The 3 line backlit LCD screen is 3 3/8″ wide by 1 1/2″ tall (viewing area 3.1″ x 1.5″ ) and the large font characters are easy to read since the backlight on the display lights when a call comes in or you are reviewing calls. Better yet it has an AC cord and a brick that I plugged into the same power strip that the phone plugs into. You can optionally insert 3 AA batteries to back-up the memory and run caller ID during power failures. As you might expect, I have not had to replace them in the 6 months I have had the unit.

More details:

• Caller ID: Receives and displays name, number and calling time
• Caller ID on Call Waiting: Receives and displays name, number and calling time of a waiting caller during a telephone conversation
• Memory Capacity: Stores calling numbers, names, and calling times of last 99 calls, answered or not
• 4 Buttons: DIAL/FLASH, DELETE, FORWARD REVIEW, and BACKWARD REVIEW
• Protocols: Supports both Bellcore and ETSI Call Waiting Caller ID interfaces
• LED Indicator for Message Waiting and New Call
• Flashing LED and LCD icon indicate message(s) waiting in your local telephone company’s voice mailbox

I do not use the call or message waiting features, but I got just what I wanted: easy to read Caller ID without the battery bill. The price is currently $24.98 at Amazon.

A perennial favorite iPad app for the younger generation around here is Pocket Zoo. There is a cartoon zoo that you can visit and see photos of the animals and hear the sounds they make. Not surprisingly, it’s a lot of fun to startle your friends and siblings with an elephant’s trumpeting.

However, the real winner is the live animal cams at zoos around the world. You mostly have to visit during daylight, of course, but the kids find it endlessly amusing to try to spot the animals, some of which are much tougher to see than others. The penguins pictured below always seem to put on a great show, but your young ones may need more patience to spot some of the larger animals. On the other hand, when they do catch a glimpse of the tiger, for instance, the reward is even greater.

Highly recommended.

I have always enjoyed turn based strategy games in general and space trading games in particular, so I was glad to find Dark Nova on the iPad. Those familiar with the space trading genre will feel right at home: you start as a struggling space captain with a small ship trying to make a buck carrying cargo from one planet to another despite the depredations of pirates, the scrutiny of the police, shifty fellow traders, and the occasional alien pest. It’s mostly all about profitable buying, selling, and passenger traffic with the occasional flyer into smuggling or piracy if you are feeling adventurous. You are free to proceed at your own pace since it is turn based and not multiplayer, and there is enough of a challenge (and multiple levels) to keep you amused for a considerable period. While I did not try it, I see there is also a Dark Nova HD specifically for the iPad which presumably has larger graphics for the larger screen, although I was quite happy with the regular version in 2x on my iPad.

We’re selling through our remaining inventory of the 2008 iPods, including the fourth-generation iPod nano and the third-generation iPod shuffle. And right now, we have hot deals on these sleek players–find savings of up to 22% off. Don’t miss these fantastic prices. And with the money that you’ll save on your new favorite player, treat yourself to a new accessory, like a case or speaker system.

If you don’t need the latest model iPod and want to save some cash - check it out.

While Googling around looking up some iPad questions, I discovered that there is in fact an official Apple iPad User Guide which I have found to be extremely useful, but that you have to download it from Apple Support to your regular PC and view it there. This 154 page Adobe Acrobat PDF file cannot be viewed on the iPad itself and cannot be converted to an iPad iBooks-readable Epub file at the otherwise very useful Epub2Go website (see their front page warning about the iPad User Guide) because of some structural issues.

I recommend that you download the User Guide immediately and short of reading the whole thing, use the Adobe Acrobat search function to find the answers to your burning iPad questions that confuse the family technical consultant. Then you can become the expert!

There are a variety of weather apps available for the iPad, but by far and away the best that I have seen is Weatherbug Elite for iPad. It has all the expected weather features, but what really blew us away is the mapping. First, we are using a Wi-Fi iPad and yet Weatherbug Elite is able to pinpoint our street location almost exactly apparently because they use technology from Skyhook Wireless that uses a vast database of Wi-Fi access points to triangulate your position.

Second, the radar and other mapping is what I would term infinitely scalable. You can use the usual iPad multi-touch to zoom the display in to your street and out to your state or larger. The other night we were in the middle of a line of thunderstorms complete with hail and funnel clouds. With Weatherbug Elite on the iPad zoomed in on our location it was like watching the storms pass overhead. Very, very neat.

However, the best news is that Weatherbug Elite for the iPad is free. Give it a try and see if you do not think it is slick as well.

This isn’t a coincidence in another way as well. Now that the iPad has arrived I have noticed that family usage of the Eee netbook has dived. PC World has a story titled Survey Says: iPad Is Killing Netbooks which makes the case that the netbook market is getting clobbered by both the iPad and low priced notebooks and that theory makes sense to me. If you want a convenient Internet PC with lots of slick features besides, get an iPad. If you want a cheap portable Windows workhouse, why settle for a netbook when when you can get a full-sized laptop for nearly the same price? Still, it’s not all over for the netbooks yet as they can claim a price advantage over the iPad and a portability advantage over the full size laptops.

I did some looking around for a manufactured iPad stylus because the build-it-yourself instructions I found on the Web seemed rather dubious and it was easy to narrow it down to the Pogo family of styluses probably because the market is still new. Anyway, we ended up with the Pogo Sketch Stylus

which is a bit longer at 5.2 inches than the Pogo Iphone Stylus which also works but is only 3.5 inches long.

Using the Pogo stylus works great and is quite an improvement. In fact, I tend to use the stylus for basic navigation and even typing on the screen keyboard. However, if you want to completely replace the use of fingers you will need two of them to emulate the multi-touch gestures which require two fingers and thereby two styluses.

Toshiba Cyber Monday 1-Hour Doorbuster – a Satellite® L500 for just $299 + FREE Microsoft Office Home & Student! 9 am to 10 am Pacific 11.30.09 only or while supplies last. Make sure you’ve completed checkout by 10 am to receive this deal!

The Black Friday Sale at ToshibaDirect – up to 25% off Laptops + Amazing Free Extras! 4 Days Only! 11.26.09–11.29.09.

Black Friday special – 20% off Toshiba-brand laptop accessories! Use coupon code ACCESS2009 at checkout. Offer valid 11.26.09–11.30.09.

All expire by 12/01/2009.

• Tiger Direct: Thanksgiving Week Special Deals
• OnSale: GiiNii 7″ Digital Photo Frame Discounted 55%
• Newegg: LG BD370 Blu-ray Disc Player Discounted 35%

• $100 (50%) off a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31500341AS with free shipping.
• $110 (48%) off a Garmin nüvi 260W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with free shipping
• $156.45 (45%) off a Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Traffic with free shipping
• $150.00 (21%) off a HP Pavilion DM3-1030US 13.3-Inch Silver Laptop - Up to 6 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium) with free shipping

New items will get the Black Friday treatment every day so you will need to check back each day.

Ordinarily Amazon Prime costs $79.00 per year, but it doesn’t take much online shopping for shipping charges to add up to that amount. Amazon, of course, hopes that Prime’s free shipping will make them the first and only stop for your online shopping.

We are satisfied Amazon Prime users in my household, but many people are naturally wary of a non-negligible upfront fee. Well, for this holiday season Amazon has a promotion that they hope will change your mind - Amazon Prime is free for one month for new Prime users. If you sign up now you will get all the Amazon Prime benefits for one month that will cover the bulk of the holiday shopping season including Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you shop for the holidays online and Amazon covers any part of your shopping list, this offer is a real bargain.

The problem with this is that many eBay sellers encourage buyers to shop around for multiple days amongst their other auctions and eBay store items to buy more and save on combined shipping. Sellers woke up Saturday to find irate emails from customers they had encouraged to keep shopping, but who had exceeded eBay’s arbitrary 48 hour limit and were hit with the "Please pay…" emails for their purchases over the past few days.

Even better, the eBay sellers cannot opt out of these dunning letters nor modify the text to fit their own selling policies, so they are now noodling away on ways to let their buyers know that it was eBay who screwed up and not them. Smooth move eBay! I’m sure your buyers and sellers both appreciate your kickoff to the holiday shopping season.

First the UltraHD specs:

Product Features

• Easy-to-use, pocket-sized HD camcorder featuring one-touch recording and digital zoom with a simple user interface
• Captures 120 minutes of HD video on 8 GB of built-in memory. No tapes or additional memory cards are required.
• Convenient flip-out USB arm plugs directly into your PC or Mac to launch FlipShare software which allows import of videos as well letting you easily email videos, edit individual clips, make custom movies, capture still photos from video, and even upload video to sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace.

Technical Details

Internal Memory: 8GB (120 minutes)

Screen Size: 2.0" (transflective TFT)

Screen Resolution: 960 x 240 pixels

Video Resolution: 1280 x 720 pixels

Frame Rate: 30 frames per second (constant frame rate, progressive scan)

Video Bitrate: 8.8Mbps (average - auto adaptive algorithm)

Video Format: H.264 video compression, AAC audio compression, saves as MP4 file

Lens Type: Fixed Focus (1.5m to infinity)

Aperture: f/2.4 (fast lens for great results in low-light environments)

Zoom: Smooth multi-step 2x digital

Interface: 8 Buttons (Power, Play, Delete, Record and 4 way navigation)

Dimensions: 4.25" x 2.19" x 1.17" (H x W x D)

PC Connection: Built-in flip-out USB arm (up to USB 2.0 speed)

TV Out: HDMI™ Mini Connector (Standard HDMI™ Cable not included)

Battery Life: Up to 2.5 hours (with 2x AA Alkaline batteries)

Up to 6.5 hours (with 2 x AA Energizer® e2® batteries)

Tripod Mount:
Yes

Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista
Mac OSX

The pros of the Flip UltraHD are exactly what you would expect - it’s a compact HD camcorder that’s it incredibly easy to use for the average consumer and takes great HD video, which is only what you would expect from a Flip.

The cons mostly come by size comparison to the MinoHD which at 3.94” x 1.97” x 0.63” (H x W x D) is smaller and sleeker and equally easy to use. However, the UltraHD still fits in a large pocket and the size brings some advantages over the MinoHD:

• 8 GB of storage instead of 4GB
• 2-inch screen instead of 1.5-inch
• Real buttons instead of touch sensitive (i.e. capacitive) "buttons"
• Replaceable batteries. The unit comes with a rechargeable battery pack, but you don’t have to recharge it to keep on shooting. You can use AA batteries or buy a separate battery pack and recharger.
• HDMI output

One real con I have seen is that the built-in flip-out USB arm can be a pain depending on your PC set-up so you may need an extension cable. Here’s how it is supposed to work:

All in all, the Flip UltraHD is a fun, quality pocket HD camcorder. The MSRP is US$199.00, but Amazon seems to be currently selling the UltraHD for US$162.00 and you may find an even better deal if you shop around.

Manufacturers

• Apple - Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod Touch plus educational pricing
• Dell - Several laptop deals and a free hard drive/memory upgrade offer
• HP - A wide range of laptops, desktops, and peripherals
• Lenovo - Many laptop deals with up to $300 off on a top of the line IdeaPad
• Toshiba - Back to school buying guide with bargains across their whole laptop range

Retailers (which often offer better deals than the manufacturers)

• Best Buy - deals on systems from Toshiba, HP, Dell, and Sony
• Newegg - No systems but a variety of discount peripherals - I like the 27 inch Hanns-G LCD monitor