And so it is, two weeks after the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, that we celebrate Towel Day and the magnificently insane world he created with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. it doesn’t hurt that it’s the anniversary of the release of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back as well, if I remember right.
But here’s the thing: the new iPad, with its wicked-fast 4G and amazing screen and your ability to speak to it – and the iPhone 4S with Siri – have come damn close, in conjunction with Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, to giving us just that.
Actually you could sort of do it with the Kindle, as xkcd famously spoofed, thanks to its own pervasive 3G, but the speed and UI issues of the regular Kindle are damn near insurmountable and they kind of don’t offer that anymore. Plus Douglas Adams was famously the biggest Apple fanboy in the British Isles – Stephen Fry only really inherited that title when Adams passed in 2001 – and I think he would have been tickled pink to have a roughly book-sized-and-shaped device that offered the whole galaxy from its screen. I envision a very nice “Don’t Panic”-embossed SmartCover being offered as a limited edition – say, at WWDC or similar.
Because I still get that feeling, occasionally – I pull out the iPad and dash off something quick and grab myself a copy of The Great Gatsby instantaneously, then an hour later pull out the iPhone and literally tell it to update me on the weather and dictate a text message before picking up right where I left off reading on a different device. And then, on the train, I pull out the iPad and spin around the diagrams of the new workplace so people can laugh at “Collaboration Harbor,” which is consultant-speak for “there’s not room to put another cubicle here so we’re going to drop a couch and see if anyone uses it despite the fact it’s surrounded by cubes on all sides”.
Seriously, the iPad is the Hitchhiker’s Guide, with Tony Stark’s earliest UI.
(And yes, I need to see The Avengers for the third time.)