In a follow-up to the article I wrote on the Wikipedia Microsoft Points article, here’s the chart that originally got deleted. Hopefully if everything else all fails, the chart will still be accessible, at least through here.

A little while ago, I wrote a rather scathing (also slightly incorrect) article on the iPad just after it had been announced. A few months later (and still no sign of it coming to Australia as of yet), I’ve had a bit of time to think about it.

And I’m thinking… I definitely want to buy one.

When the iPad was announced, there were two things I was upset about. The first was its silly name. Tampon cracks aside, it’s still too close to iPod. And the second was the fact that instead of us getting a minified MacBook, we’re instead getting a magnified iPhone (Well… iPod Touch). This stang the most since when I originally envisioned a tablet by Apple, I was expecting something I could easily whip out anywhere, and do complex things like web development or programming easily (Although, that may not be impossible ). One last thing was the lack of USB ports… making any kind of peripheral integration (excluding Bluetooth) totally impossible.

Either way, the more I think about it, an expanded iPhone seems to make sense. At a current technology level, I don’t think it’s actually possible for Apple to make a tablet PC of these dimensions, that can successfully run Mac OSX (Or at least, not without being extremely pricey), as well as integrate touch technology at the same time. For a device like this, the multi-touch features of iPhone OS just make total sense. It also makes sense in the fact that for a mobile device of this kind, a full OS like MacOS would take way too long to load, ultimately degrading the experience. So on reflection, hoping for MacOS on a tablet like this is a bit far-fetched to say the least.

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A pretty interesting thing has been happening in the geeks’ gadget world this week. Since I have a blog, I thought I’d offer my $0.02.

For those of you not in the know, here’s a quick re-hash. An Apple employee named Gray Powell took a prototype model of an as-of-yet unannounced iPhone to a bar, unto which he lost it. It was later found by another patron of the bar, from where it made its way into the hands of Gizmodo, who promptly ran a story on it. In what pretty much solidified the device’s authenticity, Apple sent a formal request to Gizmodo, asking for their ‘device’ to be returned.

Now, first and foremost…. this phone looks friggin’ awesome. Just on Gizmodo’s testimony alone, I really really want one now; way moreso than I ever wanted an iPad. Pretty much all of the issues I have with my 3G (Uh, which I guess is really just the camera lol) have been fixed with this model. In addition, you can never go wrong with a higher resolution screen.

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Well, after months of rumor and speculation, it finally got announced last night… Apple’s iPad.

But right from the get-go, sadly, I’ve found the whole thing totally underwhelming. I was expecting this thing to be totally awesome and to totally blow my world apart like the iPhone did… but sadly not so much.

Firstly is the name. I was really disappointed that they called it iPad. It is just too close to iPod. Period.With so many people out there, all with different and unique accents, I can so see myself having to clarify iPod and iPad at least once.

In addition, as per the Twitter feed, I’ve noticed a lot of people think it sounds very much like a tampon name as well, which definitely isn’t helping (Possibly the Wii all over again )
I’m not sure what the branding marketing strategy was behind that, but it failed. Epically. The rumored name that was floating around ‘iSlate’ sounded so much cooler, and definitely did not suffer any of the above problems.

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So just for those of you who missed it, Steam had a holiday sale over the Christmas holidays where they sold the majority of their games catalog at price discounts of up to 75% off.
Me being the stickler for bargains that I am, I couldn’t resist and bought every game I had been holding out for at that time. I probably spent something like 150 bucks, but I ended up with over 100 new games in my account. And these weren’t just small indie or casual games, either. I’m really looking forward to trying out Prototype, GRAW and Arkham Asylum… after I’ve finished playing Dragon Age.

So while I was settling down to playing my new games, I started to actually ponder the concept of digital distribution a little bit. I was feeling a lot happier and excited about getting and playing these games that I had downloaded, rather than bought from a store and was trying to figure out why.
I guess in its simplest form, it’s merely just buying digital content online and downloading it to your hard drive, as opposed to going to a shop and buying the exact same data on a physical form of media. On it’s own, this seems pretty uninspiring, so I started to think more about why I was feeling more satisfied about it. Here are some of the reasons I came up with.

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