After purchasing and using my new iPad 2 for a week, I’m here to share a few tidbits about the good and the bad. The version I got is a black 16GB Wi-fi only iPad 2. In my opinion, those who should be considering get an iPad should fall in the following categories:

a) don’t own a decent laptop
b) don’t own an iPhone 4
c) want something to take on the road for emailing, word processing, and surfing the web
d) bored with a lot of $$$ to spend

If you don’t fall into any of those categories, the iPad may become redundant and somewhat useless to you. In my situation, I spilled hot coffee on my Macbook Pro (2 years old) keyboard a few weeks back and now certain keys don’t work and the laptop fails to go to sleep. So basically for the time being (until I get to replacing the non-functional parts), I have a desktop laptop with an external keyboard and mouse.

I had originally planned on getting a 13″ Macbook Air 1.86GHz with 4GB RAM but after chancing upon this iPad 2 (that I am typing this post on now) at Walmart, I knew that I had to grab this opportunity and buy the damn thing — even if I end up just selling the guy on craigslist. Well, temptation struck after the third day of staring at the package and I opened the sucker. Now let’s get into the review.

Speed-wise, the iPad 2 is super fast, no complaints there. I intend to use my iPad 2 for the following tasks:

1. Facebook
2. Browsing web, blogging
3. Reading magazines, books, news
4. Replying e-mails (I have online businesses, so replying clients = everyday)
5. Casual entertainment (games, watching TV shows)

Basically everything besides heavy duty tasks like designing with Photoshop/Illustrator and recording music. I do those taks on my handicapped Macbook Pro at home. For the five tasks I mentioned above, the iPad 2 is totally adequate. Facebook via an app like Friendly or MyPad is awesome, you can do status updates, reply comments, etc. easily. Even upload a photo you took with the iPad 2 within 30 seconds time. Safari is super fast so browsing the web is simple. You can watch youtube videos (I recommend through Safari rather than through the slow Youtube app supplied) and shop online seamlessly. I check my favorite news sources through Flipboard, a sweet app with awesome layout design. You can also use Pulse or other RSS readers for customizing your reading experience. Replying e-mails = quick and painless. Games are endless on the iPad 2, some awesome ones like Maelstorm or Infinite Blade (sp?). I use an app called AirPlay to watch a bunch of video files (movies, TV shows, etc.) on my 1 TB external hard drive at home via Wi-fi. So I’m not using any space on my 16GB drive on the iPad 2. The output of the video files on the iPad 2 = awesome.

Oh, forgot to add that I bought a Zagg Logitech keyboard/case:

This guy uber helps with typing blog posts like this and replying e-mails quickly. In terms of Wi-fi versus 3G model, you can find tons of articles debating this topic. I went with Wi-fi because.. well because it was the only one of its kind left. Black versus white? You decide, again check the plethora of articles online debating this matter.

iPad 2 = victory if you fall in one of the 4 categories above and are looking to use it for the 5 categories in list 2. Feel free to add your thoughts and/or refute me hehe

I was playing around with an iPad recently and noticed a significant lag when waiting for YouTube videos to load. If you’ve been through a similar experience, you know how irritating it gets viewing start-stop, start-stop video streaming. :p

Below are a few different methods that could speed up the loading process. Try them one by one to see which solution works best for your situation:

1. Change Your DNS Settings (tips courtesy of iPad Video Converter)

   Step 1: Enter the settings menu on your iPad, select the General > Network > WiFi.Step 2: Then select the WiFi network that you use, tap on the blue arrow to the right.

   

   Step 3: You then need to type in your new DNS (208.67.222.222 ) settings into the space provided, if you have DNS setting you would like to keep a record of then you can simply press the Home/Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot that will be saved in your Photo library.

   

2. Try turning off your Bluetooth in the Settings -> General -> Network category.
   
3. Try resetting your wireless router or modem.
4. Login to your YouTube account and adjust settings. This is the ultimate final desperation option.  Create a YouTube account if you don’t have one, log in, and adjust your settings to “I have a slow connection”.  The videos you watch will stream in a lower quality but will theoretically load faster.

If none of these solutions work, then it could be a problem with YouTube.  There has been discussion of YouTube throttling speeds in major traffic areas. There are people who line in NYC get buffering issues regularly. So it could be a regional problem.

If you are also experiencing slow speed on your iPhone, here is an article to help speed up your iPhone 3G or 3Gs.

Or more accurately, voice over IP to take over the world?

Have you ever used Skype on a mobile device?

As I wrote earlier this month, I bought an iPhone 3G in Hong Kong and have been totally digging the experience.  One of the applications I use daily on my iPhone is Skype.  It is a free application and works wonders in my life.

I have been using Skype for several years but only recently did I begin making calls via Skype on a mobile phone.  My cousin Gary introduced me to the concept of being able to call countries all over the world at a very low rate (sometimes free of charge) via Skype on iPhone.  It’s simply awesome.  A few sweet scenarios:

1. Skype to Skype (free of charge and phenomenal clarity). My girlfriend Michelle is based in Dubai, so we use Skype frequently to chat via wireless internet (at home or outdoors).  I kid you not: the clarity of conversations via Skype to Skype on iPhone is significantly clearer than a cell phone to cell phone conversation.
2. Skype to (enter country) mobile/landline phone. With wireless internet and an iPhone, I can basically call most countries in the world at Skype’s fixed rates.  The company even has calling plans priced at USD $12.95 per month for unlimited calls to selected countries.

I believe that as wireless internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous all over the world, voice over IP will slowly replace traditional phone networks. Companies like Skype are then going to take over the communications world.

Sidenote: I think Skype is going public early next year… stock investment anybody?

***Tip ( June 2011): Get 25% OFF iPhone skins and cases at our partner site, Mama Studio, with coupon code: GEEKMAMA.

Have you noticed a lag in the speed at which your iPhone 3G or 3Gs loads SMS text messages or web browser pages?

Here’s the solution.

Remember that your iPhone is basically a small computer, it runs an operating system just like Windows XP or Mac OS X. And just like those systems, there are background tasks running that may slow down the performance of your iPhone. So in order to speed up your iPhone, you should properly quit the applications that you are not using.

Important note (common misconception):

When you press the ‘Home’ button on the front of the iPod Touch, you are not quitting the application. You are simply closing it, but the application is still open and running in the background.

Suppose you open a game that you downloaded or an application on your iPhone that constantly updates via the internet. But you don’t use that application often. Then it is smart to quit those applications so it is not hogging the bandwidth (speed) of your iPhone in the background.

So, in order to properly quit these applications on iPhone 3G or 3Gs, perform the following steps:

1. Open the application that you wish to quit by pressing its button on the home screen.
2. Once the app opens, hold the power button (on the top of the iPhone) until the ‘Slide to Power Off’ with a red button shows up.
3. Then let go of the power button and press and hold the ‘Home’ button on the front-bottom of the iPhone.
4. When the interface returns to the home screen, you have successfully quit the application.

Perform steps 1-4 on any applications that you don’t use often. This will speed up the performance of your iPhone.

Bonus: Clear the cache of your Safari browser regularly by doing the following:

Home Screen > Settings > Safari > Clear Cache.

This will help speed up the performance of Safari when surfing the web.

Double Bonus: Got an iPad? Learn how to speed up YouTube on iPad.

I visited Hong Kong last week and was haunted the entire time by a desire to just give in and shell out $500+ USD for an iPhone …and it didn’t help that people all around me were using the device left and right.

So… I got one on my last night there.

Needless to say, I am totally content with my decision.  I purchased an unlocked 8GB iPhone 3G model (unlocked meaning I can pop any SIM card in and can use the phone pretty much anywhere in the world on any network). I’ve been using the first generation iPod Touch for two years already, so I’m already totally acquainted with the interface.  Here’s a quick pros and cons list on the phone:

Pros:

• Totally scalable. Because there are so many developers all over the world passionate about Apple and the iPhone, there are literally thousands of applications built for the iPhone (kinda like Firefox).
• No better way to surf the net on-the-go. If you’ve ever used Safari on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you know damn well there’s no better mobile browser out there.  Simple and awesome.
• All-in-one and all good. With most all-in-one electronic devices, the applications all end up being mediocre at best.  Kinda like a restaurant that sells Korean, Indian, and Greek food.  But the iPhone is a true exception.  Phone, SMS, internet, games, everything works seamlessly.

Cons:

• Price. The price is steep for an unlocked iPhone, and if you want to bind to a network, you get a cheaper locked phone but you’ll be paying a chunky amount every month for the service.  As always, the decision to go with Apple will leave your wallet in tears.  But IMO it’s worth the investment if you’ll be fully accessing its features.

Your thoughts?

Transcript of Steve Jobs’ speech (source: Stanford):

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Brilliant. Touching. Speechless.