The “magical and revolutionary” $499 iPad hits the Apple store today, and with beans has got to side with Fast Company writer Gina Trapani’s caution that you should not run out and buy an iPad just yet.

Trapani’s first point goes to the fact that first-gen Apple products unapologetically come to market in a sometimes half-baked fashion. She points to the early iPhone adopters who felt burned by spending $500-$600 on a product whose price dip was inversely proportional to its performance improvement, to the point where as of this writing, Trapani notes, the iPhone “3G is now on sale for a measly $100, one fifth of the price of the first generation’s cheapest model.”

She goes on to say very eloquently that “next year’s iPad will be faster, cheaper, less buggy, and have better apps and worthy competitors. Let all the deep-pocketed Jobs apostles be your canaries into the iPad coalmine.”

Trapani’s other salient point perhaps goes against the grain of folks who buy gadgets for the sake of having gadgets, but she suggests quite frankly that “you don’t know if you need an iPad yet. If you’ve already got a smartphone and a laptop, the gap in your workflow that the iPad might fill isn’t obvious, and discerning consumers only absorb gadgets that fulfill a need.”

If you all are too young to remember the debut of the first Mac, withbeans.com’s technology correspondent does, because he dropped three grand on the Mac 512K in the early ‘80s, only to watch the Mac Plus come out a few months later. This is what’s classically referred to as “planned obsolescence,” and we’re not afraid to say that Apple is famous for it. So watch out for that little trick, too.

What do you think, dear withbeans readers? Are you inclined to wait to buy your iPad, or in your world is it okay to have a new gadget just because?

Image source: Apple

Bluetooth speakerphones that do double duty as a hands-free car kit and conference speaker are not so common that they’ve become passé but enough have come to market that it’s already a struggle to figure out which of these gadgets is ahead of the pack. Well, if having your Bluetooth go green packs appeal, Scosche Industries unveiled a solar Bluetooth speakerphone at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show that also ended up in a CES travel gadget round-up by Travel & Leisure.

Like most Bluetooth speakers designed with motorists in mind, the solChat, as it’s called, will take a charge from an old-school USB hookup or car adapter, but thereafter can be clipped to the windshield visor or can be suctioned directly to the windshield to soak up the sun’s rays; according to the manufacturer the “integrated solar panel continuously re-charges the lithium ion battery.”

In all other respects the unit functions like most other similar Bluetooth speakers do, so the embedded how-to video, while not absolutely necessary, gives you a good idea of how delightfully small the folks at Scosche managed to make this product.

Image source:  Scosche Industries

Ask a random bystander if he’s into online gambling and he might sniff that he doesn’t waste his money on games of chance. Ask him instead if he ever bought a refurbished piece of electronic equipment from an online retailer and he might say sure, from time to time. Well, newsflash, bystander, that’s online gambling.

Some online retailers will permit you to send back a refurb as easily as you would a new item, issuing you a magical RMA (return merchandise authorization, aka return material authorization). But just as often, you may find that your retailer’s policy is to replace your refurb rather than credit your original form of payment. A “with beans” correspondent recently tried to use a retailer’s online form to return a lousy refurbished phone and the knee-jerk response of the form was to spit back the response that an RMA could not be issued for the item. In so many words, the retailer’s was saying “Either keep your lousy phone or have us send you one that you now have reason to believe may suck just as much.”

Well, there’s a fiendishly simple way to get around that, and it comes down to three magic words: email or call the customer service department and say you understand the policy but that you see this as a customer satisfaction issue. Coolly dropping this phrase works almost every time, because linguistically and otherwise you’ve sidestepped the Draconian return policy and elevated your case to a realm that’s a bit more intangible. In the case of the bum phone, our correspondent sent an email with that phrase and within ten minutes got a response – by phone – from an apologetic rep who never once lectured him about the restrictive, stated return policy and graciously issued an RMA. That’s good news for you, very smart business for them.

Image source: Davide Vizzini via Wikimedia Commons

I heard a rumor today that perhaps Verizon may be rolling out their pay per byte pricing on data plans beginning with their San Francisco customers who would want access to a 4G (LTE) connection.

AT&T spoke about the variable pricing model for data a couple of weeks ago. Now, Verizon is mentioning it. The problem with Verizon doing this is the sheer number of users in Silicon Valley and mid-Texas…the 2 most bandwidth-hungry places in the USA. Verizon indicates that their selection of next-generation of phones may indeed be out in late 2010, not 2011 as they indicated in late 2009.

What does this mean for a San Francisco Verizon user?

With a tiered pricing model for data starting as soon as next year, you will want to make sure your handset is wifi enabled. You definitely won’t want s new Hulu or YouTube video product to cost you an extra $500 per month to watch The Office. This should be good for AT&T & Starbucks…two of the beneficiaries of increased wifi use.

Ok, so I don’t know for sure, but I have a suspicion. Google recently launched their local business enhancements for San Jose, California and Houston, Texas. Perhaps this gives us some hints about Google’s view of their most progressive and highest-margin markets.

First, let’s talk about what is known. Google plans to start-up its own ISP in at least one test market. The market will showcase Gigabit level speeds for a small sample area of users.

Austin, Texas – Why not build it for Austin, Texas (aka the other Silicon Valley)? Google has supposedly soured on Austin because of the situation with the office they closed and quickly shuttered.

Why Houston, Texas? Houston has a large amount of excess inter-city wind-powered (Green-E)electricity capacity (at the zip code level), plenty of dark fiber and shovel-ready sites located in easy tech access areas. In addition, if you assume Houston is one of their highest margin cities, they would want those users to increase their speeds (and searches) first.

I stumbled upon an interested value proposition this week. The idea that people would do 1 to 10 things online for $5. Some would design a logo for $5, some would talk down to you like your father, while some would become your Facebook friend.

The name of the service is fiverr and it contains a listing of people will to do everything under the sun for $5….payable via PayPal. I tried it out for some of our other companies.

I used a user called goinglikesixty to review our companies for $5. I liked him so much that I used him to offer reviews on 5 different sites for 2 different companies. Good deal.

I also used a user called DeuceGroup to Digg and Stumble a few deep link pages inside some of our sites.  Very quick, very good links.

In both cases, the work was completed in less than an hour and was done satisfactorily. The fiverr website runs slowly because of all the new traffic, so I’d recommend getting individual email address to be able to bypass the website. The site accepts PayPal, retains some of the funds and send the rest to the workers.

For the average consumer, going green can be a multi-part question: What green products can I introduce into my daily life, are they really making a difference when it comes to saving energy and the environment, and are these products any good? Answers to all of these questions intersect neatly in an unlikely place – an Amazon Listmania! List on the Best of Green Gadgets and Energy Savers.

A Listmania list can sometimes be self-serving affair constructed around the motivation of the lister – that’s not a cynical comment, it’s just the way it is, as all of the products on the list are for sale. But given that all Amazon reviews have user comments attached to them, the list begins to feel more objective.

The selling point of the green gadgets list, quite simply, is that it’s a good discussion starter for your household. Many of us know there are little ways we could be saving energy, but we’re not often armed with enough information about them. Did you know there was such a thing as a handheld electricity usage monitor that, according to the manufacturer, “shows the operating costs of your household appliances” and “calculates cost and forecasts by week, month and year”? Perhaps you heard tell of such a thing, but does it work? Two hundred customer reviews add up to a cumulative 4 ½ star rating, which, if you’re accustomed to relying on user reviews, is a good sign. The “works great, fast results” type of comment dominates, but look for yourself. As with any product, it’s the details, even within the positive reviews, that call the product’s usefulness for you into question.

Among the list’s items is one that’s decidedly old school –a classic push-reel lawn mower that users say is safer, quieter, and better for the environment. But in the words of one user it requires “a little more elbow grease” especially on hills. So you might want to ask yourself, is that additional exercise going to benefit you in the long term, or will it cause a strain? Hypothetical questions, of course, but all worth asking if you’re thinking about new ways to go green.

Image Source: P3 International

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still generates enough buzz that CNET’s into its fifth year of nominating products for its Best of CES Awards, and among the gadgets that made the cut for its Best of CES 2010 round-up is the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Hearing the word “hybrid” associated with a car may not immediately generate skepticism about whether and how well it works, but when it comes to smaller gadgets it’s a natural reaction, and CNET raises good questions about this notebook whose screen undocks from the keyboard “to become its own handheld Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered tablet.” CNET makes the point that a Lenovo rep demonstrated the undocking at the show, which makes the reviewers “curious as to how delicate the procedure is and whether the laptop might accidentally disconnect under casual use” and also wonder “will both devices sync well with each other? Will the battery life be suitable? None of these could be determined in the space of a few minutes.”

Those concerns aside, it’s hard to deny not only how cool this thing looks but how cool it would be to utilize it in a presentation if it actually works the way it should. CNET noted that the tablet’s touchscreen performance and video playback was a mixed bag, but the one feature to get excited about is that “the base, when detached, can continue to function as its own Core 2 computer independent of the tablet–a monitor would need to be attached, but it opens up possibilities for the U1 to truly act as two devices in one. Separate batteries and Wi-Fi antennas are contained in both the base and the tablet screen, while the tablet has the 3G and Bluetooth antennas, as well as speakers and a webcam.”

This kind of redundancy, we’ll say again, is exciting, especially when you consider how versatile the hybrid would be if, say, at a trade show you could easily attach another monitor to the U1’s keyboard to let your colleague continue demonstrating an app at your company’s booth while you ran off with the tablet to demo something else. Practically, it would probably be easier to have two separate devices, but that’s where the cleverness of the end-user comes in – how could having this undockable tablet really save me time and energy on a day-to-day basis? What do you think?

Image source: Lenovo