I paid a visit to the Apple store at Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor this afternoon. Matt Tunstall, a business specialist at the store, talked to me at length about the iPad and iPhone, and he briefly touched on a MacBook. He has offered to lead workshops with our group to help us become familiar with Apple tools and apps, and achieve our goals as part of the ideaLab. This is a free service, he said, so I plan to organize a workshop in the next week or so with our ideaLab-Heritage advisory group.

Some highlights from our conversation included using the iPad to build locater maps, report from meetings, and interface with our iPhones so we can produce video, audio and share photos as the iPad doesn’t have a video camera or digital camera built in. He said the iPad is a combination of a MacBook and iPhone, and a MacBook may be redundant in our project. However, you can’t produce a video on an iPad and you can on a MacBook, if I remember our conversation correctly, so I do see the advantage of experimenting with the MacBook, as well.

Here are some reviews of the iPad:
Ubergizmo
Engadget
All Things Digital
Geeky Gadgets

Here are some reviews of the iPhone:
Engadget
Ubergizmo

Here are some reviews of MacBooks:
TechShout.com
Notebooks.com