David R Storms.com

As all fans of this show know, there are a ton of unanswered questions. Our hopes are that this final season 6 will put to rest many of these questions. Of course, there will remain some mysteries for speculation, but I believe there will be some good payoff this year.

The good folks over at Lostpedia have been capturing these unanswered questions. I’ve decided to take a few of them and try to answer them based on my own theories, which I will admit are likely influenced by some of the podcasts on Lost that I listen to such as The Transmission and LOSTCasts.

These are in no particular order, just some of the ones I was interested in from the Lostpedia list. I want to thank Lostpedia for maintaining this list, the links you see beside it will link you to relevant articles on the site.

On Walt

Q: Does Walt have “special powers”? If so, how and why? (“Special“) (“Man of Science, Man of Faith“) (“Abandoned“)

A: Yes, Walt likely has many abilities. I believe they have been with him and grew with maturity, but became more pronounced once he was on the island, magnified somehow.  He is akin to Desmond, whom many believe to be “the variable” in the equation and of great importance. He wasn’t made that way, but was born that way. Both serve a purpose for the good.

Q: Why did Walt tell Locke not to open the Hatch? How did he know anything about it? (“Born to Run“)

A: Walt, although maybe not understanding clairvoyance, knew of the disaster that would unfold if the Swan hatch was destroyed, and felt through the survivors breaching the Hatch it would eventually lead to the stations destruction. The so called “Man in Black” or Jacob’s unamed Nemesis, is somehow restricted by the energy of the island, and while that energy is being regulated by the Swan station, he is trapped or is helpless to leave. Once the station is destroyed and that energy is released, he will be free to leave or put is plan into motion to do so.

Q: What did Walt see that frightened him enough to want to leave the Island? (“Born to Run“)

A: He fears the repercussions of the Swan station being destroyed. He knows that he cannot stop the turn of events so is desperate to flee once the Man in Black is free.

Q: Why does Shannon hear Walt say (backwards) not to push the button? (“Abandoned“)

A: The image of Walk is one of the many forms the Man in Black takes to manipulate the survivors on the island. Perhaps by mistake he thinks he can coerce Shannon to not have the button pushed which would accomplish his goal of destroying the Swan station. He speaks backwards because he is not able to recreate Walt’s image due to the unique nature of the child, the same would happen if he tried to appear as Desmond.

Q: Why do Shannon, Sayid, and Locke see Walt in places he shouldn’t be?

A: Part of the strange abilities of both Desmond and Walt is the ability to appear places. In some cases Walt appearing is actually the smoke monster (aka Man in Black) while in other cases he simply appears, as Desmond did on Oceanic 815 (flash sideways) and then disappear.

Q: Why did the Others make Walt take “tests”? What were the tests for? (“Three Minutes“)

A: The Others knew Walt was special, and that he had some keen insight or unique oppositional force to the Main In Black.  If Desmond had not fled the island after the survivors began pushing the button they would have captured him too. They did tests on Walt to try to understand his relationship with the strange energy on the island and the Main in Black.

On The Swan Hatch

Q: Why was there a Quarantine sign on the door? (“Man of Science, Man of Faith“)

A: The sign was put on the door from the inside and meant to maintain the ruse of a virus or disease being rampant outside of the Hatch. It’s intention was to deceive the people inside to continue to push the button and was a lie perpetuated by Kelvin on Desmond.

Q: What are the blast doors for? (“What Kate Did“)(“Lockdown“)

A: The doors are meant to help contain an implosion in case it would happen. The structure of the station would allow to minimize the damage caused by initiating the fail safe.

Q: Why are the Numbers the code for pushing the button?

A: They were the numbers stamped onto the outside of the Hatch as noticed by Hurley when he was in the 1977 as a member of the Dharma Initiative visiting the construction site. Releasing the pressure by entering the code every 108 minutes coupled with the numerical station ID was meant to make the code easy to remember. It could also relate to how the pressure is released, with the numerical values corresponding to units or series of commands that must be executed.

Q: What did the fail-safe do to the station?

A: The fail safe did the same thing turning the frozen donkey wheel does, it releases energy in a way that moves the island. The key is just the more modern way that this occurs. While the primitive wheel can also shunt the energy once released, the station could not and could only cap it again by allowing the entire structure to close the exposed pocket of energy. This means that when Desmond turned the key, the island did move in location and possibly in time, how far or how much is unknown.

Q: Why was contact with the outside world strictly forbidden? (“What Kate Did“)

A: This was forbidden so that all outside influences and distractions could be maintained and the objective of releasing the energy in a controlled manner could continue. The isolation was not meant to be permanent but when no more replacements came it appeared as though a new rule of a virus outside requiring a quarantine would be needed. Also, external influence from the Man In Black, even if not well known was an outside influence that had to be prevented since it was his goal to have the energy released.

Q: If it imploded (as opposed to exploded) why were Desmond, Eko and Locke not crushed within it? (“Further Instructions“)

A: The energy is not destructive to human tissue. In fact, for the people on the island whenever a flash would happen or the energy being released, they would shift in time and location. Proximity to the blast would have different effects physically, or the type and scale of energy being released would have different effects. For Locke he lost his voice. It also displaced in location Eko and Desmond. This can also been seen most recently when the Jughead bomb detonated causing “The Incident” in the season 6 premiere we saw that Kate was displaced in location into a tree and at least her and Miles suffered temporary hearing loss.

Please leave a comment on what you think of these theories or if you have your own.

The iPad has arrived. It has a name, it has been shown, now we wait and see what the world makes of it. The press event that Apple held today (Wednesday January 27th) was almost entirely focused on this new device. Many of the features and speculation about this iPad (right down to the name) had already been guessed and now that we know for sure what this thing is, it’s time decide if this is a worthwhile product.

Here is my take on some of more important aspects of this product to me.

Hardware

When I first saw the iPad, the first thing I noticed is that it seems like an over sized iPhone. Maybe that is what Apple wanted us to feel, since they are clearly trying to leverage all the knowledge people have over iPhone OS and the iPod Touch on this new platform. They want you to be able to pick this thing up, and know exactly what to do with it.

That being said, the iPad itself rotates and orients itself to the way you are holding it, portrait or landscape, which is expected. You can turn this thing around and around and it will keep adapting the display. One neat trick is that you could flip the iPad end over end to face someone in front of you to show a picture and it will orient itself to show them.

I had a bit of trouble dealing with the rather thick border around the iPad. It seemed distracting and out of place but I see the reason. If you think of how you are going to hold this thing, your thumbs are going to have to use the sides so they are going to need to rest somewhere. This is a minor point and is probably just a shock factor more than anything and really it’s the screen you should be focused on.

That brings me to the screen. So now we have an LED back lit display. I am eager to see how bring and vibrant this is. The iPad has a large 9.7 ” screen which sounds like a good size to me, more than a lot of the netbooks out there. It’s about a half-inch thick so it’s basically the thickness of an iPhone. It weights a pound and a half which from what I’ve read already feels solid and weighty in your hands.

There is a few choices for storage capacity. I like this because it offers more price points (more on price later). You can get 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes.  For me the iPhone I have at 16 GB is sufficient, but I can really see me putting hundreds of songs on this, some video, my picture collections and maybe some documents so I feel that 16 just won’t be big enough and I kind of feel that 64 GB will be the flexibility I need. Chances are I will settle with 32 GB to save the $100.

It’s nice to see an Apple device that supports wireless-N networks. The iPad itself has 2 models, wi-fi only and wi-fi / 3G hybrid. I already pay for data with my iPhone so even if up here in Canada we can get the no-contract prepaid plans for data access, I really feel that wi-fi is all I need since I can picture this as being our home device, and if I travel with it I will likely have what I need right on the iPad. What I would really love to hear is that the iPad can connect via Bluetooth to an iPhone for tethering your 3G connection. I doubt this will happen, but it would go a long way to sell the iPad for me. On Bluetooth, it will pair up with my wireless keyboard for the iMac which I was glad to hear.

There is no camera on the iPad at all. I found this a little disappointing. I never imagined I would be taking photos or video with this, but a front facing camera made sense to me so that you could do video calls with people. Perhaps because of VOIP calls requiring net access, the lack of them currently on the App Store, and the fact you can rotate the iPad however you want were enough for Apple to not put a camera in. We can always hope the next iPhone will have one!

Software

It looks like Apple has built either iPhone OS 4.0 or just iPad OS which is an off shoot of iPhone OS. It’s still unclear on this point. At the presentation nothing was revealed in this regard and we likely won’t hear anything until the Apple developer conference in a couple months.

The built in apps get an iPad refresh here and I must say for the better.

Mail

I like the mail app on the iPhone, and I use it with Google and ActiveSync in order to get push email just like Exchange. This works great and I expect that this will still be supported. This wouldn’t be a deal breaker because I could use Gmail online, but even though they didn’t say anything I don’t think they would leave this out.

In landscape mode you can see your inbox on the left and message on the right, this is my preferred way to view email and is pretty standard in Outlook and Thunderbird, and even Mac OS X’s mail app. It is a nice touch that you can rotate to portrait and then get a full screen view of the message, useful when you get email newsletters or large images.

The compose box is like a smaller new window that appears and a virtual keyboard slides underneath it. When I see this window it is clearly a recycle of the current iPhone compose window, but with a bigger box to type your message. I almost expected the whole screen to be used here for mail composition.

Calendar and Contacts

Amazing! I love the rewrite here. They have a lot more room to play with and they take advantage of it using a full size calendar, and a side bar with current day details. It really looks like a day planner in that regard and it kind of makes me jealous that the OS X iCal doesn’t look this good. For busy and full calendars this looks like it will handle them no problem. Again I hope Exchange support is present here.

The Contacts app looks more like an address book now with a page on the left and contact details on the right. I do like the extra room here to see all the contact details without any scrolling.

Maps

Still using Google maps which is awesome to begin with. On my iPhone I use maps all the time for directions, street view, GPS, etc. What I like here is you can take those maps and see more of them at once, including the satellite pictures. The street view will look amazing as well on a big display. The specs don’t list a GPS chip so I suppose it could use 3G and wi-fi to pin point your location, but really if I can plan my trip at home with wi-fi, and then cache those results when I go on the road, my navigator can easily use the maps there to get us to our destination. Sounds like for this purpose getting the 3G model is the way to go, or simply stick with my iPhone for directions.

iTunes, YouTube, Video, iPod

All of these apps have been designed to take advantage of the bounty of real estate there is to offer. This is great because I find myself always moving through menus and scrolling on the iPhone. When going through the music collection especially this is the case. So iPod having more navigation options up front with little to no page transitions is a plus for me. It seems that the iTunes and App Store interfaces also follow this design. With YouTube it feels more like the YouTube website, where you have the video up front and alternate video and selections all around you.

The video app appears to be the one you see on iPod Touch devices. Not much to say here other than video looked great on my iPhone so having it a higher resolution will be awesome. I did read that the aspect ration was 4:3 so that will mean letterbox and no full wide screen. Not much of a choice I suppose when you can still rotate from portrait to landscape.

Photos

I really like iPhoto on the Mac, and it seems that Apple has taken the best to offer there and put it on the tablet. I can see myself moving over all my photos so that I can have them handy at all times. You can toss up a slideshow to music as easy as you can in iPhoto which is great for showing off. Having all the Faces information come over is cool to. What I’d like to know is if you can do Faces management here, tagging people in photos and having all that sync with iPhoto on the Mac.

iWork

I was hoping something would be announced about the Apple productivity suite and there was: iWork will be on the iPad! This is great, editing documents and spreadsheets on this will be a great feature. Having those sync to your Mac or some online storage will be even better. These are standalone apps for the iPad only it seems at about $10 per app which is something I would pay for Pages and Numbers.

iBooks

As many suspected, the iPad will now have eBooks. This was a logical move for Apple and I can see them dominating this market. Having the colour display of the iPad behind the books and the ease to get at their iBookstore and get new material will be a good sell, it worked for the Kindle and other devices so the advantages here will be the hardware and software powering this.

The page turning effects look great and work as you would think, just swipe to turn the page. What I didn’t see is if the pages can go landscape and show 2 at a time like reading a normal book. I like that you can on the fly (and rather smoothly it seemed) change the font and font size. I’m sure there must be some provision for bookmarking as well.

Like how I don’t buy music anymore, I can see myself taking the iPad, finding on the store the new release on the day it comes out, downloading it and reading the first few pages in a couple minutes. I would actually prefer this over the bookstore when I know what I want to buy, I’ll just buy it online and get it now without traveling.

Apps

It appears as though all iPhone OS built apps will work on the iPad. When I first saw this it was a tiny box in the middle of this big display which I had a bad feeling about. Adding the X2 button to double the size was a good idea, but I would have to see how well it does on some apps. The advantage is with the development kit (SDK) going out to developers today they can rewrite their apps to work with the native screen of the iPad. I suppose then they would be filtered out of the App Store that iPhone and iPod Touch owners would see.

Price and Availability

Apple has broken the iPad into 2 groups, those with wi-fi only and those that are hybrid with optional 3G connectivity.

The wi-fi only ones, which I suspect will be the most popular and replace a lot of those iPod Touch devices out there, are priced at $499, $599 and $699 for 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes respectively.

The hybrid ones come in the same sizes, but priced at $629, $729 and $829.

I think the $599 wi-fi only version will be pretty popular and I think it is the choice I would go with. Of course these prices are in US dollars, and I am hoping that here in Canada we will get the same price but with consumer electronics we always end up paying more. Since this won’t be sold by carriers it’s hard to say. I don’t know how the 3G versions will work, they take the micro SIM cards so maybe you can buy it from the telco or Apple and then get a chip from the telco? It sounded like the devices are sold unlocked so you can take them where you want to. It’s unclear how the arrangement is going to work outside of the US.

In the US, the data plans for 3G is going to be handled by AT&T and as an interesting note they are offering a contract free prepaid usage of either $15 for up to 250 MB in a month or $30 for unlimited use, you can cancel when you want and activate it right from the iPad! Now if only phone where that easy!

The wi-fi only versions were said to be shipped in 60 days worldwide, so likely by April. The 3G models in 90 days.  Until 3G deals are worked out it is hard to say when anyone outside the US will get those models, but for me looking at the wi-fi only model I could be visiting an Apple store this spring to play!

Conclusion

Apple was very eager to share their new creation, and the industry demanded that they give up something. I get the feeling that there may be more to the iPad experience coming as Apple has more time to work on the final version of the OS and finalize a possible iPhone 4.0.

It seems like all the core functionality is there and the hardware is nailed down so its just a matter of working out any kinks, finishing whatever needs to be finished, making deals with more publishers, phone companies, etc.

I have been debating on a laptop for a while now to supplement our computer compliment at the house. I have tried to take stock of what I think the laptop would do for me, and I find I’m answering more and more internet based apps and activities. traveling with movies, sharing pictures, etc. All of these things as Steve Jobs put it today the iPad does extremely well. So it’s cheaper than the laptop, does the things I want to do, and is in a form factor I prefer.

I really need to sit with the news and wait over the coming months but I feel that when I’m ready for that laptop, the iPad may make more sense then shelling out money for a generic PC or even a MacBook.

It’s coming folks. Unless you don’t live with a fanboy or are completely unconnected to the tech world, then you are eagerly awaiting for Wednesday’s press event Apple is holding. I know I’m pretty excited, but who couldn’t be given all the hype around the net these days, well, I mean for the last few months. Of course the biggest rumour all point too…

Apple Tablet…iPad, iSlate, iTablet, Whatever

Who knows what the thing will be called. Personally, I don’t think I can imagine another word with an “i” in front of it that sounds good. Likely this mysterious device will have a new name. Everything points to this piece of hardware being the pinacle of Apple’s creation, maybe it will even eclipse the iPhone. I won’t speculate too much about what this thing is, because everything is conjecture at this point. There is no hard evidence about what this thing looks like or really what software runs it. Most people are putting it between the iPhone OS (that of course runs on all iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s) and Mac OS X (that runs on the desktop / laptop based computers).

I won’t bother including any photos of what people think it may look like, because I have no idea and what’s the point? My own opinions about this product align with what most of the world is speculating. It could be something the size of a sheet of paper that is basically a large screen. The iMac screens are gorgeous to look at and I suspect we will see something similar or better on this device. There will be no keyboard, you will touch a virtual keyboard. This will mean a lot of people will go back to the single or double finger picking on this thing. I wouldn’t expect to type a whole lot of things on this. What I would love to see is that the Bluetooth keyboard that came with my iMac work with this.

I believe that the software will be very close to OS X. Ideally Apple might want to keep their software development somewhat uncomplicated by not introducing a third operating system. Managing the desktop client, server software, iPhone software, etc would be tricky. But depending on groundbreaking this device is, chances are new software was created to create the world that Apple is looking for. Almost certainly it should emulate if not natively support all the apps in the AppStore which would put upwards of 100,000 apps at the devices fingers tips.

I don’t think I can add anything further, just that this is the main thing (including myself) that everyone will be paying attention to, I suspect it will be announced near the end of the presentation.

iPhone OS & iTunes, iLife Updated

As all of us iPhone owners know, there hasn’t been a software update in a long time. That could mean there just isn’t anything urgent warranting a bug release, but realistically Apple will be gearing up for a 4th edition of their iPhone Operating System. Normally the release of iPhone software major updates are done at a developers conference Apple runs called WWDC many months from now. A lot of people think that iPhone OS 4.0 has some significant tie in to the infamous tablet device and it is logical that Apple wants to announce its feature set at the show this week and then release to developers the development software they need to make software for the new device, not to mention to test all their existing apps for 4.0 compatibility.

Also rumoured is that to support all the new cool things Apple is doing, a refresh of iTunes will be required, so it is possible that this will be announced as well. iTunes just had an update last September so who knows if a new one will be coming this fast.

On the heals of this may be an update to the iLife suite of applications for Macs. I love iLife and if anything is announced I will be really interested.

Other Hopeful Updates

I purchased and use the iWork suite of productivity tools. I would love it if Apple came out with a new version here.

While I am very intrigued, I don’t currently own an Apple TV. I know they recently lowered the prices, but something new to push me over the edge would be great. It could be possible that the whispers of Apple dealing with cable companies could bring with it a TV subscription service? I could see myself dropping satellite service and going everything through the Internet, I mean it looks like we are heading that way anyway right?

I don’t expect much of anything else. If there is a tablet, it will take priority over this show and they are less than 2 hours so I doubt they will have time for much else. Perhaps they will announce some updates and at WWDC expand on those changes.

Drop a comment with your favourite rumours and what you expect to see. I will discuss my reactions to the Apple event once I’ve had time to soak them in!

I had the honor of being one of the contributors features on the This Week in Tech podcast #228: The TWiT of the Decade. When I saw on Facebook that Leo asked fans to contribute by using Vidly to record and tweet their thoughts on the most important tech story of the decade, I had to do it. Within minutes my unscripted and a bit nervous response was posted. Over the Christmas holidays I had to catch up on my podcasts and today when I was listening to the episode I was very shocked to hear my submission!

Thanks to Leo for adding my thoughts to his show. And thanks for making the video available on YouTube, you can watch the whole show here. My appearance is around the 1:42 mark. Enjoy!