Apple clearly still offer the best tablet computer, even with the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire late last year – no news yet on sales of that product, but it’s massively more successful than any other iPad “competitor”!

I have one on order, so we will see how good it is – I see it being useful for significant typing, where right now I get out the Apple bluetooth keyboard. Visit Kickstarter to order yours …

An alternate I proved today – set your i device to airplane mode (or otherwise disable uploading); now go through and delete the photos you don’t want to have shared; a dialog will warn about deleting in two places, and you’re OK with that. Now when you connect to WiFi only the remaining pictures will upload.
This worked great on my iPad today, pre-sorting photos imported from camera before uploading only what I wanted to keep.

If you do want to save the deleted photos, you could probably use something like Photogene to make copies elsewhere than in the main photo album, so that they are not uploaded (I haven’t tried this).

I can’t think of any other business where that would happen. Maybe “send it in for service” but never a perfect “here’s a new one”. Exceptional!

But now, the latest quarterly figures from Apple announce sales of more than 11 million iPads!

Since Apple quarters don’t line up with annual quarters, it’s tricky to get an exact prediction, but we have:
Second Quarter: 4.69 million iPads (this was the quarter where iPad -> iPad 2 occurred)
Third Quarter: 9.25 million iPads
Fourth Quarter: 11.12 million iPads
These figures cover December 25, 2010 to September 24, 2011 – Apple surely still have huge sales for the rest of this year! That period last year saw sales of over 7 million iPads, but I’d expect to see at least the last quarters 11 million repeated, and perhaps closer to 15 million.
So maybe they don’t hit 40 million iPad sales this year – but likely they will exceed 35 million …

While the Kindle Fire has many less features, it seems that Amazon has an excellent design AND implementation – in direct contrast to all previously released “iPad competitors” that appear to want to fail by unreleasing unready products.

At the below $200 price point, there will be many new owners of tablets this year – but there will still be many that want the larger more featured iPad. The losers here will surely be all those other Samsung/Motorola/Blackberry/etc tablets – they had to compete with a fabulous $500 device, now they also have to compete with a $200 price point.

I can’t imagine anyone now being happy with an unsupported $100 HP tablet when for $200 you can get the support and backing of Amazon …

Amazing! But I still doubt they can reach 40 million for the year … of course that article was wrong about screen resolution, so no surprise if it’s wrong about sales volume too.

Setting up the Eye-Fi SD card requires a “full” computer, it cannot be done on the iPad. You must configure WiFi services to be used, in to the card; you can also set up an “AdHoc” WiFi which the SD card will create for the iPad to link to, when there is no other WiFi.
Unfortunately on the trip I had multiple WiFi services in hotels, that the card was not configured for; each time I had to re-configure the iPad to connect to the Eye-Fi WiFi, to transfer photos, then configure it back to the hotel service for internet access.
This makes it enough hassle that I felt it would be easier just to use the SD card adaptor!

I also experienced problems where the photo transfer would keep stopping, while the iPad received a photo then forwarded it via 3G to an online service (it is possible to configure Eye-Fi to automatically forward to Picasa or Facebook). I had to select the “online only via WiFi” option, to prevent this problem – again somewhat defeating the supposed ease-of-use.

Finally, the Eye-Fi App itself is, to be generous, minimal …

It works only in portrait mode, displaying thumbnails from the Camera Roll which is where received photos are stored. “Cleverly” the status bar at the bottom covers up the most recent photos, making it difficult to see what is happening. It is hard to know when transfer is complete too, since “Complete” is shown after each photo – you just have to wait a long time to see if any more pictures are coming (or check the last filename against the last name in the camera).
You can tap a thumbnail to see it full size, but the viewer is so slow that you are quicker to exit to the proper iPad Photo App (where you can also delete unwanted pictures, not possible in Eye-Fi).

If the Eye-Fi SD card had not messed up my camera so often, I might keep using it – but that additional worry over reliability and the possibility of losing photos, along with the lack of easy use, makes me think this was a wasted purchase.