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…I don’t have one yet. I was at the U. Village Apple store on Saturday morning to check out the craziness and spend a little one on one time with an iPad. The interface is beautiful, and the hardware makes it quite responsive. Standard iPhone/iPod Touch apps are a joke, and look comical on the iPad’s larger screen, but apps designed for the iPad are amazing.

I’m not going to give a comprehensive review and rehash all the same stuff that all the other blogs and media outlets are covering. I’m going to comment on one, singular omission that tops the list of reasons that the iPad is not really ready yet.

User accounts.

Computers have user accounts, iPhones don’t. The iPad falls somewhere in between, so it’s arguable that it should remain simple and user account free. I beg to differ.

When I’m carrying my iPhone and someone asks me to see it or play with it for a bit, I usually hand it over and look over their shoulder. I’ll give them a minute or two, and then time is up. I’ve got a fair amount of personal information loaded into my iPhone. Email, saved passwords in Safari, and browser history are just a few to mention.

An iPad is not a “personal” device that you would pocket and carry with you around town, so the likelihood that you get hit up for some demo time is low, but it IS a coffee table computer. It’s something that you should feel comfortable to leave in the living room and allow guests to use for web surfing, iTunes music requests, etc…

Without the ability to log out, I would not be comfortable loading my personal credentials into the iPad lest I look like an asshole when a guest asks to use the thing and I say… “meh… I don’t think so, it’s my computer and I can’t log out…”

Apple? Is this on your list?

…and it was in my pocket. RedEye for iPhone is a new product that combines a free iPhone app with a Physical IR transmitter that allows you to control just about anything that came with a remote. The app connects from your iPod Touch or iPhone to the RedEye IR transmitter via Wifi and immediately sends commands to your equipment, including TVs, DVRs, stereo systems, etc… It appears to be quite nice to use, and the potential for this product is huge.

I’ve been mulling over universal remotes for a long time now, and have never found one that really excited me. Until now. The economy of using a touch screen device that you already own to replace cluttered remote controls is stunning. Check out some of the videos:

iTunes 9 was released by Apple today http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/ and it contains a mush requested feature. With iTunes 9, you can now add, remove, and arrange all the icons on your iPhone right from your computer screen. It’s very slick, and it motivated me to get all my icons organized.

Another new feature is called Genius Mix, which apparently creates genius playlist automatically from up to 12 groups of music in your library. Initially I did not see how to access this, but found that if you go to the “Store” menu and choose “Update Genius” the mix icon will pop in below the standard genius icon.

iTunes Genius Mix feature

Wallet is great for Mac users who want to keep track of a lot of passwords and login information. I use it every day. The software for your Mac has been around for awhile, and was just updated to version 3. The developers added some great new features like MobileMe synchronization to keep multiple computers up-to-date with the correct passwords.

The big news however, is that the iPhone/iPod Touch version of the software is out, and it syncs with your computers too! Very handy.

$20 for the Mac Software, and $3.99 for your iPhone.

http://www.acrylicapps.com/wallet/