in contact with people, or a laptop computer if you plan to get some work done. You can even rationalize an MP3 player as a “necessity” if you spend a lot of time commuting. But the iPad is a magazine-sized computer that lets you browse websites and read books using your fingers.

I don’t doubt Jobs’s claim that the iPad is better than a cell phone or a laptop at doing most of the stuff he demonstrated: it’s a great size for reading e-books, it’s more convenient for watching video, it’s more tactile than a desktop for browsing the web. The question is whether you do enough of that to justify paying $600-$800 for the convenience.

And I’ve done more foolish things with my money, so let’s assume that I could get over that roadblock and convince myself that I’ve got a need for something in between a cell phone and a full-powered laptop. The biggest draw for me would be e-books, magazines, comic books, web/RSS browsing, drawing, taking notes, and games.

I’ve been spending the past couple of months skimming the gadget blogs and hearing various reports from CES about all the “Apple Tablet killers” that were being announced, so I’d assumed there’d be a ton of alternatives to whatever Apple came out with. What’s been the most surprising to me is that it’s not just the Apple Effect at work: for what I’d want out of a device like this, the iPad really is the best-looking candidate.

My biggest disappointment is still that all of the devices around this size & price level have screens designed for multi-touch, not for drawing. The iPad still seems like it’d be the perfect size for using as a pen-based sketchbook and notebook, but there’s no pressure sensitivity and relatively limited resolution. Apple demoed the Brushes app at the keynote, but again, it’s finger-painting, not drawing. I’d be interested to see how well the Pogo Sketch Stylus works on it, but I’m not getting my hopes up. If I wanted to get serious about having a computerized sketchbook, it looks like the best candidate would be the HP TouchSmart tm2, which would require $1200 for a decent-powered machine, and then re-investing in Windows software after almost a decade with the Mac. (Not to mention all the iPhone apps I’ve already got).

As for the rest, they fail for me for the same reason that Macs succeed: Apple designs both the hardware and the OS. They’re made to work together. (Which is exactly why so many people complain about Apple’s controlled, closed systems). The HP Slate is about the same size and form factor as the iPad, plus it’s better-suited for watching HD video — but it’s running Windows 7. And if I can’t use a pen, I’d rather be running an OS designed for fingers than for mice. Almost all of the others are running Android, and I haven’t yet seen a demo of Android that looked enjoyable as opposed to just functional. This is a luxury device, remember, so slick presentation and little details of animation and typography are just as important as functionality.

Potential

One of the best, most reasonable, and unlike this blog most concise descriptions of the situation is Joe Hewitt’s post retitled “The Essence of iPad” on GigaOM. (And, notably, this is the guy who’s frequently cited as poster child against App Store Oppression). It’s clearly a version 1.0 device: there’s absolutely no question that future versions will come with a camera, and we can all hope that there’ll eventually be a button to lock the screen orientation, an OS that supports multitasking, and maybe someday a pen-enabled digitizer. But the biggest draw to the iPad is its potential. You can’t see the thing without imagining how you’d use it.

ComiXology has already announced an iPad version of its comic-reading app. If they can just get DC and Dark Horse on board, I’d be able to pack away all my comic books and have an apartment that doesn’t look like a creepy man-child’s.

For “real” books, in addition to Apple’s reader, Amazon’s already announced an iPad-enhanced Kindle app, and there’s little doubt that the free book readers like Stanza would follow suit. Magazines, blogs, and newspapers have already released iPhone apps separate from their web-based counterparts, but there’s rarely any use for them. It’s a no-brainer to assume that iPad-specific versions of those apps would actually be enjoyable to read.

The game demos at the Apple keynote were the least impressive, because they were all basically scaled-up iPhone games. But the potential for games is what has me most excited about the iPad, because the screen size and form factor are suited to a significantly different type of game than either the console or the mobile phone. Even the most straightforward types of games — card and board games — become more tactile and lend themselves to multiple players. Add in the potential for tabletop role-playing, collectible card games, real-time or turn-based strategy games, and you start to see how the whole platform opens up. (Imagine any of the prototypes aimed at the Microsoft Surface, without having to pay $10,000).

It sounds like I’ve just talked myself into getting one, and I still might in a weak moment. (For the record: I don’t see the appeal of the 3G model. Being able to download a book from anywhere becomes a lot less appealing when you don’t have the Kindle’s free data plan). I hate to argue with Apple’s marketing team, but there’s nothing really magical or revolutionary about the device. The magical and revolutionary part is going to come in when people start making stuff for it.