The UPS driver was smiling when he delivered my iPad at midday today. “Have fun,” he said while he matched my grin. “I’ve delivered a lot of these today.”

Once the brown truck rumbled around the corner and the brown box was opened, the iPad demanded that it be linked up with iTunes. I’d read ahead enough to have the 9.1 version ready, and even downloaded and bought some iPad apps the night before. (Apple opened the App Store’s iPad wing on Friday. In anticipation of a first-day rush, I downloaded 27, including some fun as well as the requisite work tools.)

That meant that the bill for the download, including a $14.95 Major Legue Baseball app, was $40-plus including tax. One thing to understand about owning an iPad, or an iPhone: it’s a device that carries a cost of ownership bill, because you will want tools and toys to use on it. The App Store bill arrived this morning with a handy list of the initial apps. As you can see, much of the programs useful to small businesses to keep in touch are either free (news service feeds, social networking) or included.

But Pages and Numbers made their way into my budget, because Apple’s got $9.95 versions of the word processor and spreadsheet. More on those a bit later, but this note: the keyboard included in the multi-touch screen will be just fine for short drafts. Apple has moved up its promised date of delivery for the combo keyboard-dock I ordered March 12. Originally set for April 20, now it’s coming on April 8.

One surprise comes in seeing how smooth the device is: I’ve adopted a knees-bent posture on the sofa to type and enter long data. The third party market will do very well in selling cases for these. I’ll be reviewing some from ColaSac and UNIEA as soon as they get them into our hands.

Zinio means to make a big impression by the iPad’s opening weekend. The company has been selling magazines (single-copy and subscriptions) for 10 years online and on computers, admittedly “before the market’s time” according to CEO Jeanniey Mullen. But fast-forward from the time of Windows XP to the Apple touchstone that boots up on a quarter-million laps this weekend, and you can see the numbers rising for publishers and their readers.

Zinio will offer 2,000 issues for purchase (and another 400 back issues) through its free app, something the company designed as soon as Apple released the iPad’s software development kit. The company knew that a digital reader with full motion and interactive hooks would be a lure to readers who expect more from a publication than just words and static pictures. As of Thursday the company wasn’t sure if it would make the initial April 3 iPad app rollout lineup that Apple controls, but the CEO was certain that Zinio was going to deliver business magazines like Smart Money (from the Wall Street Journal) MacWorld, Kiplinger’s, US News & World Report — even Oprah, Yoga Journal and Esquire. All will enjoy the full-screen experience of the new Apple tablet, she said.

The Zinio catalog has been available for reading on iPhone as well as the Mac and PCs, but the Mac version runs on Adobe’s Air platform. Zinio has been working on removing such technology that doesn’t run on the iPad, substituting HTML5 and XML.

“We started to look for opportunities to optimize our iPhone app for the iPad, and have been feverishly de-Flashing our [magazine] files and our reader,” Mullen said. “We’ve been rebuilding our infrastructure to support the non-Flash environment.”

Small business owners won’t see many focused titles that have been optimized for the iPad’s features this weekend other than MacWorld. But Car and Driver, Dwell, National Geographic, Sporting News Daily, Spin and Zinio’s own Viv magazine are coming online first with video features and slide shows that take a reader beyond a magazine’s traditional graphics and text. It’s going to add a new dimension to showing off a publication’s article during a presentation. Publishers will have the chance to create animated, interactive graphics that might bridge the gap towards a need for skills in Keynote, Apple’s presentation app. Read the rest of this entry »

Inventory is among the business uses shown for the Bento iPad version

The new Bento for iPad screenshots are on display this morning, courtesy of media rep Kevin Mallon at Filemaker. In the set on Flickr are several shots that illustrate how this combination of the Apple tablet and Apple-subsidiary’s base-level database can drive a business’s data needs.

Filemaker has always benefited from business interest in its products. There’s only so much cataloging of the garage, the music and film collections, the stacks of books or model trains you can do with a database. Filemaker grew off the backs of small business needs. Bento is a tool robust enough to serve a small business, but with a plucked feature set to get average tasks done.

Databases need data entry devices desperately, so a keyboard has seemed essential to their success. Bento has an iPhone app that has won great reviews. But significant amounts of data entry require a keyboard. This is a lesson learned at commercial IT enterprises, like the sort I cover for the HP market. The mouse-click always fell far behind the productivity of fingers on keys. So this app will be one of the more severe tests of the iPad’s built-in soft keyboard.

Filemaker was being coy about the crossover pricing on iPad and iPhone versions of this app. (Some iPhone apps will be running at no extra charge on the iPad right away.) We’d expect about $9.95 on release, because Apple’s selling the iWork apps at that price.

In a move that looks to be all about boosting first month shipping numbers, Apple has announced it will accept a trade-in of three iPod Touches to get a new iPad.

The trades can only be executed at an Apple Retail Store, the company said in an e-mail to the millions of iPod Touch owners who’ve registered the devices. “Since the tech media has announced that the iPad is simply a large iPod Touch, we’re embracing the comparison,” said marketing VP Phillip Schiller. “We’re Apple and can set the rules for our own products. It’s important for the iPad to succeed.”

The 3:1 ratio is thought to represent the aggregate screen size of three of the Touch devices. Many have begun to experience battery fatigue, according to analyst Rob Enderle. The tech expert lauded Apple on its admission that the iPad batteries might disappoint early adopters, and so would accept three older devices to spread its newest product into the market.

The exchange terms identify a special 8AM to 9AM Swap Hour at the retail outlets in the US. Owners who’ve gathered up three Touches will be admitted to the front of the lines expected to form on Saturday for the first day’s delivery of the iPad.