So long, iPhone, it’s not you, it’s AT&T.

So, I’m done with the iPhone. And to the estimated 1.5 million of you who bought iPhone 4s yesterday, and the astounding 77% of you who upgraded from a prior iPhone, I wish you the best of luck. The AT&T issues are just too much for me to agree to give 2 more years (with a $350 Early Termination Fee) with the more inept (well, save BP) corporation in America to “figure things out”. I ranted at length about this before over on my Tumblr, so I’ll save the details of that argument.

In preparation for my inevitable cut over to an Android phone (sorry Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile, you’re just not right for me), I’ve been playing with an unactivated Droid phone that I got for free last year through the graciousness of friends and I’ve discovered a few things since I first tried the phone out and passed on daily usage of that phone then.

1. The initial Android release that shipped with that phone (1.5 I believe) and the hardware didn’t ever play nice. I remember having to pull the battery to restart it on several occasions.
2. The camera was awful.
3. The phone had great service.
4. There were very few apps at the time.

In the last year, Android has made up a lot of the difference.

I found that most of the apps I use and tasks I need from a mobile every day are ready available and just as good on Android.

1. Twitter (or Tweetie) – yep
2. WeatherBug – yep
3. Foursquare - yep
4. Subway Maps (CityTransit, Exit Strategy) – yep
5. Photoshop mobile – yep
6. Gmail – yes, and with it’s own app
7. Google Calendar – yes, see above
8. Exchange email and calendar – yes
9. Barcode/QR scanners – multiple
10. Tumblr – yes, through a third-party (but it has an annoying bug that makes reblogging a pain in the butt)
11. Camera – it’s vastly improved, but admittedly not as good as my iPhone 3G, and this is hardware dependent
12. Service - miles and miles and miles better than AT&T
13. File system app – yes (iPhone doesn’t have one)
14. Physical keyboard – yes, on this model, though the OS level on-screen one is fine and Swype will help make up the difference on newer Android models

The stability issues I saw have been all but totally corrected with the release of Android 2.1 (and the promise of 2.2 or FroYo) just makes it a better platform. The Android market has a lot of potential in it’s openness, and will someday soon have more potential user than Apple will.

The one biggest drawback of Android has been the media integration and transfer. There’s no denying that the “ecosystem” of iPhone with iTunes is great. (Proof? I did buy an iPad and I loved it. Still do. What’s different? No AT&T. But I digress).

In terms of music, I actually prefer the Amazon MP3 store, which is available natively on the phone and offers a direct download service just as good as iTunes is. I actually buy most of the music I played on my iPhone from there as well.

The biggest drawback of media on Android is file transfer. Plugging in your phone to iTunes and having it sync your music is really easy.

Enter DoubleTwist, which has both a iTunes like desktop client, and an Android app that closely match the iTunes experience. It will allow you to create playlists, and will let you sync only non-protected music onto your iPhone (I converted most of my old iTunes protected stuff to mp3 long ago, and most of my collection is MP3 or M4A), and while it’s not 100% seamless, it’s good enough to replace this as your mobile music device.

So, what’s next? With the launch of the Droid X, the Droid Incredible on Verizon, and the Evo 4G on Sprint, from a pure hardware perspective, the phones are on par, and often exceed those of the iPhone itself.

I’d argue the user experience, while admittedly, not quite as polished (transitions especially), is now really good enough to get away with daily use, and getting better (especially with UX enhancements like HTC Sense).

So, when my contract runs out in about 4 weeks, I’ll be saying adieu to AT&T for good and never look back. And it’s sad that the iPhone gets caught up in that wash, but Apple made a deal with the devil, and after 3 years of awful AT&T service, two generations of iPhones, and 8 actual devices between my fiance and I, it’s time to say goodbye.

Android, you’ve come a long way, baby.

My “ah ha moment”

In college, like a whole lot of people, I spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out what the point in learning about the Ming dynasty was, or why I should care about ancient philosophy, or why the social patterns of migrating Eskimos were relevant to my future expected life of building and managing websites, systems and software.

But it all was, and it all is, a framework for inspiration, it just does not click with everyone who takes it. A big part of why I believe the college experience is such an integral part of life is because it’s a 4 year experiment in finding the things and people that inspire us. By adding structure to wayward nature of the ever expanding universe of knowledge, it makes inspiration digestable and obtainable. College plants these roots of inspiration.

To me, inspiration is the trigger for the deeper search for knowledge, for the absorption of information, and, most importantly, the sorting of logical vs illogical, fake vs real, and usable vs important. I believe part of brains are a “soup”, with a combination of emotion, fact, fiction and history, swimming with ideas and solutions. A combination of all of the things that have come before this moment, right now.

In the other part of our minds live empty hooks waiting to be filled with ideas. Philosophies. Stories. Human history. Solutions. Questions.

The “ah ha moment” is when the ideas from this brain soup get hung on the empty hooks in our minds. The moment when you feel like you’ve been there before, and suddenly, the course of your life changes, an answer comes out of nowhere and it just “feels right.” We all have these moments; they are personal and evolutionary changes, both small and large. “I don’t know” to “I know”. “I can’t” to “I can”. “I get it”. The “ah ha moment” instantly makes everything that became before it seem distant, the struggle to discover seem worth it, the difficulty seem easy, and provides the basis and answers for moving forward.

My biggest “ah ha moment” came out of escapes — escape of following in prior footsteps, escape from a boring existence, escape from being merely “average”, combined with a drive to fill my mind with knowledge.

I’ve always been a creative individual, in fact, I was destined to be a “writer”, for whatever that meant, for my elementary and junior high years were full of teachers making comments about the quality of my writing and my “imagination”. And I grew up in a family that was middle-class, and had never had a college graduate until me, and so the future was very much unclear.

And then, my brother, started to tinker with soldering irons and motherboards, and before I knew it, I was hooked on “computers”. Technology just seemed to come to me, I appreciated it’s structure and logical sensibilities, I appreciated the fact that hardware had rules. And I wanted to learn more more about how they worked.

What became most fascinating of all was how computers could be used to create. To discover. To learn. To socialize. Fascinating that images could be digital and editable and manipulatable. Fascinating, how I could put together a document, a “webpage”, that I could express myself in, that could be seen by people around the world. It was the way I could take this love of writing and communicating and mix it with my new found love of technology. The Web was the answer. It was the biggest “ah ha moment” of them all.

So, when it became time to go to college, it was never a question that I should go, but it was a tough decision to define the “why”. I went into college “undecided”, because I wasn’t completely sure, but as I mentioned, college provided the foundation for inspiration. I knew I’d made the right choice. But I also knew, that I didn’t want to be defined by any one thing either. I knew I’d loved history and stories. At that point, few people were teaching “web” courses, fewer still were expert at it. So, given the choice between “computers” and “communication”, “computers” seemed to provide a wider array of opportunities. The writing could come later.

And the adventures this “ah ha moment” have provided me simply amazing opportunities to learn more about just about anything that could be imagined, to meet most of my best friends in the world, to have an opportunity to write again. I teach, I learn, I grow and I share. And all of this, I owe to “the Web”.

My advice — fill your mind with the gifts and fruits of inspiration. Learn as much as you possibly can about things that inspire you. Take a chance on the world, that could change your life. You may never know where it will take you.

We are the machine.

Let’s face it, 98% of the information we’re exposed to on a daily basis isn’t worth caring about for more than an minute or two, or frankly, at all. A great deal of this should really be filed under “who gives a sh*t?”, but isn’t.

Don’t believe me? Sign off all of your social networks for 6 hours in the middle of the day, and catch up on the news at one set point, like we used to (read the paper, watch the evening news, i’ll even allow you to use Google Reader here). See how many things that you “missed” actually matter to your in your daily lives.

The openness of the Internet allows everyone to have a voice, but it’s just that that is turning the Internet to a haven for human machines – humans can’t possibly decipher all of the information being presented, but we’re being set up as a node to process it all. Why? Because we believe our peers more than we do computers, or marketing campaigns. It’s still an undeniable fact – the human machines talk to each other in a language prone to emotion, interjection and miscommunication.

The “real-time” factor of information gives it more weight – it’s the eternal breaking news, things without resolution that make our obsession with getting the story, making the first post, and sharing without thought that’s making Facebook overtake Google. Google was computing machines with finite limits and defined ways to calculate. Facebook is human machines interacting with each other in less controllable ways.

Social Media professionals need to understand this. Let’s be realistic – Social Media is the next generation of SEO. The only difference is that instead of a set algorithm that we can understand and tweak our content for, we have to consider the fickleness of personalities and how our content is written appropriately to appeal to small groups of people, who will then champion this information for broader appeal. This is the science of “trending topics”, “recommended on Facebook”, and how Social Media Marketers really need to be thinking about their jobs. But, do these topics have any lasting value? I’d argue they build brand affinity, yes, but to return to the earlier point, only for things that matter to us.

Being a part of the other 2% is really what social media strategies should be aiming for. You need to be part of the authorities people come to for news, entertainment and novelty. The real conversion metric is “How much does your brand matter?”.

Because, if this social media movement is to continue, people will need to give a sh*t. If people don’t care, social media doesn’t exist.

One score, and three media types ago…

When Ken Burns’ epic documentary The Civil War premiered on September 23, 1990, I was hooked.   Problem was, it took me about 20 years to figure out, “on what”.

I was 11, right at the beginning of the creative development that would shape my life and times on the Internet (still years away), but before I could really understand its impact on my life, I was transfixed by the stories of soldiers North and South, of triumph and tragedy, of epic success and horrific failure. I can look back on that time now and remember the feeling I had when we were watching the documentary. This, for the first time in my life was history living, through inviting interviews with individuals such as Shelby Foote (R.I.P.), Edwin Bearss and James Symington, countless voiceovers including Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman and Garrison Keillor who told the stories of those who left behind only memoirs and letters, and of course, by use of what has become known as the “Ken Burns’ effect“‘, the panning and zooming of photograph so as to make the subjects of those photos come alive.

And, now, I realized how the visualization of the story made it so much more captivating than textbooks or professors who didn’t share passion for the material ever could. It was one of the first experiences I’d had with history, documentaries and storytelling on a grand scale, and its shaped a whole lot of my life ever since. The sheer humanity of the tale was more compelling to me than comic books or action heroes ever were. Real people, really did these extraordinary things, and the medium told the story as if it had happened yesterday.

I remember the Christmas after the series aired, I got the entire set, on VHS, mind you, and it was an absolutely amazing gift (not to mention the set on VHS cost something like $149 at the time).

I watched it over and over again, to reclaim that magical feeling I had at 11 years old, to listen to those stories again and again, and relate them to the present day, and better understand the social and political impact the war had on the nation that fought it – which came more to the forefront as I got older. The visuals were still inspiring every time, and the stories even more so.

So, when the series became available on DVD a few years later, I was considering the buy, but around that time, I was captivated again by Ken Burns’ Empire of the Air (watch on NetFlix), Baseball, and later New York: A Documentary Film, as written by Ken’s brother, Ric Burns, a film, of which I think needs to be required viewing for someone who wants to really understand and love New York as the modern metropolis that it is today.

That first airing of The Civil War sparked a yearning for knowledge about the history of my city, country and people that has led me to read some amazing books about people like Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Moses, and Daniel Burnham and set me into the notion that biography and nonfiction are more compelling for me to watch and read because “it really happened.”

It’s a thirst for knowledge that has helped me to understand and respect, and love, a wide array of amazing people, because, I feel to really understand someone, you really need to understand their motivations, passions and choices, and the circumstances they made them under. Life is funny like that I think, that decisions never seem to come a the right time, but can still offer so much insight about the people that make them, and have a much larger impact on life than anyone can possibly forecast.

So, imagine my thrill when I find out that yesterday, Netflix was offering the entire Civil War documentary available for instant streaming. It felt, yes, like an old friend was coming by for a visit. I still have those VHS tapes sitting on my bookshelf, but the wave of technology had made it impossible to watch (the only VCR I have anymore is attached to an all digital HDTV that doesn’t even have input that would allow me to watch it).

But now, I can sit on my couch, watch The Civil War on my iPad, and reflect on how much as changed in 20 years, and the same time how much things have remained the same.

How I learned to love the iPad

THE PREFACE

Let me start with a quick confession. I am King Hypocrite.

Until about 5am of the day of the iPad launch, I wasn’t going to get an iPad. Since it’s late January announcement I’d been one of the naysayers, who focused on the things it couldn’t do (Flash, multitasking, install apps from anywhere, no physical keyboard, it’s just a giant iPod Touch). My vision for the iPad was as a personal video and entertainment device – one where I could pull up NetFlix Instant Streaming, watch a bunch of streaming TV shows, and movies. I saw it as the ideal platform for watching video. Yes, you can do this on a laptop with Flash, but, to me, the keyboard was this weird mental barrier in a purely psychological way. A physical keyboard said to me, implicitly, that this was an instrument of work first, which happened to play video and music and movies. In many cases, the delivery device was a webpage, which meant there were artifacts and links and barriers around the actual content. The experience wasn’t immersive. Consumption had barriers that were just difficult to overcome.

Well, no Flash, meant most online video was out. This left the iTunes video store as the only way to get most content, parceled out at $1.99/$2.99/$3.99 per download. No thanks, I thought, I’ll stick with cable.

I saw its Kindle fighting potential as a way to read books too. It appeared as if the only way to do that was too through the iTunes “iBooks” store. I actually thought my experience with the Kindle iPhone app was not terrible, but, yes, it was harder to read an entire book on a device so small. And there didn’t appear to be any potential for an iPad one.

So, come March 30, I was pretty much deadset against buying an iPad. And, that was it.

So, what happened?

Starting around April 1 came news that NetFlix would be offering an iPad app to watch instant streaming. Gamechanger. Not soon, after, ABC announced their player app, and CBS announced that select episodes of their shows would be available to iPad users as well. Hulu’s app is likely forthcoming. Check. (Not surprisingly, NBC changed their mind about offering their shows to the iPad. Another classic move by a company who just can’t seem to stop shooting themselves in the foot)

And then Amazon announced their iPad optimized Kindle app. Check. And newspapers started to unveil their apps.

I saw fun games like Flight Control HD, and the fact that OmniGraffle, my favorite wireframing application would be available. And Keynote, Pages and Numbers would have iPad app as well. This could be something I could use in my class to replace my laptop. This could be a great personal entertainment system and a whole lot of other things.

That’s when one word started to flood my consciousness was one word – potential. This is the real selling point of the iPad, that’s really hard to explain to the masses.  That this could really be anything you wanted it to be – for an hour or two a day.

THE WAITING

So, in the excitement, there I was, at 6am, with my girlfriend, who heartily endorsed this idea, on my way to be a part of a throng of people, waiting in line for a device I could get a week later waith no issues. I wanted to be part of the Hollywood like experience of it all. I figured, if I was going to be King Hypocrite, I may as well have fun with it.

Reporters seemed to think that I looked like i knew what i was talking about, so I did some short interviews with NHK, some Indian network, WCBS 880 and got quoted in PC World and by the local NBC affiliate.

So, that filled the bulk of the two and half hours I waited.  We were also joined by a good friend, Mashable COO’s Adam Hirsch, who was great to hang out with and talk to.

But, it was idle time until Gizmodo brought gift bags for the first 50 or so in line.  Unfortunately, I missed out on those (there appeared to be really great swag in there).

But the reality of it all really set in when I saw someone who as before me in line, who had already gotten theirs, playing with an iPad one the street, and I was instantly extremely excited for the first time.

THE PURCHASE

And just like that, it was go time.  Nine A.M. came, and the crowd was orderly ushered into the store, through a gauntlet of cheering Apple employees.  Never have I experienced such a thrill just going to buy a computer product before.   We were ushered downstairs to a second queue, where Apple with their personal Point of Sale devices were waiting.  I got two iPads, one for me (32GB), and one for my girlfriend (16GB), who I knew would have been pretty sad without one!

The whole purchasing process was done in about 5 minutes.  Two iPads, two Incase Neoprene Sleeves, a dock connector to VGA adapter and we were done (They didn’t have the keyboard dock in stock, and won’t for a few weeks).

I’ve never seen people so ravenously excited – off in the center, was a throng of people, ripping open the box to get started with their iPads.

Out back through the crowd of clapping Apple employees and we were done.

THE DEVICE

We did some errands around midtown after the purchase, and rather than be the object of a million demos from onlookers, and a likely mark from crooks, we left the iPads in our Apple bag until we got home.  But, after we turned on the device, we were both pretty floored but what it could do, and the quality of the first generation of iPhone apps.

Books? Yeah, we got that.  iBookstore, Kindle App, Google Books, Free Books App.

TV? Yeah, got that too.  ABC Player , CBS with Survivor for now, Hulu coming.

Movies? NetFlix, of course.

News? Still a bit stingy, but free apps from USA Today, NY Times and Wall Street Journal all look nice.  NPR has a great app for audio broadcasts.

Lifestyle? Epicurious and Weatherbug, among many others.

Games? Flight Control HD and Scrabble.

THE CONCLUSION

The iPad is certainly an amazing content consumption platform, but it’s an even better at being a chameleon. It’s the most immersive device I’ve ever seen, and it will change the game.  Does it have shortcomings? Sure.  But, the potential upside is nothing short of amazing.  It’s a device that only works because of the times.  It’s made major media companies bow to their knees.  The question really is – are YOU in or are YOU out?