Turns out iPad day was a red letter day for sports. A pair of two seeds went down. Only four 15s have ever won a first round game, all between 1992 (Santa Clara) and 2001 (Hampton) – but in a three hour span, Norfolk State took down Missouri only to be surpassed by Lehigh definitely outplaying Duke. Against that, Ohio over four seed Michigan was almost an afterthought, never mind 10-7 upsets like Purdue over St Mary’s and Xavier over Notre Dame.
It’s a bloodbath. At least my bracket is still leading the friends group (I’m dead on the blog brackets) by virtue of a couple solid upset picks, but the two game lead isn’t going to get me far. Good job I have the Yahoo Tourney app on this thing.
Because this post is brought to you, of course, by the new iPad. Fingerprints notwithstanding, it’s looking good so far. Performance has definitely improved from the original, though not radically so – I suspect most processing improvements have been in graphics rendering rather than raw CPU speed. I did buy the dark gray SmartCover, which is so far so good I suppose. It’s nice having the auto lock and the easy prop-up. Connection with the AppleTV is working after a couple of false starts – happy anniversary, Harto – but GoodPlayer isn’t putting the shady copies of Sherlock Season 2 up on screen. Nor does AirPlay really work for mirroring video, although this would work a treat for Keynote presentation.
The thing shipped with 80% battery life, and was still in the 60s after all the setup and iCloud restore. Then of course I got it home and had to start from scratch with the iTunes library, but I think we are set now. Books are in the Kindle app, there are PDFs in the iBooks app, the Economist has the last two issues ready to read, and there’s video cued up and ready to watch. The other effect of finally owning this has been to unload most video off the iPhone – horses for courses. Even the lo-def video looks good, although using a nice high-contrast black and white film like Good Night and Good Luck may be cheating.
Most of all, though, it’s the size of a magazine, it weighs a pound and a half, and it adds to the sense that I’m living in the future. I didn’t take the laptop out of the bag tonight. I may not take it out of the bag at home again unless I’m working from home. I’m glad I waited a couple of years for the super-HD display and the HUGE battery to drive it. I’m also glad I got the Verizon 4G – can’t wait to give it a spin on the road to DC next week.
This is the DynaBook. It really is. This is the dream that a nontrivial chunk of Silicon Valley has chased for the last forty years. And programming tools aside, this is it – hell, Jef Raskin’s original vision for the Mac didn’t involve programming, it was damn near a utensil itself. Time to go back and re-read Insanely Great and see what the plan was, because this – which you can climb on for as little as $400 now – may have hit the nail on the head.
All that’s left is to pair the Bluetooth keyboard and get going.