The GF2 served me well. It’s a great little travel camera, but the lack of dedicated hardware controls made it feel a little toy-like, despite the excellent implementation of its touch screen controls. The GF2 also lacked an external shutter release, a feature I use constantly for macro shots or when on a tripod. Long exposures take as long to process as your shutter release time – a 30 second exposure takes 30 seconds to finish recording – that’s pure waiting time when you can’t take another shot. It makes the GF2 useless for some types of time-lapse photography.

Which brings us to the GX1. Announced late in 2011, the GX1 promised to be the true successor to the now cult-status GF1, the origin of the micro-four-thirds species. With the updated 16MP sensor replacing the now aged 12MP LiveMOS sensor and a processor that’s been tweaked and upgraded from the top-end G3, the GX1 is probably the fastest m4/3 camera in Panasonic’s lineup.

The camera starts up and is ready to fire in just over a second (depending on lens). DPReview clocked power to exposure time at around 1.4s in their excellent review. Subsequent shots are a mere 0.2s including auto-focus. Long exposure shots are recorded with very little delay regardless of exposure time. Touch screen controls feel responsive and snappy for the most part, the exceptions being a few animated UI elements that feel a tad sluggish (the touch tabs interface, for instance). Fortunately, for most of these touchscreen features, there are now dedicated hardware controls to access functions directly.

Construction-wise, the GX1 is a solid little camera. The addition of the extra chunky rubber grip on the front feels good in the hand, though it does feel like there isn’t a lot of space for your thumb on the rubber grip surrounding the command dial. That said, I don’t think I’ve accidentally hit any of the controls with my thumb during shooting. It’s a fairly comfortable camera to hold with one hand if you need to. Shutter release feel is excellent with good feedback on half-presses.

Controls

The controls are comprehensive. Two hardware Fn buttons are assignable and an additional two are available in the touch tab interface. By default they’re set to Auto Exposure for Fn1, AF/AE Lock for Fn2, and Fn3 and 4 are set to adjust display paramaters (level guide and histogram respectively). These are pretty sane defaults and I like the positions of Fn1 and Fn2 for auto exposure and AF/AE lock well enough. Astoundingly, the button labeling on the four-position buttons are silver on silver guaranteeing they’re impossible to read in any light. Fortunately, you’ll get to know them pretty quickly. I chose the “silver” body for my GX1 and the other button labels are white on the somewhat dark silver body. Also not super-easy to read, but I still like the nearly titanium color of the aluminum body.

One slightly surprising change is the single control dial (referred to as Rear Dial in the manual) has been made slightly smaller on the GX1. This means you need more rotations to accomplish the same change as on previous models. A minor point but one that makes the control dial feel a little bit clunky. I’m also not a huge fan of the feel of this control. I’d prefer something more solid with better feel. As probably the single-most heavily used control after the shutter release, it’s a control I’d prefer had better tactility. This does however encourage use of the auto exposure button on Fn1 when shooting in any of the manual exposure modes. The rocking power switch next to the excellent mode dial on top has a somewhat cheap feel to it as well. I’m worried that I’ll break it off someday. The battery and memory card door on the bottom is the only other piece of plastic on the body that feels like it could break if I weren’t careful. I’d probably have to be a complete ass to manage that though as when it’s closed, it’s fairly tight.

My only other quibble with this camera is the inclusion of Panasonic’s iA button. iA stands for “Intelligent Auto” and is a feature for novice shooters who just want a point and shoot. Dedicating a full button on the top plate for this feature is pretty annoying on a camera aimed at enthusiast shooters. I’d far prefer it were programmable. Your only option is to set the iA button to “click and hold” to eliminate accidental presses. If you’re into iA mode, it lights up in a garish blue when activated letting the world know that you don’t know how to use your camera.

Video

Other fun features on the mode dial are various scene and creative modes that let you alter the colors and shooting characteristics if you’re into the whole instagram thing and shoot in JPEG. One nice feature of these modes is that they work when shooting video. This gives you an easy way to shoot in sepia or black and white without requiring time-consuming post-processing on your computer. More-importantly, the custom white balance modes also function in movie recording. If you want to shoot with a cyan or orange filter or green up your fluorescent lights like you’re in an episode of CSI, you can do it.

These are great little cameras for video and honestly one of the main reasons I became interested in micro 4/3. They take a bit of getting used to. Some lenses have different focusing characteristics and if you’re shooting in continuous auto-focus they tend to hunt a bit. This is where the touch screen auto-focus really comes in handy. Setting yourself in single shot auto-focus and using the touch screen to pick your focus point mid-shot (called “rack-focus”) or using face or target tracking autofocus modes let you shoot a scene with impressive results. Something I still need more practice with.

The GX1 has returned to offering a stereo condenser mic on the top, a feature missing from the GF3. I don’t believe it’s possible to attach a hot-shoe mounted stereo mic as is possible on the more video-focused GH2 though for my needs, the built-in mic is just fine.

Conclusion

So there you have it! The GX1 is a superb “little” walking around camera. With the 14mm pancake lens or the 14-42mm power-zoom, it’s quite pocketable. Having traveled with it a couple of times now, I have no qualms about carrying it in a small camera bag, you can pack a surprising amount of photo gear into a compact carrier. Would this replace my Nikon DSLR? Probably not (14 bit color in the Nikon, multiple exposure capabilities, a whole different range of high quality lenses, etc.). But for travel or street shooting, I think the GX1 and a couple of hot primes fits the bill nicely.

A high ISO test shot, cleaned up in Light Room.

Camera Pron with the 45mm Leica 2.8 Macro.

This was very distressing to me. Especially as I’m going to be going to a photo workshop very soon now.

I called Ivan’s, our local camera shop and asked them about the chances of getting it repaired. “Not very good,” was the gist of the reply. Apparently there’s a backlog and some cameras are taking several months to get fixed if it needs parts that aren’t in Canada. And there is apparently a bit of a parts shortfall these days. Not good at all.

He did give me Nikon Canada‘s number though and suggested I give them a try. “Maybe if they get a call from a customer, they’ll be able to help you out.”

This gave me a bit of hope. I called The Canadian Source of All Things Nikon and was shocked to hear a human answer the phone after the first ring. She transferred me directly to customer service who then sent me directly to the parts department. I explained that I had a broken release switch, and did they have another? “Let me check,” the parts tech said and put me on hold. She came back promptly and said she’d have to call me back. I left her my details and hung up.

Hunh!

She didn’t call back that day so I ordered a USB cable from Amazon. I could still get about 300 14-bit RAW shots onto my 8GB CF card before I filled it up. More if I shot in 12-bit, which I usually do anyway. My hopes of hearing back from Nikon were not great at this point, but I held on.

The next day, Deb asks me if I’d seen any results on the web for my broken button. I said I hadn’t. My search string was weak, but she managed to find this thread on the D200/D300 Users Group on Flickr almost right away. Apparently it’s a pretty common thing. Deb also read through and discovered that by prying the rubber grip back, it exposes a catch release slot over the door. With her fingernails and a toothpick, she was able to pop the door open. Nice, though repeated applications of this hack would almost surely destroy the rubber grip on the back and compromise the dust seals there.

Later, I downloaded a D300 Repair manual. It’s easy. Just search for that and grab a PDF.

Then a little after noon, the phone rang. I recognized the 905 number and greeted the parts technician. “We have your part!” she said, excitedly, then paused. “… but we can only ship it via Purolator”. I laughed and said I didn’t mind paying $15 dollars shipping for what must be a pretty cheap part (it’s 5 bucks). She sounded relieved and I gave her my shipping info. She said it’d be there in a couple of days.

Wow!

I am so used to having dismal customer support experiences that I was totally unprepared for how awesome Nikon would be to deal with. In fact, I expected nothing to come of this and was considering all kinds of crazy options. Deb kept telling me that I should “just go and buy a D7000″ but I was pretty uninterested in doing that. My 4 year old non-S D300 is such a familiar machine that I didn’t want to give up on it. I don’t care that it doesn’t shoot video or has fewer megapixels. I love the control layout and I can pretty much run the whole thing in my sleep. Or at night. In the dark.

I’ll take some pictures when the switch arrives and document the repair for others in case they need it. I probably should’ve ordered two replacement switches for when this one fails in another 4 years.

And, as I was writing that last sentence, the Purolator guy rang my doorbell with the switch. Honestly, I’m a little amazed at just how awesome this is. Total time to receiving this part is under 48 hours since I placed the call. All done over the phone, no internets clogging up the communications. Just humans. Thanks, Nikon!

And then things started getting interesting. I heard about the Fujifilm X100 around CES (or was it Photokina?) earlier this year and it sounded pretty special, even without any actual units capable of producing images, people were going nuts over it. Sporting a proper Fujinon 35mm-equivalent F2 fixed lens, this was a totally different point and shoot. A range finder camera with an innovative prism allowing it to work as either a straight optical or an electronic viewfinder. And man, it looked great.

Unfortunately, once the hardware started shipping, the reviews weren’t off the charts. With a $1200 price tag, I’d kind of expect this little gem to be the best thing short of a Leica M9 you can fit in your jacket. While the image quality is great, the performance seems a little average. Noticeable shutter lag and some confusing controls make for a fiddly experience and more than likely, some lost shots. Then again, I’ve been eating up CoffeeGeek‘s reviews of his X100 and he’s making it sound pretty sweet. They’re also, apparently not available due to manufacturing shortages in Japan. If you’ve got one, consider yourself very lucky.

Enter the GF2. I did a bunch of reading, comparing some of the different available cameras like the Olympus E-PL2, the Canon G12 and the S95 as well as the new Nikon P7000 and Lumix LX5 and the Sony NEX3. The Micro Four Thirds (m4:3) cameras were looking more and more interesting. Despite an aging sensor, the Panasonic GF2 had some very innovative features. Not all reviewers were keen on the touch screen, but I was willing to give it a shot (or several thousand).

One big advantage over the fixed zooms was the interchangeable lens format. I wanted to keep the camera as compact as possible while providing a solid, fast lens. My primary focal range when I’m walking around with my D300 is a 24mm (38mm equivalent on full frame) which mapped very closely to the Panasonic 20mm F1.7. As a pancake lens, it’s quite compact, though not quite as svelte as the 14mm F2.5 pancake that came with it.

In addition to some processing improvements over the GF1, the GF2 eschews many of its predecessors’ hardware controls in favor of a very well-implemented touch screen system. This was a concern of mine and something some reviewers haven’t been too kind about, proclaiming the GF2 a  “dumbed-down” camera. In practice though, I find the touch-screen both very intuitive and surprisingly fast to access frequently-used controls. The touch screen controls are very customizable via the Q-menu functions allowing you to set your preferred controls on a dock-like, scrollable menu. Augmenting the touch screen is a command dial which does dual-duty as an extra selection button. In manual mode, the command dial toggles between F-stops and shutter speed. In aperture priority, between aperture and exposure adjustment.

It is also Very Fast. Not just for a point-and-shoot, either. The GF2 is under a second from power-on to recording a shot. Shutter response is instantaneous with no noticeable lag. Focus is quick and intelligent. The 23-point AF system has a bunch of features I haven’t really played with yet. I did play a little with the focus-tracking system where you select a subject on the touch screen and the camera magically keeps it in focus as it moves around.

My one beef is the Q-menu button does double duty as a programmable Function button. There’s one other button on the top of the camera that serves as a “noob” button for novices, the GF2′s “Intelligent Auto” button would be a lot more useful if it were programmable to something else. I don’t see myself ever using iA mode. Maybe a firmware update will provide a programming option. Please. In any case, the one programmable button means having to use the screen to access the Q-menu feature if you want to program the button to do something else.

Image quality from the supplied 14mm lens is excellent. The optional 20mm pancake lens is even better, providing great low-light performance and impressive bokeh. Lens distortion on both lenses is surprisingly minimal. Noise-levels at ISO 800 are stellar. Even up to 1600, you can take a decent shot – the Foveon X3 sensor giving a nice film-like grain. Color noise is acceptable and easily removed in a decent image editor.

Yes. I like this camera a lot. Having spent a week with it in a bunch of different lighting situations, I’m more than happy with the pictures that come out of it. I’m really happy to have a portable, well-built camera to carry around.

See some more pics here.

[update, official Rogers update available via this thread: http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Android/message-id/927]

Now that Rogers has finally released a Froyo update for the Streak, I think my own upgrade exploits are a little less necessary for the average human. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any reviews of the Rogers version yet, but I have a hard time believing it works as well as DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid firmwares. I’m using 1.8.0 now (aka Chernobyl Meltdown) and it seems to work very very well. He’s done a great job of packaging up a ROM with useful features and software and I recommend it heartily.

My own upgrade path took me all over the internet. With some helpful pointers from @gav_taylor on twitter, I found the XDA forums and from there, links to a trove of firmware options tailored (pun!) to my very needs. I started with an O2 version of the ROM which made my radios think they were operating somewhere in England and unable to work in high-speed mode on Rogers. But at least I could see the device’s potential. From there, I upgraded to a stock Dell 2.2 ROM (v318) and finally migrated to StreakDroid 1.6 (still Froyo, despite the confusing numbering). It was tricky, required a lot of removing the battery, and felt like I was going to brick my device at any second. Since then, DJ_Steve’s had two more releases, 1.7.0 and 1.8.0. I just installed the latter yesterday and it doesn’t seem very different from 1.7.0. I think it’s mostly a bug-fix release. Battery life seems improved, I think. [and so does jdmcivic, it appears]

So now that I’ve got this Froyo thing what do I think?

It makes a helluva difference for starters. It takes this smallish slab of metal and glass and plastic and turns it from being a cumbersome, graphically antiquated toy to something you can actually use and even enjoy. Froyo looks good and works well on this device. DJ_Steve’s tweaks make the Streak feel like a pretty capable device and adds some extra glitz to the environment. App switching is instantanous. LauncherPro (thanks for the rec, madhava!) with all the eye candy turned up to full is silky smooth. It runs very well, but is a little battery intensive (more on that in my review of the hardware). The Gingerbread keyboard is a huge improvement, especially with swype disabled.

There’s already a huge array of software available for Android. I was amazed to see the number of entries in the store is comparable to the iTunes app store, if not ahead of it now. Of course, there are some caveats. Not all of the software I’ve tested is as high quality as most of the featured items on the iTunes app store. The bar to entry feels a bit lower. That said, there are whole classes of application available for Android you just can’t get on iTunes. File managers, wifi hotspots (unnecessary with Froyo which has that capability built-in), rooting tools for the hacker-minded.

Appz

Like the iTunes App Store, one of the weakest aspects of the Android Marketplace is the application itself. There is a cool alternative for Android users though. I recommend AppBrain for managing your applications. It has some extra features like notifying you when your apps have updates and the ability to sync your installed apps. Highly recommended.

For music players, WinAmp seems like a pretty capable player. I haven’t played with the desktop version yet on Windows which will allow syncing and file management, but it looks like a pretty solid player. It comes with some widgets for controlling the app from your desktop launcher too. There’s also Songbird which I was surprised to find in here. There are various built-in music player apps as well.

Some apps have jumped  the AppStore boundary and are available in both Android and iTunes. Kindle for one I’ll be watching closely over the coming months as Apple’s tyrannical bid for Moar Monayz unfolds. I will say that the Android version feels like it’s a bit behind the iPhone version. Some features are missing (syncing books not purchased from the Kindle store) and some of the polish on the iTunes version. The music identifier Shazam is also here as well as the omnipresent Angry Birds. I haven’t tested either of these, but it’s nice to see that some of my favorites are on both platforms. It’ll make the eventual total migration less painful.

One completely absent category is the media player. Whither video players galore? I was totally shocked to see that the base media player that ships with Froyo is a really basic, incapable device mostly included to play recorded videos from the camera app. Apparently Android is turning on accelerated video in some future release of Android. I have no idea what codecs that will include (hopefully WebM?) or what that’ll mean for video apps like VLC who I hear is working on a port. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as one of the best parts of my iPad is its ability to play glorious, high-quality video (admittedly after some transcoding in Handbrake). I have no doubt it will come, but it’s absence feels strange and unexpected. It is a let down.

Also exciting to see several web browsers on offer. The two I’ve been playing with most are the Firefox beta and Miren. I hear good things about Dolphin too. All of these are easily better than the default browser that Android ships with and it begs the question: Do Android devs talk to Chrome devs? Then again, I’m happy to have Firefox there so I don’t really care.

They wouldn’t let me.

The agent informed me that the device was enroute to their shipping depot. I boggled at him. Did he know how long it would take? No. Could I get a tracking number? No. Was there anything else he could do for me today? I guess not!

So I waited. I pretty much gave up on ever seeing it. And naturally, that’s when it showed up.

First blog post written on it using the android wordpress app. I’ll follow up with my impressions of the Dell Streak (or Steak as I’ve come to call it) soon.

I’ve longed for a decent small keyboard for many spins round the sun now. It seems like a simple thing. Make a keyboard with no number pad with a bunch of keys on it suitable for a Windows computer. Simple! It should be wired with a USB connector because I don’t want to fiddle with batteries or yet another USB wireless dongle. The keys should be decent with good tactile feedback. They should also be full-sized. It should do these things and take up as little space on my desk as possible.

Enter the XGene Multimedia Mini Keyboard. Take a moment to have a look at it.

That’s it. Sitting above my Apple Wireless keyboard. You’ll note that I have different requirements for my PC keyboard compared to my Mac’s, otherwise, I’d just use one of those. So far, keyfeel is pretty solid. It requires a bit of force to type on this thing. I’ve had a couple of keys not register because I wasn’t typing hard enough. The keys themselves get a little tiny when you get out to the edges of the board. The outside right edge is bordered by home/page-up/down/end which means that they’ve shrunk the backspace, backslash and enter keys to accommodate. The same goes for the keys on the left, the tab, caps lock (now a control key) and escape keys are pretty smallish.

Backspace is probably the worst of the bunch because it’s surrounded by a home key, the equal sign, and the decades old and mysterious PrtSc, Scroll Lock and Pause Break keys. Trying to erase a mistake often leads to more mistakes and funny beeps. The backspace key should probably cover the whole top right of the keyboard the way I type.

It doesn’t get much better at the bottom of the keyboard. The space bar is small and shifted just far enough to the left that I often hit the tiny little “alt” key next to it, popping open a menu. Windows key, Context menu key, Ins and Del live next to it, all competing with the arrow keys. Yes, it is a little cramped.

We’ll see how it works for gaming though. The main keys are normal-sized so I’m hoping they won’t hinder my use of the ASDW keys. I’m already considering prying up some of the worst offenders around the edges.

Preliminary review: 3 stars.

The iPad represents a shift towards a kind of computing that is both attractive and terrifying. An experience that is highly tailored with most of the ugly underpinnings hidden away behind a curtain of abstraction. Those same ugly underpinnings that let you do interesting things with your computer if you’re of a technical bent.

That first paragraph (and a bunch since) was typed on my new iPad using the WordPress app. Typing is something I haven’t had a lot of practice doing yet but so far it isn’t quite as bad as most of the reviews have led me to expect. Well, let me clarify a bit: typing in portrait mode is not awesome. In order to hold the thing, you need your hands. This forces you to type with your thumbs and the iPad is wide enough that this is awkward. Landscape-mode typing is pretty nice if you can lay the iPad flat, say, on your lap. Of course then it’s tilted away from you if you’re at all reclined, so it’s at a bit of a funny angle. You may find you need to contort yourself into variations on the fetal position to find a “comfortable” seating angle. Still, for a first try, I was touch-typing pretty quickly on it with not too many mistakes.

What changed?

I said before that I wasn’t interested in the iPad. I certainly tried to hold out despite being bombarded by ads, friends, parents asking me when I was getting one and deb, enthusiastically suggesting we get them. Yes, dear reader, I am weak. Weak with the need for new gadgetry!

I think the iPad is a new class of gadget. I’ve tried suggesting that my Dell Mini 10 was a suitable competitor for the iPad (look! it’s got a real keyboard!) but honestly, it’s different. I consider the iPad to be more of a big iPod than a full-blown computer. I can sync music and videos to it including my huge backlog of Ted talks. It’s nearly ideal as a couch pad for looking things up on the web or for light reading. I’m looking forward to traveling with it in place of my 1st generation ipod touch. I think I’ll still be using my Kindle for longer bouts of reading however.

Which one?

I got the iPad 64GB with wifi only. I was really tempted by 3G, but without the option to share my existing data plan with it, I was not that interested. Sure, Rogers has a decent plan at $35 / mo for 5GB, but that’s on top of my cell phone plan. I’d even consider paying 10-15 / mo to share my existing data plan between the two devices. I think Rogers missed out there. Also, wifi is going to be more available in more locations over time so eventually, it won’t be that big a loss. And I can use the extra $400 / year or so to, I don’t know… upgrade my phone!

Accessories

The iPad only comes with a couple of accessories in the box. A USB-Dock cable and a wall-wart style power adapter. The usual minimal pamphlets and Apple stickers are also included. I was a little surprised at the included power-adapter. It looks like an older-style MacBook adapter with the detachable two-prong plug. I’d have expected something a little less chunky, maybe like a slightly bigger version of the iPhone power adapter. The USB cable seems to have been updated a bit with a squarer piece on the USB end. The actual dock-connection seems to keep getting smaller though which makes it hard to grab onto to remove it from the iPod… pad.

The first things I bought for it were the Apple iPad dock (sans-keyboard) and a sleeve for carrying it around.

The sleeve was from Kensington and claimed to be “for the iPad”. Whoever designed it, had probably heard there was an iPad coming, took a stab at the dimensions and sent it off to manufacturing. It’s terrible. There’s enough room inside of it to probably store two iPads and a bunch of other stuff along the edges. I should have checked with it in store on some of the demo units they had out. I’ll replace it with something classy from Sena when they’re available.

The Dock is a dock. Not much to say there except that: a) it’s substantial in weight, which it should be because the iPad itself is fairly hefty and, b) it’s hard to actually dock the thing in it. The iPad uses the same old dock connector that all iPods have used since the beginning. It’s practically an industry standard! The problem is, the iPad is much bigger, and lining up that little slot with the dock’s edge connector is tricky, requiring lots of leaning over and scrutinizing-with-your-tongue-sticking-out-concentration to get the connection right. It’s more fiddly than it should be. Also, it works for portrait mode, but not landscape. I’d like a landscape dock for movies or pictures. As it is, it works well enough for standing the thing up on my desk.

Apps

If you’re excited about playing all your iPhone or iPod games on your iPad, or you have a slew of apps, don’t get too excited. They kind of suck. Sure, you can load them and even double their size, but with the exception of a few of the games I’ve tried, it’s not great. Orbital works and doesn’t look too bad from the chunkier pixels. Some apps I’ve tried are also acceptable, but I would have thought Apple of all companies would have made a better effort to make them look better. Proper font sizing and the nicer on screen keyboard for starters.

After syncing all my stuff, the first thing I did was delete most of the non-iPad apps.

The built in apps have all been updated for the new screen size. Some with some cute interface flourishes that would be grossly extravagant on a regular computer. iCal and Contacts have book-like wrappings around the edges. Mail and Safari are about what you’d expect and Mail works quite well. Safari is a bit frustrating with it’s simplicity, but the bookmark syncing with MobileMe is nice.

A few of my favorite apps that have been updated to work with the iPad include Instapaper, Kindle, and Stanza. There’s a separate version of Good Reader which I also recommend.

WordPress

While taking a sweep through and finding which apps were iPad-ready, I loaded up and was pleasantly surprised that it worked with my new fat iPod. This post started at that moment and I’ve been continuing to use it to write and edit it. It works well, though you don’t get a rich text editor like you do in the online app. No big.

Colloquy

Another happy accident was learning that colloquy was already universal. It looks great and seems to work pretty well though I haven’t figured out how to get notifications to work.

Air Video

This is a gem of an app recommended by Mr B. If you have a collection of videos in various formats (avi in xvid/divx, mkv, maybe others), you install a server on your Mac or PC and feed it your videos directory. Then with the app on your iphone or iPad, connect to your server and play video converted on the fly. You can also queue up conversions to save on CPU cycles. Very cool and works well on the videos I’ve tried.

Twitteriffic

Normally on the iPhone I like using Twittelator pro. The version for the iPad looks a little crazy in the UI department so I thought I’d try something different. On the recommendation from several friends, I thought I’d give Twitteriffic a shot. So far I’m liking it. It’s simple, offers a nice set of features and has some unobtrusive ads. I guess there’s a pro version for money but so far I’m happy with the lite version. Also, Twitter in safari is decent, but I wish I could default to the full web version rather than getting dumped into the mobile version all the time. It’s the main reason for wanting an app at all. How about a pref @twitter?

AIM

The lack of iPad support in Beejive was a little annoying and made worse by a $10 grab for a new HD version. That left me without a nice-looking IM app. There is a version of AIM for the iPad however which is quite slick, despite a confusing and probably useless Lifestream section that hooks up your AIM contacts twitter, flickr, delicious and whatever other streams they choose to associate with their account. For AIM messages though, it’s great and has an interesting interface.

There is already a ton of apps available for the iPad and I only skimmed the surface of them here. As I find others I like I’ll be sure to drop some reviews. I’ll follow up soon with a review of some games.

Unless you’re one of those people who doesn’t really pay attention to technology, and if you are, you probably aren’t going to be reading this, you’re aware that Amazon has an electronic book reading device called the Kindle. If you happen to be living north of the 49th parallel (give-or-take) and within a particular band of longitude, you will also be aware that this device is now available in Canada. We got ours last week.

For this review, I’m not going to post any pictures. I’m giving the word full reign in honor of what the Kindle is supposed to stand for. It’s a “Book Reading Device” on which, the printed word is supposed to be conveyed to the reader. As an electronic device, there are a few logistical hurdles that must be overcome. Amazon have provided a couple of means of doing that as well as what must be a bunch of resources to actually convert these books into an easily-digestible format for you to enjoy.

The first of these delivery mechanisms is wireless. This is no mere wifi, but a 3G cellular radio that should operate just about everywhere in the western world. Amazon has gone to some mysterious lengths to forge deals with the owners of these airwaves so you can buy and download books wherever you happen to be. This is a powerful concept and fairly unique. As far as I know, they are the only company to have forged these blood-pacts with otherwise unapproachable broadcast entities to create something they’ve called “Whispernet”. You don’t even get to know which wireless provider you’re piggybacking on. It just connects when you activate the wireless function on the device.

I’ve purchased a few books through Amazon now and it’s a seamless mechanism. You can browse online on kindle.com from your computer or on the Kindle itself. When you buy a book on your computer, you can select a “send to this device” option and the book magically appears in your list the next time you connect to Whispernet on your Kindle. Magical.

The other, more pedestrian means of getting content onto your Kindle is via good ol’ USB cable. Or USB cable to proprietary Amazon pluglet. Why they chose to create yet another incompatible device connector I cannot fathom. If the white cable is any indication, it’s because they wanted to be somewhat “Apple-ey”. They certainly nailed the packaging and unpacking experience, though it certainly has a distinctive “Amazon feel” to it with the pull-tabs on the cardboard boxes. In any case, USB transfer is pretty straightforward. Just dump your mobi-formatted (and now, as of version 2.3 of the Kindle OS, PDFs!) eBooks into the Documents directory on the Kindle and they’ll show up in your list.

But you may not like what you see there. And now I have to get to the dark part of this review. Not all ebooks are made equal. If you’re downloading books from various sources online and they deliver them as a mobi book it may not be formatted optimally for the Kindle and may look funny, have poor metadata or no table of contents. Worse, if you’re unlucky enough to get something in an HTML, RTF, or plain-text document, you’ll have to convert it to mobi format yourself. There are several tools to help you do this, Calibre being the one I’ve used most so far, but it is a fiddly process, often with several iterations of conversion and checking, usually with mediocre results. If the book you’re trying to get into your Kindle is available on the Kindle store, you might want to save yourself the possible bad experience of messing around with document converters and buy the thing on their site. It’ll look good and be optimally-formatted. [ed. Gutenberg books are good]

Which brings me to the important part of this review. What is it like to read a book on this thing? After a week of carrying the Kindle around with me and reading my first purchased book (the mediocre, The Professional by Robert B. Parker) I can say that it is a very pleasant experience. The Kindle feels nice to hold, even in the leather book-like cover available as an optional extra. It has a heft to it that is somewhat more than a paperback, but it feels more comfortable than reading a hard-cover. Text is very legible on the reflective screen and you have the option of several font sizes to choose from.

My only real complaint is that there isn’t enough space for your thumbs to rest. The keyboard area at the bottom of the Kindle is easy to press buttons on. The 5-way navigation button on the right eats up further real-state your thumb could be coasting on. The large Next page buttons right in the middle of the device are comfortable resting places, but you might accidentally skip ahead. This is a fairly minor complaint though and for the most part, you don’t have to think about it.

Ok, I’ve thought of another complaint. There are nearly 70,000 missing books from the Canadian Kindle catalog. I’m not sure why they’re missing. If it’s some publishing agreements the apparently quite powerful Canadian publishing houses have or if it’s a matter of language. Looking up Iain M. Banks’ Matter I see it’s not available in Canada. I wonder if it’s because the Canadian edition used the UK text and it was “translated” for U.S. readers? In any case, I am confident it will get here and in the mean-time, there are plenty of other books to choose from. I’m currently reading the last of the “back-catalog” of Culture novels, The Algebraist.

If you’re looking for stuff to read, check out dria’s post about Project Gutenberg. I plan on signing up for at least a few books this year.