So I have now had at least a good hour of hands on time with the iPad at various stores. Of course that is not really enough time to give a thorough review of a product, but it is enough time to decide not to purchase one. I am by no means an Apple fanatic. I do however own and use Apple products everyday, including iPhone, iMac and Macbook Pro. I see a lot of potential in the iPad but as it stands right now all I can say is “DO NOT WANT” and here’s why.

1. No Flash. Sorry I don’t care if HTML5 is taking over, I don’t care if Flash is going the way of the dinosaurs. Right now I need flash to see a lot of the sites I frequent. Maybe when Flash does go away I’ll consider the iPad but right now if I’m going to ditch out $500 I want to see the sites I currently visit and not have to wait for sites to switch from Flash.

2. Expensive apps. The iPad itself can’t do much out of the box so I’m going to need apps. A lot of them. Problem is they are expensive! Sure you can run iPhone apps, but they don’t look or feel the same and if I want to do that I’ll just forget the iPad and use my iPhone. Although I didnt spend a huge amount of time in the app store at a glance iPad apps = big $$ compared to iPhone/iPod Touch apps.

3. Rather difficult to maneuver. As I stated earlier I have limited seat time with the iPad, however from that time I’ve found it hard to maneuver around. I find it hard to type and click things. I have small hands and the iPad is just big enough to make it difficult. I would imagine someone with larger hands would not have a problem.

4. It’s heavy! I was surprised and how heavy it actually was. Although I didn’t use it long enough to know for sure I can only imagine my arms would get tired of holding this thing up. It also contributes to reason #3 making it harder to maneuver. Not a huge deal, but the small problems keep stacking up.

5. Price! Now many people say the price points on the iPad are very reasonable and that may be the case if the iPad served any real purpose and could replace another device. However it can’t do any of this. It’s not a laptop or netbook, it’s not a phone or camera, it’s not really a book reader ala Kindle… it’s a toy. As such I think $500 is too much. If the iPad were $199 I might buy one right now just for the hell of it as an impulse buy because I like gadgets.

So because of these reasons I will be anxiously awaiting the next reiteration of the iPad in the hope that it will be all that it can be.

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I have been using the Google Email App for a while now and I’m very impressed. In my experience most small business owners use either a free web email like Hotmail or Yahoo or they use the email that comes with their hosting. The problem with web mail solutions like Hotmail is that it looks unprofessional having your email @hotmail.com (although some allow you to use your domain if you pay) and many are limited in the ways you can access your email (some don’t allow IMAP for example). Using the email provided by your hosting company is not great either. Usually their web access applications are sub par, their spam filtering is lacking, and most people switch hosting companies all the time. This means you have to always have a local copy of all your emails at all time.

Here is where the Google Email App comes in. With Google Apps you can change the MX records on your hosting account to redirect all email traffic to Google. What this does is provide a 3rd party who will handle your email no matter what hosting company you use. Another great feature is the Google web mail interface. In my opinion their web mail interface is one of the best in the business! They also allow IMAP access to your account. By using IMAP you can sync all your computers and mobile devices including all folders! Another great thing about having IMAP access is that if you wish to switch from Google to another email provider the new provider can easily pull all your email data using IMAP.

I recently had an issue arise when a client wanted to switch from Yahoo Small Business Email (which is a paid service) to another service. Yahoo does not allow IMAP access so moving to a new service would mean either losing all his emails or downloading them to his local computer. Even downloading them to his computer would be a massive undertaking because without IMAP access none of the folders he has created on Yahoo would be transferred. Ultimately he decided it wasn’t worth the effort and chose to stay with Yahoo. This situation can be avoided by choosing an email provider that allow IMAP access.

Google Email App also allows you to create multiple accounts for yourself or employees all on your domain with their own unique login. However the best part of the Google Email app is the price… FREE! Google also offers a paid version with a few features more suited to larger companies.

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Alright so it’s been slow going on the site. We are still both working full time so we don’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to Performance Tread right now, but we are chugging along.

I have Magento setup on our new host and we are starting to add products. We are starting with the performance tires first since that’s really our initial target audience. It’s a slow process though we have to enter one by one for each model and each SIZE! It’s going to take forever. I have also been looking to see if we could get a csv file or something from the manufacturers with all the tire data so we don’t have to copy paste specs from their site one by one. Not much luck it’s like pulling teeth. We managed to get access to some good quality images for Goodyear and Michelin but no data. We have to figure something out for that or we will never finish adding these products.

I have also started looking into how we can do a by vehicle search since a lot of people have no idea what size tires they need or where to find their tire size. There is a company that sells the data of tire size for all makes and models or cars but it’s a bit pricey like $2k/year. Then I have to integrate it somehow into Magento. I think we will pass for now. I’m hoping our target customers are a bit more savvy about tire size than the average joe. Will just have a search by size for right now.

Still working on that deal I mentioned last time, hopefully I will have more to say on that soon. Also looking to partner up with a local rim manufacturer who is producing some very nice, very high quality rims. We keep debating if we want to carry a lot of items or just focus on the best stuff. We have the racing experience to know what works best and what doesn’t so why bother with the lower end stuff… not sure which way to go.

Last but not least I have started looking into shipping costs… I don’t like what I see. We setup a basic account with UPS and I compared some of the rates I got from other sites to what UPS was giving me for the same shipment. It was around double… ouch! Can’t be charging more than everyone else for shipping. I think it goes back to volume. So many little things we didn’t even think would be an obstacle keep popping up kind of demotivating. Anyways will be speaking to UPS rep soon to see what we can do.

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