Our two iPad Airs arrived via FedEx Air this morning — straight up at 10:00am — and I haven’t been able to put down either of them ever since they landed in my hands.

Yes, the iPads Airs are incredibly thin and light.  I thought a mistake had been made and we were instead sent the new retina iPad Minis — I can’t imagine I’d want an iPad that was any smaller than the Air.  It’s just the perfect size, filled with magic and mysticism from the first touch out of the box.

Replacing our old iPad 3s with our new iPad Airs in my Verizon Wireless online account was dead simple.  Enter the new IMEIs.  Enter the SIM card numbers.  Boom!  Done.  Running.  We have 4G LTE liftoff!  I want all my iPads to be on Verizon LTE. Hurricane Sandy taught me that hard lesson against WiFi-only devices. Stay safe. Stay ultra-connected via many tethers back to the real world.

The first thing I did after updating my iPad via my iCloud backup account — talk about ease and transparency, thy name is iCloud — was to set up my iPad as a hotspot and run my MacBook Air through the connection for internet service.

Here’s the Xfinity report card:  13.8 MB down and 0.30 up.  Down is excellent and up is awful — is that news? — but it’s all workable and doable together for the way 99% of us will use these sorts of short-life hotspots.

Continue reading → Apple iPad Airs Have Landed in Our Hands and Taken Off Again in Our Hearts