My iPod Touch broke a couple weeks ago. It still plays music and games, but the home button broke and now I can’t get back to the home screen. I can’t believe Apple made this device with such a serious flaw. There is absolutely no way to get to the home screen without getting really creative.

I was complaining to my brother-in-law, who really likes Apple products. He asked if I had called a “Genius” yet. Nope, I haven’t. I don’t even know where an Apple store is, I’ve never been in one. I got this device at BestBuy. After going around and around with him he finally said, just throw it away and buy a new one.

After all you will get another iPod… No matter how much you complain, when you need a music player you will get an Apple product.

He was absolutely right! I don’t even know of another mp3 player on the market. Do they still make the Zune? iPod is so branded into my brain, I could complain all day long, but in the end I will get another iPod.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. To start, I hate it when he is right, and second, there has to be a way to get all the benefits of an iPod without an iPod. After all it’s just an mp3 player.

A few days ago my wife got the Samsung Vibrant, or Galaxy S, whichever you prefer to call it. It’s simply amazing. Big screen with a thin body. It’s powerful and fast. Best of all, it plays video and music to perfection. It comes loaded with Avatar. You can jump to any part of the movie and in a second it continues to play… It’s super fast.

Android has solved my problem. Why should I buy an iPod when I can get an mp3 player built into my phone. Why would anyone buy an mp3 player again? whether it’s an Android device or an iPhone, the iPod is getting absorbed by another device. Just like the PDA was absorbed years ago by the smart phone. I don’t see too many PDAs anymore. That market tanked… and so will the mp3 player market AKA the iPod market.

So, that’s bad news for Apple.

You might agree or you might not, but when I see analysts on on CNBC giving Apple targets of $350-$400 I wonder why. A couple days ago I was listening to the radio and Rob Black gave Apple a target of $1,000??? A joke right. Of course he planted his target to five years from now, but seriously let’s think about this rationally. Let’s think about this from an Android fan boy perspective.

As I mentioned earlier, you don’t have to buy an iPod any more. You can replace it with a very solid iPhone 4. I’m sure you’ll be happy with it, millions of people are. But you can also get an very good phone from any one of the major carriers, including At&t that runs on Android.

The Droid X is awesome. The EVO is awesome. The Vibrant is awesome. The iPhone is awesome. Are they iPhone killers? not really, but they are definitely iPhone competitors.

Even with the iPhone rumored to make it to Verizon and T-mobile, when you look at an iPhone and a Droid X on the same table. I’d have to give the edge to the Android phone. They are very sexy phones. Looking at the home screen with the live background and widgets looks sharp. Compare that to a home page filled with apps on the iPhone and right away you are guided away from the iPhone.

Sure the iPad is huge right now, but you know Android and WebOS tablets are right around the corner ready to take even more market share from Apple.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been waiting to get my wife an iPhone for a long, long time, but we have both had bad experiences with At&t service. I was waiting and waiting to hear any news about the iPhone going to T-mobile. I would have bought her one, and I’m sure she would be thrilled to own one. Long story short, her Blackberry broke, she now has an Android phone and I’m sure she will have one for many years to come.

In Summary

I think the iPod is on the way out, Android is Hot, and $1,000 price targets for Apple are absolutely ridiculous!

Before I offer my solution, I have to give props to Nalts.

Leave it to Nalts, a youtube celebrity, to make the craziest iPad video yet… Not only is he driving with an iPad mask, which seems highly dangerous, but he also used duct tape to attached the mask to his face… I was laughing when I saw the mask, but when I saw the duct tape wrappd around his ears, it was just too funny.

Here’s my solution to this whole problem… Too bad I can’t go back in time and offer this brilliant advice to Steve Jobs and possibly de-rail the epic failure that is the iPad.

Set aside the hype of this device, which was par for any Apple product. The name iPad created an instant joke. Combine that with a sub par device and the hate blogs will go crazy.

All they had to do was name is iPlate… a computer you can eat off of.

That’s it. Simply change the name and you will dominate an entire market that has been stagnate for decades, the plate market. Mr Jobs positioned this device as a device between smartphones and laptops… to replace the netbook market. Unfortunately, it is not a good replacement for netbooks, but it’s a perfect replacement for plates.

Is iPlate a game changer… Hell yes! Restaurants would jump all over this idea. Not only can you eat off the iPlate, but you can surf the web, watch videos, tweet what you are eating. You could even use the iplate to order your food and pay your bill, of course you can’t do it at the same time because it doesn’t multi-task, and for you foodies, you can’t take a picture of your meal because there is no camera.

The iPhone was game changing. It filled a need for a much better smartphone. It’s strong enough for power users and easy enough for old ladies, although I still think the blackberry is going to stay king of executive phone use for a long time, just because of the email abilities.

The problem with the iPhone and all other Apple products is the closed system. Steve Jobs basically says “You’re in my world now!!!” and if the innovation doesn’t live up to the expectations people are going to bitch. The iPhone was awesome so people didn’t complain. The iPad is a lackluster device, topped with a restricted system, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

Unfortunately we’ve come to expect that from our smartphones. For a larger device that’s supposed to replace your netbook as a complete portable computing solution, though, this is almost unprecedented — at least from a device that’s likely to have a great deal of influence on the market and on the design of future devices. That’s bad news no matter how you spin it.
Source: Mashable

Seriously, you can’t even share files between the iPad your home computers… There might be a way around this, like uploading to the cloud.

I love you Google… Not really, but this was a big win for them and the Android OS. It’s coming on strong, because it’s open, it’s got many more carriers and phone makers, and Apple dropped the ball.

Here are just a few of the problems with the iPad

• No Multitasking – WOW, I can’t listen to music and work on a spreadsheet at the same time?
• No USB – the universal adapter.
• No GPS – Where am I, and more importantly, where are cool places to hang out in my area. Location based services are all the rage, someone should have told Apple this!
• No Camera – I heard there was going to be a camera that let you use hand gestures to control the tablet… That would have been cool.
• Not OPEN – You have to play by Apple’s rules.

Don’t even get me started on the name iPad… iSlate was cool, iPad has already been coined iTampon which trending to #1 on Twitter today… That’s bad. I can’t believe…

Nope, not going there, gotta stop…

mobile computing on smartphones has been around for a long time. Probably the most well known smartphone was the palm Treo. That phone was the first to take people from owning a cellphone and a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). I owned a couple of them and would install apps all the time. There was no app market, we had to get them the old fashion way, by searching the internet and downloading them from personal homepages. I was able to find a disk once with about 700 apps on it. Everything from chess to SF Bart maps to GEOtagging. Of course, it was nothing like it is today, but don’t forget, apps have been around for a long time.

I remember buying Tom Tom Navigation for my wife’s Treo. Worked great and was a cheap alternative to buying a separate navigation device for her car. Of course it was all disks, there was no way to get maps on the fly with a download, and you had to use an external GPS unit to receive the location signals, but that was just the standard a few years ago.

I use to make apps with a program called Codewarrior. Codewarrior for palm was discontinued a few years ago due to the fall in popularity of the Palm Treo, and the Palm OS. The new Palm apps run on a hybrid HTML language… but has yet to gain any serious following. I have only seen one Palm Pre on the streets.

Codewarrior basically let you make forms and pages with wrappers to handle all the behind the scenes activities. It was crude, but you could definitely build apps and distribute them to other users without having to jailbreak or hack the phone.

It makes me think how palm, and the earlier smartphone companies didn’t see how smartphone apps would change the way we use smartphones?

Why did it take a company like Apple to unleash the next evolution in apps. Even with inferior data plans from 5-6 years ago, the companies should have still seen this coming. Many times I complain about new technologies and new media getting a lot of attention, when in reality the technology has been around for years. All it take is a tipping point I guess for them to hit critical mass and society to find a use for them.