I’m a bit late here, but just in case you haven’t heard (or updated) yet, iOS 4.2 is now available for the iPad (and iPhone).

There are more than 100 new features, but in my view just having the ability to organize your apps in folders makes the iPad immensely more useful.

It might be worth considering AT&T’s 3G Microcell:

AT&T 3G MicroCell acts like a mini cellular tower in your home or small business environment. It connects to AT&T’s network via your existing broadband Internet service (such as U-verse, DSL or cable) and is designed to support up to four simultaneous users in a home or small business setting.

We live squarely in the Twin Cities metro area. Nonetheless, I get only 2-3 bars of coverage on the main floor of my house, and only 1 bar in the basement. Just about every call that I take in my basement is bound to be dropped if it lasts more than 5 minutes, which is a problem because that’s where my home office is. So I’m eager to see how this works.

From the Google blog:

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

You can learn more about how this works and how to get started using it in the full post.

This is not exactly breaking news, either, but it’s well worth pointing to nonetheless: Crossway has now released the ESV Study Bible for the iPad and iPhone. You can find them in the App Store.

The app is simply fantastic. They really nailed the user interface and the very challenging puzzle of how to make it easy for the user to access the study Bible notes without interfering with simply reading the text itself. There was clearly some detailed, user-oriented thought that went into developing this app. This is what we need more of. It is a great service to not only make the Scriptures and God-centered content available, to make them easily available in a user-centered format.

Thank you, Crossway!

It’s not exactly breaking news, but if you haven’t heard: OmniFocus for iPad was finally released on Friday. Here’s a quick summary from PC World:

OmniFocus for iPad isn’t just some gussied up version of the iPhone version either: the app’s been redesigned for the iPad from the ground up. You can organize tasks into projects, folders, and sub-tasks and nest them until your heart is content; tasks themselves support detailed options like start dates, due dates, repeating schedules, audio notes, and photo attachments.

If you want to organize your tasks by category or specific context (“things to do while you’re at the computer,” for example [by the way–I think that’s a bad idea!]), you can do that too. And if those contexts involve specific locations–your local supermarket and post office for example–you can look at a map to quickly get an idea of where all your tasks might take you.

If you’re an OmniFocus user on the Mac and/or the iPhone, OmniFocus on the iPad will happily sync with them, making sure your tasks are always up to date, no matter which device you’re on. If you ever run into problems, The Omni Group even offers free customer support via both e-mail and phone.

You can get OmniFocus for iPad in the App Store here.

From the Wall Street Journal (registration required, I think):

Two of the leading makers of electronic-book readers, threatened by the success of Apple’s iPad, slashed prices in a move that could further drive e-readers into the mainstream.

• Video: News Hub Analyzes Price Moves
• Digits: Is Price Low Enough?
• E-Reader Pricing War Heats Up

Interestingly, this corresponds to Godin’s post from a few days ago.

For those who use Evernote, they have added functionality that lets you assign the notebook and any tags to the note right from within the email.

I will blog on iPads coming up if I get the chance. I do have one and have found that it solves trillions of productivity problems.

One gap right now is that OmniFocus is not yet available. You can run the iPhone version, but there are lots of limitations to that. Fortunately, it looks like a version of OmniFocus developed to take full advantage of the iPad will be releasing in June. Here’s an update from their site.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a really good review of the iPad. He argues that the iPad may be a true “game changer.” Here’s how the WSJ summarizes his article:

Apple’s new touch-screen device has the potential to change portable computing profoundly. It could challenge the primacy of the laptop and eventually propel the multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface.

Here’s another interesting part:

The iPad is much more than an e-book or digital periodical reader, though it does those tasks brilliantly, better in my view than the Amazon Kindle. And it’s far more than just a big iPhone, even though it uses the same easy-to-master interface, and Apple says it runs nearly all of the 150,000 apps that work on the iPhone.

It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.