So my project for Saturday afternoon/evening was to take Rhody to the beach, shoot a bit of video, then head home, assemble some music, and put it all together in iMovie. Here’s the result.

The music, by the way, is by Winnie Dahlgren, a terrific percussionist based in Boston who has graciously allowed me to use tracks from her album ‘Till We Meet Again for my videos. This track is called “Sunset Over Noyalito Avenue.”

Well, the geniuses at Apple win again. This morning I decided that I was going to do this iPad thing right. So I got up at 5:45 and biked into the city to snag an early place in line at the Stockton Street store.

I arrived at 6:50 a.m. and was 35th in line. I didn’t have to wait long to find out the score: the manager came out to say that he had no AT&T iPads to sell at this location. The choices: a 16GB Wi-Fi model or a 32GB or 64GB Verizon 3G model, in white only. My first preference would have been a black, 64GB, AT&T model, but hey, I’m not patient enough to wait. So I took a ticket entitling me to a white Verizon model. The doors opened at 9:00 a.m., I got my new white iPad with a green smart cover, and I was home by 10:00.

And you know what? The white iPad is already growing on me fast. I just finished getting it all set up (which took a couple of hours because I had a ton of apps, music, and other content to copy over from my original iPad). I’ve been having fun taking some of the new features for a quick spin, including FaceTime (which works great!) and the rear camera. Which is not as terrible as everyone has been saying — yes it’s under 1 megapixel, but if you hold it steady you can take a decent picture with it, like the one below (don’t ask me why it’s upside down — I have a bad feeling that there’s some kind of orientation bug in the EXIF data that’s causing WordPress to turn the photo over). Now I’m going to head outside and try a little videography.

Most of my apps are organized into folders, and I’ve preserved that structure below. I’m not listing bookmarks, but I am including non-universal iPhone apps. By the way, my current iPad is an original 64-gigabyte Wi-FI + 3G model. iTunes shows that it has 59.17 gigabytes of capacity and I’m currently using 30 gigabytes, with 29 left over.

At the very end, I list my most-used apps.

Dock

• Safari
• Mail
• Calendar
• Map
• iPod
• Flipboard

Home Page

• App Store
• iTunes
• Photos
• YouTube
• Contacts
• Videos
• Google
• NYTimes
• Kindle
• Settings
• Reeder
• Instapaper
• WeatherBug
• Pages
• Twitter
• Evernote
• Friendly
• Portfolio To Go

Photos Folder

• Eyewitness
• Beautiful Panoramas
• Heritage (Fotopedia)
• Big Picture
• AliveAlbums
• iSynth
• National Parks (Fotopedia)
• Life
• Colors (Fotopedia)

Photography Folder

• Camera for iPad
• Instagram
• Photogene
• Colorsplash
• Animoto
• PhotoFunia

Location Folder

• Geocaching
• Where
• Everytrail
• Foursquare
• GPS Kit
• Traffic.com
• Geopher Lite
• Yobongo
• SCVNGR

TV & Movies Folder

• ABC Player
• Netflix
• Flixster
• Movies (MSpot)
• TED
• PBS
• Sidereel

Music & Radio Folder

• Pandora
• Public Radio
• NPR
• Magic Piano
• Ocarina
• Magic Fiddle
• Etude
• Glee
• Clock Radio
• Ambiance
• History of Jazz
• Shazam
• Naturespace

Art Folder

• Penultimate
• Sketchbook (Autodesk)
• Louvre
• eCards
• ArtStudio
• iMovie Extras

Action Games Folder

• Mirror’s Edge
• Tilt to Live HD
• RealRacing HD
• Gwarrs: Touch
• DoodleJump
• Fieldrunners
• Game Center
• Angry Birds
• BFBC 2
• Talking Roby
• Tiny Wings

Puzzle Games Folder

• Myst
• Zen Bound
• Morocco
• Pocket Pond
• Koi Pond
• Osmos HD
• Frenzic
• Scrabble
• uzu

Travel & Maps Folder

• Goby
• World Atlas (National Geographic)
• Urbanspoon
• Photo Map
• UpNext
• AllTrails
• TripAdvisor
• Google Earth
• Star Walk
• CityMaps2Go
• Yelp

News Folder

• Pulse News
• Mashable
• Fluent News
• Huff Post
• Nature_HG
• Slate
• NewsRack
• my6sense
• CNN

Magazines Folder

• Esquire
• Wired
• TheNewYorker
• The Economist
• The Atavist

Books Folder

• Best of Times (Vook)
• Poem Flow
• iBooks
• Marvel
• The Elements
• Canyons (Vook)
• Shepp’s Photos (Vook)
• DC Comics
• Google Books
• Net Matters
• Alice for iPad

Reference Folder

• Discover
• Wikipanion
• Epicurious
• Siri
• AppAdvice
• Explor
• Stumbleupon
• Mint.com
• WindowShop (Amazon)
• SearchReviews

Utilities Folder

• Skype
• Remote
• WakeMate
• Magic Window
• Carbonite
• Applausometer
• Calculator XL
• Speedtest
• eBay
• Bump
• Facebook
• Tweetdeck

Business Folder

• iTalk
• Box.net
• GoodReader
• Notes
• WordPress
• Gmail
• SoundNote
• Bento
• Dictation (Dragon)

Most Used Apps, in rough order of usage; it’s not necessarily the same stuff that’s on my Home page, though perhaps it should be!

• Safari
• Mail
• Videos
• NYTimes
• Flipboard
• Instapaper
• Kindle
• Photos
• Twitter
• iPod
• Calendar
• Netflix
• Osmos HD
• The New Yorker
• GoodReader
• Google Earth
• Remote

San Francisco Circuit

Map your trip with EveryTrail

I did find the iPad version of WordPress and I am using it to write this post. So far the mechanics of the device are pretty congenial. I’m finding it much easier to touch type with all 10 fingers than I anticipated. The only downside that I see so far is that the device is surprisingly heavy. I will have to experiment with different ways of holding it and propping it up. Already I’m feeling a bit of “pinky strain” from holding the gadget in one hand, with the weight of it resting on my pinky.

I was number 20 in line at the Apple store this morning, and had a lot of fun waiting in line with the other Apple fans. You can read all about that over at Xconomy.

Two developments last week (the first official week of Mass Mobile Month) were especially exciting. First there was the release of the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app, a handy portable guide to all of the mobile-related events this month and their venues. Cambridge, MA-based Swift Mobile created the app; it’s a variation on the apps they’re developing for the travel and meeting industry (see our coverage of Swift Mobile on Xconomy).

Second, I had the opportunity last week to meet Kathy Kiely, president of the Ad Club, the trade association for marketing and advertising companies in New England, and record an interview about Mass Mobile Month for The Big Orange Couch, the club’s online video series. I hate watching myself on video, but I think this one actually came out pretty well! It’s embedded below.

One of the highlights of Mass Mobile Month is Xconomy’s own Mobile Madness event on March 9. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it now—last I checked, the event was nearly sold out. Unfortunately, after spending the last few months organizing Mobile Madness, I may wind up missing some or all of it, as I’ve been seated as a juror for a trial in Boston that’s expected to last several weeks.

I want to thank all of the organizations who have joined Xconomy in promoting the Mass Mobile Month events. All of these organizations recognize that by working together, we can take Boston’s amazing cluster of talent and ideas for mobile innovation and make it into something even more remarkable and world-changing.

Gustin’s points and my quick rebuttals:

1. The first version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. Yes, but any version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. That’s not a great reason not to buy any particular product.

2. You don’t need a giant thousand-dollar smartphone. You don’t need a $200 or $600 smartphone either. But it might make your life better enough to be worth the money. And if the iPhone is any precedent, Apple’s tablet computer will be far more than a smartphone.

3. You’re just going to break it, anyway. Yes, all of my gadgets have a few scratches and dings. That’s life. They still work. I’ve even seen iPhones with shattered screens that still work. If we were all so afraid of breaking things, we’d live in padded rooms.

4. Multifunction devices can do a lot — just not well. That’s just silly. One word: iPhone.

5. Buy one, and you might as well wear a “Rob Me!” sign. Perhaps, but this is no more true for a tablet computer than for a MacBook or other laptop, and that doesn’t stop people from using their laptops on the subway or at Starbucks.

6. The tablet never caught on — and there’s a reason for that. Yes, I went into some of those reasons in my “Tablet Fever” piece. The point is that Apple, with the iPhone, made a very good start at addressing the problems, and the slate device is likely to represent a larger-scale implementation of the solutions.

7. No keyboard, no mouse, no dice. Hey, if you prefer a keyboard, you can always stick with your laptop (or keep triple-typing on your phone). My bet is that the Apple tablet will have multiple input methods (virtual keyboard, voice, and possibly handwriting recognition) that, together, will work well enough to substitute for a physical keyboard. And within 10 years people will wonder why they ever were so fixated on physical keyboards.

8. Netbooks are cheaper. If you want a netbook. To me they seem like dinky, dumbed-down Windows PCs.

9. Something better’s coming. Something better is always coming.

10. Beware — Apple also built the world’s most infamous paperweight. One word: Newton. Oh, good grief. When are people going to stop pointing to the Newton? For one thing, the Newton was actually amazingly cool in its day—calling it a paperweight is grossly unfair. How else could it have inspired the Palm Pilot and a whole generation of other portable devices? And if Apple hadn’t learned a few lessons from the Newton’s ultimate failure, I don’t think they’d be where they are today with the iPhone.

Then again, I might just be a victim of wishful thinking — we’ll see later today.

What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.