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Being based in the EU at the moment, I finally got my iPad yesterday and have now spent some quality time with it the last 32 hours. First impression has been extremely good even if it did not take long to figure out what the iPad 2.0 will need to provide.

I’m sure that if someone is able to make the tablet PC a viable product category Apple is the company to do it (first). Still, without knowing the intended positioning at Apple they have succeeded to create a device that is perfect for the my-lap-internet-computer-used-in-the coach-in-front-of-the-TV and I-love-to-read-the-morning-newspaper-without-6sqft-of-empty-space-around-me use cases. It is brilliant for that, and I’m glad to see that we can finally start to enjoying a very pleasant digital magazine reading experience.

Anyway, to expand the use cases, I suggest Apple do the following simple improvements.

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Mattias Digital media, MID, Mobile iPad, review

We all know Nokia, it is the leading mobile phone brand and is heavily pushing to stay there. Unfortunately, the huge corporation is seriously struggling with keeping up with the user experience in the smart phone area and competition from Apple, HTC, and now Palm with its new WebOS. They are all a few steps ahead currently. As a previously devoted Nokia user I’ve collected a few simple ways to improve the Nokia S60 user experience to a more acceptable level. I’ve been testing these out on the Nokia E71 and partly on the new N97 as well.

Anyway, the top 5 top 6 list below is a current snapshot of my best findings. If you have found any other great tweaks and application suggestions I’m more than happy to try them out and update this post accordingly.

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Mattias Digital media, Mobile application, email, media, navigation, Nokia, S60, smart phone, software, user experience, web browser

I have a lot of gadgets in use and I really don’t like keeping separate versions of my contacts (~500 of them) and my calendar. Therefore, I’ve done the painful work of trying to find the perfect and free solution for syncing them between all my different digital storages automatically over the Internet including a Nokia E71 phone, an iPhone, an HP 2140 HD laptop running Windows XP with local mail and calendar software (currently Outlook 2007), a Mac Mini as well as Gmail contacts and Google calendar for online access. I really recommend you back up your data properly before starting a journey like this. Once done, you should be care free of backups and up to date versions of your stuff.

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Mattias Digital media, Mobile, Tutorials Apple, calendar, contacts, Google, Nokia, outlook, phone, software, Soocial, sync

As stated in Part 1 of this Mac Mini HTPS series where I evaluated different Media Center and HTPC software options my choice was to go with MediaPortal, an excellent open source and free software for turning your Windows PC into a living room digital media master. In other words, we need to load the Mac MIni with some kind of Microsoft OS software. Fortunately, the engineers at Apple has anticipated this and made this very easy to do as long as you have access to a Windows XP (or VIsta or Windows 7 beta) installation CD.

Any version is fine as MediaPortal supports more or less any post XP SP2 version Windows. Personally, I chose Windows XP SP3 as it is very stable and currently provides the best performance for the Mini hardware. Also, once the software has been installed and configured according to this guide, the OS itself will in practice be invisible anyway so there is little benefit from the nice but resource heavier Vista or Windows 7.

Requirements
Software: Windows XP installation CD/DVD, Apple OS X Leopard Installation DVD (for installing Windows XP drivers for Mac Mini hardware)
Hardware: Intel Mac Mini 2nd or 3rd generation (runs well on 1.83 GHz Core Duo), a USB TV tuner supported by MediaPortal
Other: Internet connection, some patience and a couple of hours of time to spare

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Mattias Digital media Digital media, htpc, mac mini, mediaportal