One one hand, it shows the intense amount of careful thought Apple puts into the user experience. But on the other hand, it highlights the discovery problem. I know people who have been using iOS since before it was called iOS, and still didn’t know about these. How do you put these kinds of finishing touches into a product and make sure the target audience can find out about them? -m

A cute little graphic on the screen said I could use my scroll wheel. I’m on a laptop, so I tried the two-finger drag–the equivalent gesture sans mouse… and flipped some dozens of pages in half a second. Now, hopelessly lost I searched for a ‘back’ button to no avail.  Perversely, there is a prominent ‘back’ button, but disabled. Mocking me.

This feels rushed. I wonder what could be pushing Amazon to release something so unfinished? -m

No iPhone for me. Yet. -m

So Jerry (or whoever is on deck as CEO), you should probably look into this mobile thing and see what’s up with leadership there and whether anything is salvageable… -m

But watch out: everyone’s favorite gang of bankrupt litigious weasels, the SCO group, in a desperate effort to prove they they have a broader business plan than making up claims about owning open source software, already have a mobile-related product called “Me, Inc.“. On the plus side, these guys are so deep into their bankruptcy proceedings that they probably don’t have the mettle to go up against Apple at this point. But neither do they have much to lose for trying… -m

You probably already know that you can switch apps quickly with Cmd+tab. But if you reach your pinky up a bit more and hit Cmd+~ you can rotate through the windows of the current app. This turns out to be most useful when, say, your email compose window gets behind the main email client window.

What is the equivalent keystroke on Linux? -m

What is Amazon’s most valuable IP?

How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside all the details and purchasing history they already have for each customer, there’s a single bit called something like owns_kindle. Those bearing this mark are the ur-early-adopters, the loyalists, the customers with a vary large net future value. The marketers dream. Opt-in isn’t even an issue–what Kindle owner won’t be interested in special offers and exclusive deals for their special device? Where else are they going to go?

That one bit alone is probably worth another $400, making it the most valuable IP in terms of dollars-per-byte that Amazon holds. Even if they do a drastic price cut soon (and such price cuts will at some point be inevitable to sustain the market), even if they refund half of the difference to the early adopters, they will come away with super-sized smiles. -m

P.S. s/Kindle/iPhone/ and s/Amazon/Apple/ and this entire post still holds.

P.P.S. There is a pretty good play Apple could make here around an ebook reader. Tie it to the same wireless service plan that the iPhone uses, make books available through the iTunes store (including tons of Gutenberg/public domain content/creative commons for free), and put it on a very slick designed piece of hardware. But even in this case, it will initially sell for a premium price for the reasons above. Game on!