iPad 3G

Three offshore hops and we're in Charleston at the Maritime Center - one of our most favorite places. Immediately, the air conditioning was turned on to spoil us. Although we intended to stay for 2 days, I paid for 5. Pay for 5 days and you get 7 days - I'm such a sucker for that. Truth be told, the weather wasn't good for us to leave today (Sunday). We need this bad weather to pass over and it looks like things don't clear up until at least Wednesday.

So I convince Karen to walk to the Apple store in the late afternoon. This is one of the advantages of being in a real city - lots of things walking distance from where we are. We had a video cable that we wanted to return and it seemed like a good idea to do that right away. Besides, we needed the 10 block walk.

Upon arriving at the store at 4:50, we find a long line waiting to get in. Imagine that - today at 5:00 pm is the release of the iPad 3G (cellular connectivity + GPS). "What luck!" I told Karen. She didn't buy it though - she knew this was a multi-step plan probably started weeks ago.

So we wait on line for about 20 minutes, get up to the door and are greeted by a set of serious geeky-looking people. Now I'm definitely a member of the geek class but even this set had me wondering where my class had gone wrong.

We're escorted in the door with our own sales assistant who gives us our new iPad 3G. We made the cut. So did 3 people behind us. It was that close.

It's been fun to experiment with it. The screen is beautiful and the apps are mostly working well. There are some bugs that need to be fixed - common with a device so new like this.

The GPS, thankfully, works much better than the iPhone's GPS. It even locks position signals below deck. I can see an anchor alarm in the future with this especially since it manages to have exceptional battery life - 10 hours or more.

We met with our good friends Jeb & Linda who made an incredible dinner party centered around the Kentucky Derby. The dogs remember the dog park across the street and are having a wonderful time too. This is a special place.

Here are a couple of screen shots showing what my iPad 3G looks like. It'll be fun to see how it fits with boating once we get back underway.

My iPad screen background:

Looking at the blog (looking at itself!) in Safari: