Steve Rosenbaum's The 9/11 Memorial: Past, Present, and Future

On September 11th, 2001, the Web basically consisted of words, images, murky RealAudio sound, and a smattering of video that was a hassle to deal with, especially if you were still on dial-up. And tablets, in their modern, iPad-era form, didn’t exist at all. But a lot has happened in the past decade–and the tenth-anniversary coverage of the attacks and subsequent events include some remarkable creations which make use of today’s technology to do things that TV, books, magazines, and newspapers can’t.

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I haven’t written as much here recently as I like to, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been hard at work writing for other sites. Three new stories are up today:

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

What do an iPad 2 and an IBM ThinkPad from 1995 have in common? Not a whole lot–unless the iPad is equipped with Logitech’s new Fold-Up Keyboard and the ThinkPad is the famous 701 “Butterfly” model. Like the Butterfly ThinkPad, Logitech’s new gadget, which snaps onto the bottom of the iPad, packs a keyboard that’s wider than the case. As you lift up the iPad, the keyboard swivels out in two pieces–as shown in the first image above–and then pieces together. It’s also reminiscent of the Stowaway folding keyboard, a gadget which would be a wonderful iPhone accessory but which appears to no longer be available.

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All Things Digital’s Arik Hesseldahl reports that sales of HP’s TouchPad at Best Buy aren’t great. In fact, his source says that Best Buy has managed to sell less than ten percent of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has shipped to the retailer so far. It’s causing Best Buy some angst, Hesseldahl says.

HP’s rapid move to cut the TouchPad’s price apparently hasn’t goosed demand, at least sufficiently: according to an analyst Hesseldahl quotes, consumers think that the price might tumble even further. And so rather than buy a cheap TouchPad now, they’re waiting for even cheaper TouchPads that could be in the works.

I like competition and I like the TouchPad’s WebOS software, so I’m rooting for some incarnation of HP’s product to be a winner that sells well. But it’s not the least bit startling to see it get off to a slow start. The first reviews of the TouchPad–here’s mine–were pretty much unanimously lukewarm at best, pointing out bugs, performance issues, and a general lack of apps. Even if you were intrigued by the TouchPad, the reviews would leave you thinking that it made sense to wait rather than rush out and buy one.

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I’m not sure what to call the category of news app–mostly, but not exclusively, seen on the iPad–that includes Flipboard, Float, News 360, Pulse News, Taptu, Zite, and other contenders. All I know is that it’s booming–and that AOL’s Editions, which debuted this week, is the newest example. (Also the first one I can think of from a big company rather than a spunky startup.)

Like Flipboard and its rivals, Editions pulls together news stories from all over, and then stitches them together into a personalized magazine-like digital publication. It takes the “magazine-like” part very seriously: Each edition of Editions has a cover (complete with mailing label) and sections that apply a halftone-style to photos to make them look like printed material.

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Time Inc. is sticking its neck out in a big way, announcing Wednesday its intention to make available tablet versions of its entire U.S. magazine lineup available by the end of the year. If the plans are successful that would be 21 titles in all, and it would also be the first publisher to bring its entire catalog online.

The company makes mention of “leading platforms,” which leads me to believe that it’s referring to iOS and Android. It has also made  some of its magazines available on HP’s TouchPad — which runs WebOS — but it isn’t clear whether Time is including that in the guarantee.

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Since buying my iPad 2, I’ve found myself consuming more digital video than ever. This is especially true in the mornings, as I lay in bed trying to catch up on the news of the day (and watch Al Jazeera through its awesome iPad app).

Enter Targus and its upcoming Lap Lounge, an iPad 2 stand that is meant to do exactly what its name suggests: sit comfortably in your lap when you’re lounging around in the house, on the plane, and so forth.

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After accidentally being released a day early (and subsequently pulled), Skype’s iPad app is now available in the App Store for real. The release ends a long wait for those looking to Skype on their tablets: Skype with video on the iPhone has been available since the beginning of the year, and the iOS app itself for much longer than that.

Skype is playing up the benefits of video chatting on the big screen of the iPad, and I have to agree. While it’s nice to video chat from your phone, I’ve always thought video conferencing does better on bigger screened devices.

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How can hard-drive companies jump on the iPad bandwagon? Seagate and Hitachi have created wireless drives designed to work with Apple’s tablet. Iomega is taking another approach. Its Mac Companion Hard Drive is a standard USB hard disk–and a desktop model at that–designed to charge an iPad.

As seen above, the Companion features an Apple-esque design and is sized to fit on the stand of an iMac or Apple monitor. It can connect to a Mac via FireWire 400/800 or USB 2.0, and has both a two-port USB 2.0 hub and the high-powered charging port required by the iPad.  (The USB 2.0 is a tipoff that Iomega really intends this drive for Mac users–otherwise, the company has been aggressively moving to USB 3.0, a technology which no Mac yet supports.)

The Companion is available in 1TB ($195) and 2TB ($295) versions, carries a three-year warranty, and will be available only at the Apple Store at first.

Some people review phones and tablets. My friend Ray Soneira, the display guru who runs DisplayMate, reviews phone displays and tablet displays–and he just published an update to his ongoing review of tablet screens. Executive summary: He thinks that Apple’s iPad 2 and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 are both really good, and very close–and that, even though the Tab’s colors are oversaturated, it’s slightly better than the iPad overall. None of the other tablets he tried rival the iPad and the Tab.

Ray also points out an important fact that many of us trip up on: Android tablets with 10.1″ screens don’t give you more real estate than the 9.7″ iPad 2.

Apple’s new App Store policies–the ones I worried about when they were announced months ago–have kicked in. From now on, app makers who sell content such as books and music have two ways of making it available. They can use Apple’s In-App Purchase system to sell content within the app (giving Apple a 30 percent commission). Or they can sell it directly to consumers through their own venues, such as Web-based stores–but can include no mentions or links relating to that fact in the iOS app itself.

Many third-party developers are choosing one route or the other without any public fuss. Canadian e-book purveyor Kobo is being a tad more prickly. It’s updated its iOS app with a new version that meets the new rules–it lets you read books you’ve purchased, but provides no way to buy them or register for a Kobo account, nor any explanation of how to do so. But it’s also announcing plans to build an HTML5 e-reading app which will work in the iOS browser–and which it’ll control itself, with no requirement that it follow Apple’s rules. And the company’s chief iOS architect is detailing the Byzantine approval process which the Kobo app had to go through before Apple would finally approve it. (The essentially similar Borders app wasn’t forced to jump through as many hoops, a reminder of the biggest problem with App Store rules: they’re sometimes applied in an inconsistent, apparently arbitrary fashion.)

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StumbleUpon has always been one of my favorite iPad apps, an endless time-waster that with the press of a button sends you to seemingly random corners of the Internet. Now, it’s received a facelift.

The new app includes sorting options for photos, videos and news, along with a category view that makes it easier to find pages based on your topics of interest. StumbleUpon’s iPad app has also gained a couple of swipe-based gestures, allowing you to move forward and backward by dragging a finger across the screen.

So far, so good. But there’s one feature I could do without, and would like the option to disable: Every time you stumble to a new page, a message on top of the screen lists the username of a stranger who liked what he or she saw. Tapping the name takes you to that user’s profile, which lists age, gender and recent activity, and provides options for following that user.

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Apple rumors, in case you hadn’t noticed, are everywhere. There are tons of them–especially on future iPhones and iPads. And if you don’t like a particular one, wait a day or two–another one will come along that confidently says that the first one was hogwash.

As I’ve mentioned here, perhaps too often, I don’t bother to report most Apple rumors here. (I do cover ones that seems utterly plausible or utterly implausible–they’re the two best kind.) I do read them on other sites, though. And I’ve decided to perform a public service by rounding up a bunch of them. I figure that the chances are virtually 100 percent that at least a handful of the “scoops” after the jump are spot on. Your job is to figure out which ones!

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I’ve sort of given up on keeping track of Apple rumors (which is why I cheerfully ignore most of ‘em and never write about them here). But here’s Josh Topolsky of This is My Next with a snapshot of the current thinking on the question “When will we see the next iPhone and iPad, and what will they look like?“

My iPad is bursting at the seams with wonderful applications. If I had to pick just one of them as the romantic ideal of what a tablet app can and should be, it would be Flipboard. This “social magazine”–which brings together stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and the entire Web into a wonderfully browsable package–simply couldn’t have existed in the pre-iPad era. And its user interface is a thing of wonder: an amazingly polished, fun experience that both feels like a magazine and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s not just the best one I’ve seen on an iPad app; it’s one of the best ones I’ve seen on anything.

Can you tell that I kind of like this program? Well, now I like it even more. The company is rolling out an update today, and cofounder Mike McCue briefed me on it last week and gave me the chance to spend a couple of days with it before it hit the App Store.

Flipboard hasn’t changed radically, but there are a bunch of improvements that make it even more….well, Flipboardy.

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It’s a big week for interesting stats relating to Internet usage breakdowns by device. Comscore has released numbers that say that the iPad accounts for 97 percent of tablet usage on the Web–no shocker there. And cloud networking company Meraki has published some data based on device usage numbers from its customers networks:

Whenever I look at numbers like these, I try to remind myself that we don’t know how precisely they map to the world at large. But they’re still fun to ponder.

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