That's what John Swansburg says in this article in Slate. He tells us why and then asks his fellow writers to convince him of why he should love it. It's very cute and there is, in my opinion, a lot of truth in what he says. I have an iPad and I guess I would re-write the headline as: I hate my iPad on Tuesday, but then love it on Wednesday. Here's a snippet: I admit that I bought my iPad for the wrong reasons. I got one because it seemed like everyone I knew had gotten...

From their website: In August we launched a free iPad app. People seemed to like it—it shot to the top of the iTunes App Store charts, won praise from the New York Times and Gizmodo, and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times—but our readers also wrote in to suggest a few improvements. The two most common requests? It should let us save articles! And: It needs Instapaper support! Your wish is our command. Our latest update to the app allows users to save articles to read later (handy if you're storing up good reads for a plane ride or commute). And it also allows...

HP has come out with a new $799 Windows 7 tablet PC, called the Slate 500. Ars Technica’s Peter Bright has a brief look at it, finding that it is aimed squarely at businesses rather than consumers—don’t expect to be using it for e-reading in the home, unless you have a lot more money to burn than the average tablet consumer. The result is a device for corporations to run custom Windows applications on—healthcare, point-of-sale, banking, that kind of thing. This point is underscored by HP's marketing video. In these environments, the ability to run...

We’ve previously mentioned startup Kno’s plans to create a dual 14”-screened tablet device for viewing college textbooks in their original page size. However, now Kno has also announced plans for a less-expensive single-screened 14” slate. Like the double-screened model, the Kno tablet will be powered by a nVidia Tegra processor. It will have a touchscreen and a stylus for notetaking. Both the dual- and single-screen tablets are expected to ship by the end of the year. Kno has not announced pricing, save to say that the tablet will be “absolutely cheaper than the dual screen version,” and the...

On Slate, Farhad Manjoo is making a rather bold prediction concerning the pricing of Amazon’s Kindle. Only a short time after Jeff Bezos dropped the price to $189 and introduced a lower-priced wi-fi version for $139, Manjoo predicts Amazon will go even lower in time for the holiday season: I rarely make predictions about the tech business, but here goes: Before the holidays, Amazon will cut the price of the Wi-Fi Kindle to $99, and the 3G version will go for $150 or less. Amazon will do so, I think, not only to sell a...

Slate Magazine has released an iPad app.  It give access to the latest articles and blogs, political commentary, movies and television reviews and the daily news Explainer column and Slatest.  It also will have videos from Slate V, Slate's video site and Slate's daily podcasts. Slate has had an iPhone app available since May, 2010, but looking at the descriptions of the two it looks as if the iPad app is more complete.  Oddly, the iPhone app costs $1.99 while the iPad app is free....

Harry McCracken is an extremely nice fellow (I've met him) and runs the Technologizer - one of the best technology blogs on the web. He's just published a round-up, with pictures of iPad rivals.  He includes a description of each machine and also references to reviews where appropriate.  A great resource. ... Starting later this year, the iPad will be confronted by an army of other touchscreen machines, from potentially worthy opponents to shameless wannabees. Call ‘em iPadversaries, and read on for my first stab at accounting for (most of) them. I cheerfully admit that I’ve defined the...

Engadget reports that Verizon is getting a pair of e-book reading devices—one 7”, one 10”—in September, and the name “Entourage” has been thrown around in connection with them. Are they going to be made by the company Entourage, currently known for the dual-screened Edge? Are they going to be dual-screened like the Edge, or just tablets? Nobody knows at this point. On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different...

I haven't heard the name Marchall McLuhan (pictured at the left) in quite a while, but author Jan Swafford brings him up in a Slate article where he discusses McLuhan's concepts of "hot" and "cold" media. Here's a snippet: ... But I say again: We perceive words on-screen differently than in print. In the process of writing and teaching writing, I engage in regular experiments testing this theory. Here's how it works, with me and with most writers I know (because I've asked). I've used computers for more than 25 years. I draft prose on-screen, work it over until I can't...

David Morgenstern has an editorial on ZDNet in which he predicts a grim future for e-book device manufacturers that aren’t Apple. He notes that over the last few days, not one but two high-profile tablets have been cancelled—Microsoft’s two-screened Courier and HP’s Windows 7 slate—and he lays their cancellation squarely at the feet of the iPad. He also suggests that the three million unit guesstimate being tossed around for the Kindle device’s sales may be grossly overinflated, and it might well have sold below one million. (Though, given Amazon’s reticence to release numbers, either guess is probably equally valid.) Meanwhile,...

A study in contrasts: PC World and eWeek each look at the impending iPad launch from entirely opposite points of view. PC World notes that every new smartphone that comes out gets branded a potential “iPhone killer” (though it invariably never turns out to be one in fact), and asks the question, “What things might the iPad ‘kill’?” Among the possibilities are the Kindle—PC World notes that the iPad has already caused a spat between Amazon and Macmillan—and tablet PCs. (Flash, Java, and the desktop metaphor are mentioned as well, among others.) Even if the Kindle’s e-ink screen might cause less eyestrain...

A couple of days ago, I looked at some articles suggesting that the Internet was having a deleterious effect on attention spans. Little did I know when I was writing them that I was buying into a chain of “new media” scares going all the way back to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and beyond. Slashdot links to an article in Slate that goes over the history of these fears. Psychologist Vaughan Bell writes: Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of...