I handed over my netbook to my father-in-law this week. As a retired 31-year IBM lifer, he has the time, the skill set, and the patience to mess around with it, which puts him three ahead of me.
What I found in the six months I donked around with it was that in the grand scheme of things, I rarely used it for anything but web surfing. I never found a really satisfactory blogging client for it, which was one of the big incentives to have it, and the advent of FaceTime has severely undercut the argument for needing the webcam for long-distance teleconferencing (which i literally used maybe once the whole time I had it).
The bigger problem, though, it that it was just weak. 1 GB of RAM being pushed by a 1.6 Ghz Atom processor isn’t exactly crazy horsepower. Video playback was damn near worthless; I tried but it took some seriously messed-up configuring to get Hulu to work – even when I booted back into XP, what I got was more slideshow than video. It was adequate at video playback for local files, but not in a compelling fashion, especially given the limited battery life.
What I realize now is that in every way other than text entry, for my needs and purposes, the iPhone 4 basically kicks the shit out of the typical netbook. Maybe this is because the netbook was largely underpowered when it first hit in 2008 and hasn’t really moved very far since. Maybe it’s just asking too much to compromise the hardware and still get a viable desktop-OS experience. Maybe this explains why Apple scaled the iPhone OS up instead of scaling Mac OS X down. And most of all, maybe this explains why everybody’s talking up Android tablets as the iPad killer, and ignoring existing devices that cost half as much.
Ultimately, though, the iPad isn’t getting it done for me either. It delivers improvements in text input, and the screen is far easier to handle books, PDF and video on, but those aren’t enough to rate having to carry a bag. I might consider the new Kindle for travel – I’m far more likely to read and listen to podcasts than I am to try to watch my own video content – and if I lost my job tomorrow, I would certainly look at an iPad rather than a new MacBook, now that we have the known good Mac mini upstairs.
I think what the iPad really is, in the end, is the first salvo of the notebook-replacement wars. There were tablets before, and netbooks, but the iPad is Apple’s way of hitting the beach with “we’re going to forcibly change the paradigm of portable computing.” The same way there were computers with USB ports before, or MP3 players before, or smartphones before, Apple’s going to burn a lot of money and advertising to push a new technology in a way that makes people want to try it out. The early adopters sink a ton of cash and get abused mercilessly in the press, the geek elite rolls its eyes endlessly (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”) and a rev later, everybody else is building an “iPad killer.”
And when the day comes, I’ll probably give them a look too. Android 3 on a reasonably good hardware tablet might just be an iPad-breaker; the licensing model for a Wi-Fi tablet is a lot more promising than having to deal with carrier bullshit. I’m sure the usual suspects have something on the way; if Dell is pushing a 5″ tablet-with-phone now, I’m sure they’ll have their “iPad killer” out by Christmas, and of course there’s the Cisco Cius next year.
But for now, the shortcomings of the iPhone 4 aren’t enough to validate the monetary outlay to cover them. It’s not worth $200 for a bigger screen to look at text, let alone $500 and up. Back to “wait-and-see” – and, of course, trucking home with the work laptop every night for blogging…