the onda

Apple is doing douchey things with its app store policy and newly discovered offensive position on patents. For sure. And yet, I joined the masses of folks on Friday that made the company close to $100M of presales on a product none of us have seen. It hurts me to fork over money to such a closed ecosystem, but I did it anyway.

Not because I am a fanboy. Not because I want to watch video in bed. And certainly not because I want to replace my laptop with a new class of device.

But because I've got a really compelling usecase and am currently using a poor substitute.

The picture to the right is my ailing original iPhone running an app called Instapaper— a fantastic slim little app that lets you select content from any webpage for reading later. I have bookmarklets installed in all of my browsers and the app running on this crap old iPhone. I collect content throughout the day and (sometimes) read it at night while in bed. The iPhone lives by the bed (along with a charger) and occasionally doubles as a web access device for sending a reply to an email that I've forgotten or looking something up.

However, it is crappy and suboptimal because of how little the screen is. So much so, that I used to print out my Instapaper archive and take that to bed. Which would be okay were it not for the one-way trip to dead that content takes when it gets on paper— no sharing, no commenting, and no peripheral exploration of references within the content.

This convenience is worth the cost of entry for me. It may not sustain a runner product like the iPhone, but in aggregate, I think that looking for a way to place and device shift longer form reading is a killer app for the tablet form factor. The Kindle, while great for novels, is too close to paper to fulfill this role.

Apple ought to pay attention to apps like Instapaper in the event that it discovers that not all of us want to continue feeding on TV content after we've gone to bed.