Hardware and gadgets

United Airlines is replacing paper-based pilot flight manuals and charts with iPads. Each iPad will replace 38 pounds of paper distributed to each pilot over the course of year, amounting to some 16 million pieces of paper.

Business Insider reports that the HP TouchPad is a dud. Best Buy has more than 200,000 unsold tablets from Hewlett-Packard, and they want to return them. Meanwhile, Best Buy can't keep Apple iPads in stock. In our local Best Buy, I chatted up one of the sales people, who said they don't even bother to keep a demo unit on the floor. He told me the stores get a weekly allocation of usually an unknown but small quantity, and they sell out within hours.

Byte has an article with some detail about Amazon's 9" tablet that will supposedly be released this fall (just in time for Christmas shopping season). Amazon has some pieces in place that Apple does not, including free 3G wireless connectivity (from the Kindle platform) and Amazon's well-tested and already popular cloud storage could give Apple's untested cloud storage trouble. Apple has done very well by bundling lots of well-integrated apps and services, and Amazon may be the one company ready to compete.

Apple has passed Nokia to become the world's biggest smartphone vendor. Nokia was very late to the game in releasing smartphones, as was RIM, the maker of the Blackberry. Apple has now passed both companies in total shipments.

User satisfaction with most gadgets tends to decrease after about 13 weeks of use, but a new study by a University of Missouri researcher shows that people like their iPads MORE after that period of time--more than when they first bought it.

Found on the Internet...I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw this....

That sound you hear is of the cash register business drying up. Square, a company that has developed a "soft" cash register for the iPad, is very likely to capture a big chunk of the traditional cash register market, which has been dominated by mostly small and medium-sized firms that customize mostly Windows-based computers. Part of Square's innovation is a small dongle that attaches to the iPad and reads credit cards.

Via Ed Dreistadt, who always keeps up with car stuff when he's not busy helping companies with their marketing, comes this hilarious story on Ford's "2nd generation" SYNC(tm) software.

The software was developed by Microsoft, which begs the question, "What could go wrong?"

Just ten years ago, surveillance cameras that were IP-addressable cost many hundreds or even thousands of dollars and generated massive amounts of data.

This jet-powered bicycle might be very handy in areas that still have no broadband, as hauling your data around by jet bike might be faster than dial-up. If we still don't have flying cars, a jet-powered bicycle seems like a pretty good consolation prize.

On behalf of all the engineers and scientists that invented and then perfected all the technology on display at the Super Bowl half time, let me apologize. The fact that you CAN suit up several hundred people in radio-controlled LED light suits and send them prancing around a football field does not mean that you SHOULD. And the fact that you can put lampshades on the heads of some of those, uh, "dancers" and have them prance around behind Black Eyed Peas does not mean that you should.

I wrote about this little device a while back, but it is now available for order. I'm thinking about getting a couple for the house, to replace existing wall sockets where we tend to drop our iPhones and iPods at the end of the day. This USB wall socket has two standard 120 volt AC outlets and two powered USB outlets. So you don't need chargers cluttering up your sockets. And of course, it can charge any device that has a USB charging option.

The Evoke Flow is a new take on what a radio ought to be. While it's nice to have fifteen thousand songs on your home computer, it is not always handy or convenient. Even if you have some of the gadgets that let you stream the music around the house, many of those still require fussing at your computer (some need more fussing, some need less). The Evoke Flow looks like an old sixties AM radio; the form factor includes a handle to encourage you to carry it around the house.

Two stories in one: The iPad is cutting into traditional newspaper and magazine subscriptions while simultaneously increasing readership for the online versions of newspapers and magazines. The challenge for publishers of newspapers and magazines is to set the online subscription prices at the right price point. If they are greedy and try to keep the online price high, they will never achieve the economies of scale possible when distribution costs are nearly equal to zero.

Apple shareholders are going to have a Merry Christmas if the holiday gift buying polls are correct. All most kids want under the tree is an iPad (31%) or an iPod Touch (29%). That 31% figure for the iPad beats every other device on in the poll, including Microsoft's Xbox 360, which is a measly 12%.

Cisco has announced that its Cius tablet device will be available in March. The Cius is smaller than the iPad, with a 7" screen, but will include some business-oriented features that the iPad does not have, like integration with Cisco's very expensive TelePresence videoconferencing system.

A new piece of software for the iPad demonstrates the innovation taking place within the Apple App Store software universe. SoundNote lets an iPad user take text notes that are automatically synced with an accompanying audio recording. Who would want this? Students....take your notes in class on your iPad while your iPad records the audio from the entire lecture. When you go back later to read your notes, click to hear the audio starting from wherever you are in your written notes. And it costs $5. That's right, five dollars.

Four guys jammin' on a New York subway, with their, um, iPhones....better than you might think.

Newspapers and old media businesses may be going out of business, but entrepreneurs keep coming up with new businesses that don't rely on 200 year old business models. A UK company has come out with gloves designed for use with touchpad devices like smartphones and the iPad.

The iPad is breaking every consumer electronic sales record and setting new records. The sales records set by the device include biggest first day sales, biggest first month sales, and biggest first year sales. Apple is on track to sell something north of ten million iPads in the first year. By comparison, the DVD player, in its first year, sold a measly 350,000 units. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day.