Could Comcast Derail Obama’s Broadband Agenda?

President Obama has made broadband a key part of his telecommunications agenda. To get there, he has tasked the Federal Communications Commission with the responsibility to make changes to Internet regulations and promote his “National Broadband Plan,” an ambitious effort to reform the industry and expand broadband access across the country.

There’s an elephant in the room however, and it’s name is Comcast. The telecommunications company is challenging the FCC’s authority on Internet regulation in court, and if successful it could seriously inhibit the agency’s efforts to move its plans forward. Comcast’s beef goes back to 2008, when the FCC censured the company for its bandwidth-throttling efforts against BitTorrent and others.

If the court rules in Comcast’s favor, the FCC may lose the necessary powers it requires in order to shift spectrum from television companies to wireless providers in order to advance broadband access. The agency also has other options, including reclassifying Internet service under more tightly regulated telephone service laws, but even that isn’t fraught with trouble.

Telecommunications companies would no doubt be unhappy that they wouldd be required to share lines with their competitors, and we all know that probably means lawsuits. It would also mean Internet providers would have to accept quite a bit more regulation then they’ve been used to. More lawsuits. All in all, the Comcast case really seems to hold the key to Obama’s broadband plans.

Personally, I find it sad that it has come to this to decide whether this country really gets serious with high-speed Internet access. I know among the more conservative readers on here, government regulation is not very popular. But its a simple fact in this capitalist society that the almighty dollar is what companies are most interested in. Regulation does put a crimp on profits, and I believe nobody can really argue that.

We’re getting to the point where the Internet is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity. At that point, regulation of the industry is necessary in order to ensure that it is accessible by all, rather than only where it is the most highly profitable. Of course, its not going to be as profitable for a company to offer Internet access in rural North Dakota as downtown Los Angeles.

But should access be determined by geographical location, or potential profit margins? Therein lies the argument. And now it appears a court case in Washington, DC could possibly set the course of broadband access for years to come.

Game-Changers Are Usually Imperfect

The iPad reviews continue to roll in, and while most are extremely favorable–here are Engadget and Macworld–there are certainly voices of dissent out there. Dave Winer agrees with Cory Doctorow that it’s a toy. And Paul Thurrott, disappointed by the non-widescreen design, lack of cameras, and weight of the thing, says that folks who think the iPad is a game-changer are tools.

Is the iPad a game changer? It looks that way to me. But I already know that products don’t have to be perfect to be landmarks. The original Mac, for instance, was so short on RAM that it was barely usable for everyday tasks. The first iPhone was a 2G phone that arrived when there were plenty of good 3G phones out there. But does anyone out there want to make the case that they weren’t game-changers?

In both cases, the products’ deficiencies didn’t matter, because the things that were right–especially the software–were brilliantly right. And within a year or so, Apple followed up with upgraded versions that fixed the biggest issues.

Would a widescreen iPad with two cameras and less heft be more appealing than the machine Apple released on Saturday? You betcha. Will there be tablets from other companies with wider screens, cameras, and weight? Sure–but it’s rare that any product becomes a breakthrough via impressive specs alone.

Before Saturday, when people asked me how important the iPad was going to be, I told them to judge it not by the sum of the device that Apple released this week. iPad is a platform, and platforms are processes–so if you’re trying to figure out if iPad is a big deal, envision the one that Apple will release a year from now. Then decide.

5Words: Microsoft Has an Event, Too

Microsoft mystery event next week.

iPad users report Wi-Fi issues.

How fast’s the iPad CPU?

iPad: actually good for Amazon?

Adobe’s first iPad app, Ideas.

Snopes.com, the Web’s great debunker.

Zune HD update is available.

A pocket for your iPad.

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Apple to Show Off iPhone OS 4.0

Apple is sending out invitations to an April 8th event in Cupertino that promises to show off iPhone OS 4.0 — and it’s believed we’ll finally get third party multitasking if the reports are right.

HP Teases Us With Its Slate Again

Today’s the first weekday of the post-iPad era, and HP is once again talking up its upcoming Windows 7-based slate computer. Here’s a video it released:

Looks slick–but it’s a lot easier to make a gizmo look slick in a promotional video than in real life, of course. (If only every car looked as good in a driveway as it does in TV commercials.)

The big question about the HP device is how much effort the company has put into putting a slate-oriented interface on top of Windows 7. As of the last time I asked Microsoft, it said it didn’t have plans to release a version of Windows 7 tailored especially for tablets. So it’s up to HP to make its device truly finger-friendly. With its TouchSmart PCs, the company has done a much better job than anyone else of figuring out how to integrate touch into the Windows experience. But as the iPad shows, tablets work best if their interface was designed for touch from the ground up, rather than being a desktop interface that’s been rejiggered for touch. And the iPad sets the bar very, very high.

The Great iPad Type-Off

Can an iPad replace a notebook, at least for casual use on a weekend jaunt? That’s actually several questions rolled into one. And one of the most important ones is “How’s the keyboard?”

I decided to do a test–a very unscientific one–to see how quickly I could bang out text on the iPad, in both its landscape and portrait orientations. A few notes on this undertaking:

• I tested the iPad against a 15-inch MacBook Pro (with an excellent full-sized keyboard), an Asus EeePC 1000HE (a netbook with a pretty good keyboard by netbook standards), and an iPhone 3GS (with a keyboard that crams the same basic idea as the iPad one into far less space).
• On each device, I typed the English lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim’s song “The Girl From Ipanema” (which, I should note, are by Norman Gimbel). I chose this test for a practical reason: I know the words by heart, and they therefore test my typing speed, not my ability to transcribe a passage I’m unfamiliar with.
• I never took typing lessons and  therefore type idiosyncratically; Wikipedia tells me my speed is average. If you’re an ace touch typist, your results might vary a lot.
• On the iPhone, I typed with two thumbs in portrait mode, and one finger in landscape mode. On everything else, I typed with both hands, as I would on any standard keyboard.
• On all the devices, I took advantage of autocorrection and autocapitalization where possible, and otherwise corrected my own errors as I typed.
• For each device, I practiced a few times, then typed the passage and timed my speed with a stopwatch.

How’d the iPad stack up? After the jump, the results.

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300,000 iPads Sold on Saturday? Not Too Shabby, But…

Apple said Monday that it had sold over 300,000 iPads on Saturday, which could be taken as a good sign of the device’s potential success. One big wildcard here–these sales also include not only pre-orders for the Wi-Fi-only iPad but also deliveries to the company’s retail partners as well. In other words, not every one of those 300,000 iPads may be in the hands of a consumer yet. On the other hand, the figure doesn’t include pre-orders for the 3G iPad which is due out late this month.

Apple’s new book store did well too, with a quarter million books downloaded on Saturday, and CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement that new iPad owners were downloading an average of about one book and three applications within hours of unpacking the device. All in all, iPad’s launch numbers were very similar to the launch of the initial iPhone.

Some analysts had gone way overboard in their predictions, with Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster being the most overly aggressive with projected sales of 650,000+ in the first 24 hours. Much of this probably had to do with the overwhelming hype surrounding the device, which arguably was unwarranted in most cases. Lines for the iPad, as described by our own Harry McCracken, were in most cases much smaller than that for the first iPhone.

The real test for the viability of this device remains in these weeks following the launch. Will the device continue to sell after the initial flurry of activity? Will we see another spike in purchasing when the WiFi+3G model releases late this month? It’s hard to say. Price will likely play a large part in how this does, and the company has not been shy to say publicly it will tweak prices to meet its sales goals.

The answer will come when we get a better look at the demographics of its buyers. If its just the techie/Apple faithful/Gotta-have-it crowd, the iPad could be Apple’s next Cube. However, if Ma and Pa begin snagging their own iPads, then we know Apple’s onto something.

As much as I can’t wait to get one myself, I’m still undecided here on how I think it will do. It’s a big gamble for Apple, one I’m sure they’ll hope will pay off.

Eleven Things I Now Know About the iPad

In the end, you have to try it for yourself. The world is full of people who formed fierce opinions about the iPad not only before they’d used one but before they knew anything for sure about it. But this gizmo is something new. And if you think you can come to any conclusions about it by thinking of it as either a giant iPhone or a netbook with the keyboard chopped off, you’re wrong.

I woke up at 5am on Saturday, drove to my neighborhood Apple Store, and ended up near the front of the queue of first-day iPad buyers. I was out the door with a unit in hand at 9:15am, and spent the rest of Saturday (and Sunday morning) with it in hand, exploring the built-in apps, downloading a gaggle of third-party ones, and generally trying to form more definitive impressions than I was able to get during my brief hands-on time with an iPad at January’s launch event.

This isn’t a comprehensive review–I’m not going to bemoan the lack of Flash, multitasking, and a camera, or repeat any impressions that you can come to without spending time by yourself with an iPad. I’m just going to tell you eleven significant things I know about the thing that I didn’t know–at least for sure–on Friday night.

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iPad Gaming Gives New Life to the Touch Screen

The iPad’s most striking feature is its large touch screen, but for most apps, that boils down to more real estate for menus, information or video. In video games, the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen shines as an input device in ways that the iPhone and iPod Touch never could.

This became most apparent to me, oddly enough, while playing some iPhone games pixel-doubled to fill the iPad screen. Suddenly, it seemed like I had an unfair advantage. I was slaughtering deadly viruses in Nano Fighter, a fast-paced shooter that uses virtual joysticks to steer your vessel and fire. I could neatly stack blocks in Topple 2. Jupiter Lander for the Commodore 64 app (free today, by the way) no longer seemed impossible.

For video games that require button-like input, the iPhone’s touch screen is a concession. Sure, it makes tower defense and card games more fun, but any attempts to demand precise input or emulate a game console controller lead to frustration.

The iPad is a major improvement simply because it allows for better accuracy. For button-based games, it’s not perfect, in the same way that the iPad’s virtual keyboard can’t replace the feel a physical one, but like the keyboard, it’s a vast improvement over anything with a sub-4-inch screen.

The iPhone’s advantage remains its accelerometer. You don’t gain any accuracy by twisting and turning the iPad in a racing game, and it feels clumsier and nerdier to do so. But the iPad makes the most compelling case for touch-based controls I’ve seen yet.

A Report from the iLine

Greetings from the outside of the Stonestown Mall in San Francisco, where it’s cold, dark, and desolate–and I’m the fourth person (and third adult) in line to buy an iPad. I got here at 5:30am, about 90 minutes after the first gent in line. And there’s some very sophisticated discussion of iPads, iPhones, and iMacs going on ahead of me.

The Apple Store folks, who have showed up late in the game when I’ve been here to buy iPhones, are already here. They just set up a velvet rope line for us to wait behind–hey, we’re an unruly bunch, and there are so many people here at 6:20am for reasons other than to buy iPads–and have supplied us with free water.

Other than that, not much is going on here. If anything newsworthy happens, I’ll report back, either here or on Twitter. See you later today with more iPad stuff.

Gmail Gets iPad-ized

Google’s version of Gmail for the iPhone, Android, and WebOS is one of the slickest Web-based mobile services out there–and its iPad edition looks pretty impressive, too.

Microsoft Comes to Its Senses

It’s the biggest news in name changes since the iPhone 3G S became the iPhone 3GS after its release: Windows Phone 7 Series is now–thank goodness–just Windows Phone 7.

You’ve Got iPad Questions. I’ll Try to Give You Answers

I’ve enjoyed reading the early iPad reviews, but much of what they have to say–pro and con–simply recaps things we already knew about the gizmo. Tomorrow morning, Apple Store willing, I’ll have an iPad of my own. And I’m going to do my darndest to spend relatively little time repeating stuff you already know. (This may be a wild rumor, but I’ve heard it may not support Flash!)

Got any questions about it that you haven’t seen answered by anyone just yet? Lemme know–and I’ll do my darndest to answer them as soon as I can…

The Case(s) Against the iPad

Two smart people have written stirring pieces arguing against buying an iPad. And the fascinating thing is, the two arguments have almost nothing in common.

Over at Fast Company, Gina Trapani says you shouldn’t buy an iPad because they’re too pricey and aren’t fully baked yet. Hold off until they go more completely mainstream, she advises.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow thinks you shouldn’t buy an iPad because they’re already too bland and commercial: He wants an iPad you can crack open and hack, and one without any DRM and the App Store’s limitations on what you can install on the gizmo.

And me? Well, I agree with points in both pieces without buying either argument. Like Trapani, I think lots of intelligent folks won’t even consider buying an iPad until the second-generation version comes along. (I said so in a piece I wrote for FoxNews.com, and have never regretted holding off on the iPhone until the 3G model arrived.) And like Doctorow, I’m unhappy with both the idea of Apple being the only distributor of iPhone/iPad software and many, many things about how it’s performed in that role.

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Bento Comes to the iPad

This is definitely a minority opinion. But when I sat in the audience at Apple’s iPad launch back in January, the single thing that got me most excited was the demos of iPad versions of Apple’s iWork office-suite apps. Computer manufacturers have been trying to sell tablets as productivity devices for eons, but Apple actually reimagined its programs’ user interfaces for tablet use, rather than slapping a few touch features on otherwise mundane desktop software.

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eBay’s iPad App: Highly Visual

eBay, which rolled out a couple of new iPhone apps earlier this week, plans to be on the iPad the moment it launches on Saturday. I haven’t even seen the eBay app on a simulated iPad yet, but folks from eBay showed me some images and explained the thinking behind the app. Rather than duplicating the iPhone version or bringing each and every feature from eBay.com, they decided to focus on making the iPad app the most visual incarnation of the service to date–one that feels like window shopping in the real world, and is optimized for browsing the service from the comfort of a sofa or easy chair.

So the classic eBay list of items is gone–you find stuff to buy or bid on via a gallery of images in which each picture is quite large, and you use your fingertip to scroll through a never-ending procesion of products–they’re not broken into multiple pages. When you find items you like, you can view pictures that fill the iPad screen.

Sounds like a logical approach to take–and I’m curious whether the iPad’s already-legendary zippiness makes trolling through eBay even more addictive. After the jump, a few screen shots of the app (in the form of a mini-slideshow–I’m experimenting with a new WordPress feature).

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