The idea of a smartwatch appears to have the same level of appeal to those of Generation X as the jetpack does. Both devices come from science fiction, and while technology has touched upon both, neither device has really entered consumer reality yet, though both have often been promised.

The Pebble e-paper watch comes closest to realizing the smartwatch as we’ve yet seen. If you haven’t already heard of the Pebble, it’s a Kickstarter project whose funding has already surpassed eight million dollars, so it’s pretty clear the project is popular, and is currently Kickstarter’s most-funded project ever.

The good.

The Pebble is designed to work with iOS and Android devices, using Bluetooth to speak with a smartphone. Chiefly, the Pebble aims to serve as a remote notification center, so you don’t need to look at your phone whenever a notification comes in. The Pebble provides notification for the following:

• Incoming Caller ID
• Email (Gmail or any IMAP email account)
• Calendar Alerts
• Facebook Messages
• Twitter
• Weather Alerts
• Silent vibrating alarm and timer

The Pebble also touts interoperability with certain smartphone apps, so it can control your smartphone’s music, access GPS data for cycling/running, etc. Out-of-box, the Pebble will presumably work with a couple key apps, but will primarily serve as a notification center until you grab third-party apps from the Pebble online store.

The bad.

Your notifications sent to your watch may be cool, but we see this as more of a novelty than a truly useful feature; the Pebble simply doesn’t offer any features that a smartphone by itself doesn’t. Yes, it puts notifications on your wrist, but for how many niche cases is that truly an improvement over just looking at your phone? Given the short range of Bluetooth, you have to have your phone near the Pebble anyway, so is saving you from pulling your phone from your pocket really worth $115? If a notification is important enough to respond to, you’ll have to pull your phone out anyway. If you’re not expecting an important notification, you can probably go without checking your wrist until you’re in a place you can use your phone.¹

It’s not that we can’t think of ways to use the Pebble, it’s simply that we’re not convinced the Pebble is going to make anyone’s mobile computing life better. Sure, that’s subjective, but in terms of efficiency, all the Pebble is doing is adding another layer of technology between you and your smartphone, and when is that a good thing? Again, outside of extremely specific use cases, the Pebble is a great novelty item, but little more.

The ugly.

Outside of the Pebble being a neat gadget, there’s the form factor to consider. Some people wear the iPod Nano as a watch because they love the digital watch-faces but the Nano is a really big watch. For those with smaller wrists, the Nano just looks silly, and the Pebble is similarly big. Pebble’s main Kickstarter page doesn’t include dimensions,² but looking into it further, we found that the Pebble’s body is roughly 5cm x 3cm. Compare this to the iPod Nano’s 3.75cm x 4.09cm dimension body, and you can see that the Pebble is no small beast. We wonder how many backers didn’t even consider this when pledging.

The size is also a concern because it means the Pebble pretty much needs to replace a watch. Whereas other wrist gadgets can sit alongside a watch, the Pebble really can’t, and wearing it on the wrist opposite your watch just looks like you’re wearing two watches. That may not be a concern for everyone, but we wonder how more versatile the Pebble would be if it had a thinner display that wrapped around more of the wrist, and scrolled notifications accordingly.

Another design concern we have is the plastic screen (as opposed to the crystal many watches sport), as plastic scratches much easier than glass. Yet, the biggest problem with the Pebble is that it’s limited to existing APIs, as well as the hardware it doesn’t have. There’s no line-out for plugging headphones in, for example, so you can’t entirely stash your phone for when you plan to take the Pebble on a run.³ In many cases, you’ll still be using an armband to exercise with the iPhone, because the Pebble doesn’t offer a way around this.

On the iPhone, the Pebble also can’t read text messages, which limits what it can do with notifications.

Hope is in the SDK.

While the core functionality of the Pebble puts a purchase to question, the device’s saving grace may very well be its intended third-party support. The Pebble will have an SDK available before release, so third-party developers could have iPhone apps working with the Pebble as soon as the watch is released. The most high-profile iPhone app to have announced Pebble support thus far is RunKeeper, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see others take the plunge. A companion app for Zombies, Run!, for example, would be quite cool.

One area we’re looking forward to is activity-monitoring. The Pebble includes a gyroscope and vibration motor, so it has all the hardware necessary to compete against the Jawbone UP and Nike FuelBand. While no activity-and-sleep-monitoring apps have yet been announced for the Pebble, the potential is there, and we hope to see someone tackle this. At present, the Jawbone UP is the only wrist-wearable gadget that does full-on sleep and motion tracking, and there are still concerns over Jawbone’s quality control with the UP. As the Nike Fuelband doesn’t track sleep or provide activity alarms, the market is ripe for the Pebble to fill this void.

Our recommendation?

We see buying a Pebble as an investment in potential functionality. Today, the developers announced a production cap of 75,000 Pebble watches for the initial Kickstarter drive, so there are roughly 10,000 watches left for reserve. We decided to back the project, figuring the worst case scenario is that we don’t see an activity/sleep-moniting app in the Pebble’s future, or the watch is simply too big for our wrists, and we sell the watch online. Given the demand for it, backers shouldn’t have a problem reselling their wares if they need to, and may even be able to make a couple dollars on it; if you’re on the fence, you probably won’t lose money on the Pebble.

Best case scenario for us is a proper activity/sleep-monitor app being released shortly after the Pebble store goes live. In this case, our worst decision will be deciding to forego a nice watch and instead wear the Pebble nearly full-time.

At the very least, the Pebble is a cool experiment in whether this market is capable of flourishing, let alone existing. There’s also the potential we’ll see a really killer app for the Pebble that no one’s thought of yet, so lurking Pebble’s developer forum should prove interesting in the days ahead. The Pebble’s estimated ship date is September, so there’s plenty of time for new app ideas to be thrown around and worked on. So while the Pebble’s basic functions don’t excite us, we’re looking forward to what developers come up with in the days ahead.

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After weeks of use, our fourth Jawbone UP replacement band, and fifth UP overall, has finally died. We only reported on the death of our last UP band a little over a month ago, so the trend of late seems to be about one month of life per band.

Battery life on our fifth band seemed reasonable, with no real indication anything bad was about to happen. It was a week at least since our last full charge, and when the band was at around 10%, we forgot to top it off and instead let the battery expire. At this point, we plugged the band into a power source, waited until the LED went from red to white, and tried to sync the UP with our iPhone. It wouldn’t.

We tried both a soft reset as well as a hard reset. Rebooting our iPhone, per the instructions at the UP support site, didn’t help either. Instead of writing in about our problem as we had in the past, instead we called Jawbone yesterday, and were greeted by a very cheerful support representative. She suggested we plug the UP into our iPhone after we launched the voice memos app, as an UP capable of syncing should move the volume needle because it’s transmitting data using audio. We tried this, yet the needle didn’t move. That confirmed our UP was toast.

A sixth band should be on its way soon. As we had a support representative on the phone already, we took the opportunity to ask about the status of a revised UP without these problems. We had wondered several times before whether the bands Jawbone was sending out as replacements were known to have problems, or if this was effectively an ongoing “beta” period where Jawbone was trying to it right by sending out bands with small changes. The support representative confirmed that the former was true: Jawbone’s replacement bands are all original bands with known problems, and in all likelihood, would also fail.

Basically, replacing dead bands with those prone to failure is a stop-gap measure. Eventually, Jawbone will “relaunch” the UP in a revised, working state. But the representative didn’t know when that relaunch would happen. In short, if the relaunch happens before November, and we have a dead band at that time, we can request a proper replacement. In the meantime, we either keep trading dead bands in about once-per-month, or give up until the relaunch.

The representative reminded us of Jawbone’s no-questions-asked-refund policy regarding the UP, which we’ve already taken advantage of. At this point, having received a refund for the UP, we’re basically paying to use the UP with whatever time we spend dealing with the replacement process once per month. Considering we do like the functionality of the UP, and haven’t found a suitable alternative, we’ll continue playing this replacement game for the forseeable future, hoping that the relaunch will put an end to this cycle soon.

It’s a frustrating experience, but we have no doubt that Jawbone is legitimately embarassed by their lack of testing before the UP was sold last year. That’s why they continue to replace these bands at what must be considerable cost, particularly when they’ve already refunded many of the original purchases. Jawbone could have simply provided refunds and not continued sending replacement bands to the respective customers, but they’ve instead taken the high road.¹ If they can manage to relaunch the UP within the warranty period, they’ll manage to keep many of their customers, but if they don’t relaunch in time, we expect considerable outcry from their users.

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After receiving our fifth Jawbone UP, we decided to seriously look into the newest competitor in the self-monitoring gadget race: the Nike+ FuelBand. Unfortunately, as very new accessory on the market with a fair degree of demand, it wasn’t immediately available, so we had to wait several weeks before stock was replenished.

In the meantime, we looked up Nike’s sizing guide for the FuelBand, which came up short. It simply wasn’t clear from any of Nike’s documentation what size we should aim for. We printed out Nike’s sizing band, wrapped it around our wrist, and found that we literally fell on-the-line between two sizes. Per Nike’s Twitter feed, we were told that customers should opt to size up if this happens, so that’s what we did.

When we heard that stock was available, we made our purchase at the Nike online store. We received our FuelBand about a week later. It was packaged nicely, vaguely like you’d expect an Apple device to be boxed, but perhaps with a bit more box than necessary. In addition to the band, the box included a charging cable, a link removal tool, an 8mm extension link, a 16mm extension link, and a stand.¹

One link was already in the band when it arrived, and because we fell between sizes, we knew we’d have to remove it in order to get a good fit. This was an easy task, but unfortunately the sizing still seemed off – the band proved very loose even with neither of the additional links installed. If we were to wear the band over a sweatshirt, the fit would be great, but as it was, the band slid up and down our wrist a bit too much. It felt a bit awkward when it slid up our forearm, and when it slid down to our wrist, it hindered our full range of movement.

That’s a design issue.

When we bought the Jawbone UP last year, we questioned why the band didn’t link at both ends, and wished that one end could plug into the other in order to close the band securely. This is how the FuelBand works, and while we like it in theory, it’s problematic. If the Jawbone UP slides down to the base of our hand, it doesn’t restrict wrist movement because the band’s two ends can flex away from one another when pressure is applied.

Practically speaking, let’s take a power clean as an example. Your hands are pointed down at the ground when you start, so whatever fitness band you’re wearing is likely to slip towards the ground. If it slips enough to cover the joint of your hand and wrist, you have a problem as you continue your movement. By the time you jerk the bar from the ground and manipulate it to fall on your shoulders, your wrists should be bent backwards. If you’re wearing the FuelBand in this example, one hand won’t be able to bend back as far as the other because the band is in the way. At best, this causes some discomfort in your wrist. At worst, it throws your exercise off entirely.

If you’re doing the same exercise with the Jawbone UP, as soon as you bend your wrist, the two ends of the UP push away and the band slightly increases in size because of its elasticity. No harm, no foul.

It wasn’t until after we exercised with the FuelBand that we truly appreciated Jawbone’s design. In fact, before this, we cursed the design every time we accidentally tore the UP from our wrist when pulling off a sweater. Yet, it’s the very fact that the UP isn’t securely latched to your wrist that makes it such a great accessory for the weight room.

Back to sizing, we later found out that Nike claims the small FuelBand to be 171mm around with both links in, and the mediam FuelBand to be 172mm around with no links in. Yet, for some reason, Nike doesn’t recommend both links to be used at one time, which seems a little odd. This means that if we do drop down a size, we’ll have to make due with a band that’s 9mm shorter than the one we tried out. We can probably make due, even if the fit will be snug, but this likely wouldn’t correct the issue with the band restricting wrist movement, unless the band is so snug that it won’t slide over our wrist’s joint bones. Unfortunately, that means the band would have to be almost exactly the circumference of our wrists, and we seriously question the liklihood of that scenario.

Otherwise, it’s pretty good.

Beyond that one issue, the FuelBand’s design is pretty nice. The display is pretty much invisible until you press the one button on the surface of the device, giving the band a very plain, but sporty look. The FuelBand should really come in several colours, but they’d likely have to be dark for the LEDs to look nice and crisp, as they do on the black band. We found the addition of a time-keeping function a nice touch, as the FuelBand can easily replace a watch in the workplace. As the band is extremely plain looking, it wouldn’t even look out-of-place wearing a suit-and-tie. In contrast, the Jawbone UP’s slimmer profile, patterned surface, and unconventional parallel ends, make it stick out a lot more in a conservative workplace.

As far as getting the FuelBand working, there’s an additional step or two over the Jawbone UP. As we prefer to sync with the iPhone, we were disappointed that the FuelBand doesn’t work with the iPhone out-of-box. First, the FuelBand didn’t come charged, whereas the Jawbone UP ships with some level of power, even if low. Second, you have to first connect the FuelBand to a PC, after downloading the respective software application. Only once the FuelBand is set up on the PC can you set up the FuelBand app on your iPhone.

This wouldn’t be half bad if the FuelBand didn’t occasionally require reconnecting it to your PC. We love the convenience of syncing the FuelBand with our iPhone over Bluetooth, but after one particular sync cycle, we were told that there was inconsistent information on the device, and that we should sync with our PC to fix this.

The Bluetooth syncing really is nice, though. The best part is that it can sync in real time when the app is running. So as you run, the app updates with the activity you’re doing. You don’t need this functionality because you can just as easily look down at your wrist after pressing the button on the FuelBand, but presumably there are instances where looking at your iPhone is more convenient than looking at your wrist. Maybe you’re on a treadmill, for example, and your phone is propped up already.

The FuelBand’s accuracy is about on par with the Jawbone UP.² We don’t know how Nike’s tracking algorithm incorporates information on which wrist you wear the FuelBand on, but because you specify this, presumably there’s some accuracy correction for certain movements. Yet, we don’t recall ever entering into the app any information on whether we’re left or right-handed, so it’s not clear what the FuelBand is factoring in here. Otherwise, we could see it not counting certain movements we do throughout the day, like pushing our PC’s mouse around with our dominant hand.

As we mentioned in a previous post, the very fact the FuelBand has Bluetooth may make wearing it situationally dependent. While you can turn Bluetooth  on the FuelBand off, the very fact that the device has Bluetooth means certain individuals may not be able to wear it to the office.³

A lot of people have discussed Nike Fuel, the unit the FuelBand tracks. This seems mostly marketing hype, however. While the FuelBand does provide a Nike Fuel reading, it also tracks and reports steps and estimated calories burned. Presumably, the app computes Fuel based on a function of steps taken over time; the more steps taken in a shorter amount of time, the higher the Fuel calculation. We hoped to play with this theory some more, but stopped using the FuelBand because of its loose fit before we could experiment enough.

What it doesn’t have.

After thinking about our band’s sizing, our first instinct was to just exchange the band for a smaller one. But as we went back to rely on the Jawbone UP exclusively again, we realized that the UP’s killer feature isn’t in tracking steps taken, it’s in the sleep alarm and night-time sleep tracker.

That is to say, as much as the FuelBand competes with the UP, the UP is really a different product, aimed at more general lifestyle tracking. In our case, we place a more emphasis on the sleep-related features than we do the day-time step tracking, so we realized the FuelBand will never entirely replace the UP unless it improves its software options.⁴

For us, then, as long as we have an UP band that works, it will likely trump the FuelBand as our daily tracking accessory.⁵

Should you get it?

The FuelBand is $50 more expensive than the UP, yet unlike with the UP, there’s no record of defective devices. If you’re big on cardio and that’s the type of movement you want to track, the FuelBand is a better option, as it tracks both steps taken and Nike Fuel, the latter which may be a better assessment of the fitness you’re getting day-by-day. If you’re already using Nike+ to track runs, then the FuelBand will fit into your workflow nicely.

If you plan to track your workouts in the weightroom, or where you’re otherwise manipulating your wrists (like in certain Crossfit movements), the UP may be a better option for you. And if your goal is to track more than just exercise, the FuelBand will obviously fall short.

Finally, if you’re considering the FuelBand, make sure you get your sizing right. The sizing does not match up with the UP (i.e. a medium in the UP is not a medium in the FuelBand), and the UP provides more flexibility despite not having removable links. If you can wait, delay a purchase until you can find the FueldBand in a local store, so you can ensure the sizing is proper. Otherwise, you may have to deal with shipping returns, which are always a hassle.

If it weren’t for the issues Jawbone’s had with the UP, we’d recommend it immediately. Since it’s still unclear where the UP stands regarding these problems, however, the FuelBand is a good alternative, and arguably a much better option if you’re primarily looking to track runs. If that’s not the case, you might want to hold off and see if Jawbone’s UP manufacturing is back on track, as we think more thought went into the design of the UP than the FuelBand.⁶

Either way, for general movement tracking, the FuelBand and UP are both good devices. It’s just too bad we can’t have the best parts of each in one band.

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Some have made the case, admittedly admirably, that if Apple were to make a tablet smaller than the iPad, it would come in at 7.85″. Technically this makes sense, but it’s only looking at the issue from a hardware perspective, not from a functional one.

Take the iPhone and iPad for instance.¹ The two devices are extremely similar on a technical level, with neither really beating the other out insofar as general use goes. That is to say, the iPhone can do more or less what the iPad can, and vice versa. The only major caveat here is that the iPhone is a phone, and the iPad is larger.² And it’s the latter point we’ll focus on, because size in this regard is important.

The iPhone and iPad are so similar that Apple-haters have called the iPad nothing more than an oversized iPhone. And while that’s somewhat true from a thousand-foot perspective, it’s tough to argue that iPad and iPhone sales are cannibalizing one another, especially when so many owners of one also own the other.

Why is that?

It’s a matter of use, and environment is only one factor. For example, we use TweetBot on both our iPhone and our iPad, but how we use TweetBot on the two devices is somewhat different. For example, we have both apps hooked up to our Readability account, but when we come across a link to an article in our Twitter feed when we’re using TweetBot for the iPhone, we’ll typically send it to Readability to read later without even peeking at it first. On the iPad, we’ll generally click the link to the article, and either read it right then, else save it to Readability to reference at a later time. The point is, while TweetBot on both apps offers the same functionality, we’ll favor a particular workflow on one device over another, because a given device is better for some tasks depending on the form the device takes.

That’s the reason mobile versions of web sites make more sense on the iPhone. At first, we were incredibly annoyed that most mobile web site versions lacked the same features as the “full” site, but from a use scenario, most people don’t need access to the full site when they’re using a mobile device.³ That’s because most people aren’t using the iPhone as their primary browser, but rather a backup browser used on the road.

The iPad, however, is another story. A lot of people are using the iPad as their primary computing device, and so expect web sites to load with all the functionality in a desktop version. That’s why it’s so important for developers to ensure that web site versions designed for viewing on phones aren’t the design that show up for tablet users: the user expectation is different.

There are also some apps that simply wouldn’t work on a given device, even though there’s no technical reason an app couldn’t be written for it. We’ve recently enjoyed sketching out some design ideas in Papers, an app made for iPad. There’s no reason the developers couldn’t make Papers into a universal app and offer an iPhone version, but it would detract from the experience; part of the joy of using Papers on an iPad is the amount of drawing real-estate available to the user, and decreasing this real-estate would make for a less-enjoyable experience. In fact, this the reason we don’t see the type of drawing apps on iPhones as we do on the iPad: the iPhone’s screen is too small to be of any real use to artists.

What does this have to do with a smaller iPad?

Whether or not Apple can release a 7.85″ tablet without annoying developers, there’s nothing a 7.85″ tablet would do that the iPhone and iPad can’t, on both a technical level and a task-specific one. Whereas we’ve illustrated how workflows can change depending on whether you’re using an app on an iPhone or iPad, and how some apps simply make more sense on one form factor, what makes best sense on a 7.85″ tablet? Nothing.

A 7.85″ tablet would be too small for gaining the major benefits of apps like Papers, and too big to be an always-available backup device for checking mail, Twitter, etc. Our use of TweetBot on this imaginary 7.85″ device would either mimic our use of TweetBot on the iPhone or iPad, but not differ the way it does between version now. No matter what kind of an app you can think of, the app will always suit an iPhone or iPad better.

A 7.85″ device simply makes no sense in this market, and we don’t even need to argue costs to make that case.

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When we last reported on our experience with the Jawbone UP, we had just received our third band, hoping it would last longer than the one we originally purchased. It turns out it didn’t, as the vibration motor died shortly after our post went up. This meant the alarm function was useless, so we sent another e-mail to Jawbone support, and were told they would send us a fourth band.

It took about three weeks to get the new band in our hands, with Jawbone being a bit less responsive about getting an RMA and tracking number to us, compared to how they handled our earlier replacements. We asked Jawbone support whether the fourth band they were to send us was part of the original production run, or if it was manufactured afterwards and with updates addressing earlier problems. What we got was a bland reply not really addressing the question:

We are committed to send a brand new fully working band, if you have any issue with this new band you can just contact us and we will be glad to replace it for you again.

We received our fourth band, and after a full charge and a day’s use, the band reported 58% battery life left. The next evening, about 38%. The third evening, 20%. The band died that night, so our alarm never went off.

After trying to charge the UP, the band quickly showed the white light indicating the band was full, and no matter how long we kept the UP band plugged in, it refused to sychronize with our iPhone. So this morning, we sent yet another e-mail to Jawbone, explaining that this fourth band didn’t even last a full week.

Our experience with the UP has gone downhill since the original band we purchased; our replacement bands have actually failed in less time than the original band, so we assume they’re all part of the original production run and Jawbone is simply getting rid of the stock they have left. Presumably, a lot of other UP buyers have taken their refunds and not bothered to obtain replacement bands, and since Jawbone isn’t currently selling them, they undoubtedly have stock that needs to either be thrown away, else given away. Unfortunately, we’d prefer the former, because continuing to send out bands that are prone to fail isn’t going to help smooth over relations with already upset customers.

Per one of Jawbone’s earlier responses, they will keep sending out replacement bands for as long as the original band’s warranty is for. That doesn’t make us feel much better.

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Retina-optimized graphics are awesome, we all pretty much agree. But there comes a trade-off with such: file-size. TUAW’s Mike Schramm summarizes the issue:

The most obvious drawback is app size. Those bigger graphics take up more space, and for many graphics-heavy applications, that could put them over the cellular data download limit (now at 50 MB). Universal apps specifically are taking this hit, even if they’re not running with the new iPad-sized graphics on the iPhone hardware.

A good universal app today supports four resolutions:

1. Legacy graphics for the 2G iPhone, iPhone 3/3GS, and iPod Touch.
2. Legacy graphics for the original iPad and iPad 2.
3. Retina graphics for the iPhone 4/4S.
4. Retina graphics for the new iPad.

There are ways to mitigate the file size increase, such as recycling retina iPhone graphics for use on older iPads. In search of real-life examples for how an app is distributed, however, Lex Friedman at MacWorld compared the pre-retina and post-retina file sizes of Apple’s own universal iOS apps. In doing so, we see file sizes roughly 2.75 times greater post-retina.

Between this, camera improvements, and more computing power to push more detailed textures in 3D games, there’s a reason the 16GB new iPad isn’t recommended by a lot of bloggers.¹

While we can assume that support for older devices will drop in the future, we still have at least a generation or two to go before non-retina devices are no longer supported by new versions of iOS. And even when that time comes, dropping non-retina graphics files won’t drastically improve the footprint of app file sizes, since it’s the retina versions that are making file sizes much bigger. At the very least, we should expect next year’s iPad to offer a 128GB storage option.

In the meantime, we still maintain that better cloud tools would help immensely, especially with large iPhoto libraries that can take up considerable storage space. Another potential solution on Apple’s side is to somehow strip graphics from AppStore downloads that aren’t needed on a target device. For example, retina graphics would be removed from an app downloaded from a non-retina device, and iPad graphics would be stripped from a universal app if installed on an iPhone.

Then again, perhaps we’re making too large an issue out of one that’s easily rectified in one or two generations, as flash storage becomes cheaper. Still, it’s enough of a problem that some are pushing not to release universal apps in order to save on storage space, a proposal that we find to be a rather bittersweet solution.

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Every couple weeks we read about someone else taking up a private journal with Day One, a journaling app available for both iOS and OS X. One of the key benefits of the app is its cloud-based synchronization, allowing you to use iCloud or Dropbox to keep entries updates across devices. The app is also acknowledged for its rather good-looking interface, which sets it apart from similar apps available in the App Store.

We picked up Day One for iOS several months back, but didn’t use it too extensively.We’ve wanted to keep a private journal for many years now, but find that we never etch enough time into our schedule to make it happen.¹

Day One is fairly simplistic as far as journaling apps go. There’s limited Markdown support at the moment, and no integration with social networking sites, nor with embedded media outside of hyperlinks. In a way, that’s one of Day One’s strengths, because it focuses you on writing, not reviewing what you posted on Twitter earlier that day, or where you checked in via FourSquare.²

Where we’ve found Day One to excel is in writing short journal entries and tracking some amount of information we’d otherwise lose sight of. For example, we’ve used other apps to track lifestyle activities like meals eaten, workout results, and general physical condition. These tend to be activity-specific apps, like Livestrong’s MyPlate, or Azumio’s Heart Rate monitor. Day One allows us to compile all this information into one daily log, which may not offer fancy graphs for tracking this data visually, but still serves as a useful log for later reference.

It’d be great if the various tracking apps we use could easily export to Day One using a URL scheme,³ but Launch Center already supports starting a new Day One entry with clipboard information, so as long as a given tracking app will let you copy information to the clipboard, a simple workflow follows accordingly.⁴

While we’re still not using Day One for longform entries, the app remains on our iPhone and iPad to track other daily notes, likes foods eaten and how we felt accordingly thereafter. It’s great for this, and we wonder why we didn’t think of using Day One to journal these types of activities earlier.

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We expect that a lot of people don’t know what “PC” stands for, or at least give it any real thought. The idea of a “personal computer” came about at a time when computers were huge, expensive, and used by several people in research facilities and universities. At the time, what made a computer “personal” was that it was owned by a person instead of a company or organization. As more and more people relied on desktop computers at home, the “personal” half of the term had less and less meaning; in homes where several family members used a computer, the desktop and file structure became a mish-mash of the user’s personalities. Things changed a bit when home operation systems began to use local accounts, one for each user. But even then, the form factor of a typical computer simply doesn’t lend itself to the level of connectivity that something “personal” ought to.

Compare this to an iPod, for example. An iPod is cheap enough for most everyone to own, and its contents are a reflection of the owner, containing her tastes, styles, and interests. Even the exterior of the device can be customized by the owner, either by choosing a specific exterior color at purchase, else using cases and decals. Furthermore, the form factor of an iPod is perfect; most people can use their iPod at home, on their commute, at work, and in the gym.

While computers have become smaller, and notebooks more common, they still don’t reach the level of closeness that people have with their iPods, because they’re still very task-specific tools.¹ This is where mobile devices have stepped in to become the everywhere tool in a person’s life. While smartphones have been reasonably successful, their size makes certain tasks limited, or cumbersome. To great success, the iPad has found the middle road between what’s small enough to go most everywhere and what’s large enough to still be useful for most tasks. And the iPad form factor, a tablet, makes it ideal for tasks that most people would never have considered doing on a computer, or on a mobile device.

Stephen Hackett comments on several tasks he uses his iPad for:

I can do all of these things on my MacBook Pro, or even my Mac mini at home. The iPad, however, makes these tasks not only easier, but more enjoyable … especially on the couch, with a beer.

The success of the iPad isn’t in just in what all it can do, because contrary to what some may claim, the iPad is not “just another tool”. Rather, the iPad is successful because not only does it do a lot, but it lets you integrate the iPad into all your daily tasks, be it in the kitchen, at the office, on the couch, or even in the bathroom. The iPad is a more natural fit for how we live our lives, instead of constraining our tasks to a necessary time and place that most traditional computers require.

If anything, the iPad is a more personal computer than a PC, which is really what this “post-PC” hub-bub in the press is all about. “PC” has become a misnomer, because compared to the iPad and its emulators, PCs are not personal, they’re impersonal.² Inasmuch as what the iPad can do, it may differ little from a conventional PC, but the idea Apple is pushing with their post-PC nomenclature is that tablets are opening new doors for how computers can be used, and it’s about as drastic as the difference was between PCs and what came before.

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When the original iPad was released, the 3G version was exclusive to AT&T. Among the data plans offered was an “unlimited” plan that ran for $29.99/month. This plan has since been deprecated; if you bought an iPad after the plan was discontinued, you have to opt for a limited bandwidth tier, while those who had the option for the unlimited plan before are grandfathered in. Today, the largest data plan available through AT&T is 3GB/month, with additional bandwidth costing extra.¹ Conveniently, the 3GB plan also costs $29.99/month.

The controversy with the unlimited plan is that AT&T has threatened to throttle bandwidth for unlimited plan subscribers for quite some time. Reports have been varied, and customers wanted a clarification of the rule. Recently, AT&T provided this clarification, stating they would throttle bandwidth for all unlimited plan subscribers after 3GB of bandwidth is consumed in a given month. Once the next billing cycle begins anew, the throttle would be removed, and customers would be back to full-speed data transfers. AT&T’s argument is that they want to ensure that a minority of users are not placing undue burden on the network for the majority, but as Hot Hardware points out, that’s not really the case:

First, AT&T’s bandwidth throttle is based solely on a person’s usage, not their location or the overall demand for bandwidth at any given time. In reality, this is never the case. At 5PM in a downtown metropolitan area, cellular bandwidth will be at an absolute premium — a graveyard shift worker in one of the office buildings at 3 AM has no way to saturate the available spectrum, even if they had a dozen phones.

In other words, AT&T is finding a convenient excuse (that doesn’t hold much water) to charge their early iPad-adopting customers more money than they were initially led to believe. If these customers choose not to switch plans and pony up for more bandwidth in the event they exceed 3GB/month, AT&T throttles the customer’s networks speed by as much as 95%, effectively making the data connection useless.² AT&T is still technically providing unlimited bandwidth to the customer, only it’s at incredibly low speeds.

An iPhone user in California recently won a small claims court judgement for $850 over this throttling fiasco³, and I would be surprised if others don’t take similar legal actions. Not everyone sees the small claims court victory just, however, like Dan Frommer:

Please get over your emotional battle — and extinguish any legal threats, that’s silly — and join us in reality. If you use a lot of mobile data, be happy about it, and be happy paying for it.

Dan’s argument is just as emotional as the argument of those asking that “unlimited” mean “unlimited bandwidth at maximum speed”; Dan accuses unlimited subscribers of whining, but then whines about how we’re all hurting his precious network. But as Hot Hardware points out, high-bandwidth users aren’t necessarily adversely affecting the network; for AT&T to justly throttle a user’s speeds, the burden of proof needs to be on them to show that a user’s network use was affecting the network in a negative way, but they’re not doing that. The reality is AT&T trying to underhandedly change the terms of its original $29.99/month plan by convincing the majority of its customers that they would be negatively impacted otherwise.

The assumption Dan makes (and those who back him in this) is not just that unlimited-plan subscribers are hammering network speeds for everyone else, but that they’re consistently using more than 3GB of data each month. To our knowledge, AT&T hasn’t provided any evidence of this either, and from an anecdotal perspective, we don’t believe this to be the case; we’ve been on the unlimited plan since pretty much day one, and most months, don’t come close to reaching 3GB.⁴ We may never exceed the 3GB cap each month, and if we have, it’s incredibly rare. This means that most months, we pay more than what we use, and would be surprised to hear it’s much different for many other unlimited plan subscribers. In effect, we’re putting more into the network than the average consumer, and so if we happen to exceed the 3GB cap one month, shouldn’t we morally be allowed to get away with it? Maybe Dan should be thanking us instead of calling us whiners.

AT&T has a rollover minutes plan for their cell phones, which seems reasonably fair: if you don’t use all your minutes in a given month, the surplus will be added to your next month’s minutes (to a limit) for you to use later. Maybe AT&T should do something like this for data. But that would be fair.

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Two months ago, we reported on the death of our Jawbone UP. It lasted longer than other folks’ units, but ultimately succumbed to a battery issue. Jawbone customer service was prompt in getting me a new UP, and so I didn’t have too much untracked activity time.

Our second UP band had a couple hiccups since we received it. Nothing major, but the band randomly “reset” twice, requiring a sync with our iPhone to get working again. Then, about two weeks ago, the band succumbed to the same fate as our first UP. So much for Jawbone having worked out whatever issue caused the original’s death.¹

Customer service was again prompt, and we had an RMA number and shipping number a couple days after reporting the problem. We’re now on our third UP band. On the plus side, it means we have two replacement caps in case one gets lost², but we also have two dead bands that we haven’t thrown out yet.

Around the time the second band died, Jawbone released an update to their iPhone software. We didn’t notice any substantial changes, and the food tracking log remains mostly useless. Time will tell whether the third band will last longer than two months, but we’re hoping that this time, Jawbone replaced the UP with a version that doesn’t have the same issue the earlier ones did. You’d think that at this point, they’d have done enough testing to get a longer-term solution out there.

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