Month: April 2010

* It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design.

* If it’s a big iPod Touch, the key word is definitely BIG. Having 1024×768 scale changes everything, making for a better UI experience and a lot easier time with things like mail or reading complex websites (you don’t need a Facebook app for the iPad, you just go to Facebook).

* The killer app, for me, is the battery life. This is the thing Apple has done: they have used a phone OS to get light and lean, while still including a first-rate browser – the net result blows away any netbook you like for speed while offering ridiculous battery performance (after almost 7 hours of off-and-on browsing and mail and even some video, I’ve still only blown off 1/3 of the charge). Better than my MacBook Pro, better than my Dell Mini 1012 (in Ubuntu OR WinXP), better than my iPhone – hell, I could use all three of those one after the other until the batteries all died, and I think an iPad would outlast them all. Now in fairness I’ve been using it on a college campus with pervasive Wi-Fi, not taxing it with the need to hold a 3G signal, but even so – this is something you can take around for email and web surfing all day and not have to worry about when you’re going to plug it in. For that reason alone, I think it has a lot of potential not just as a netbook killer, but as a MacBook Air killer.

* I mean, seriously, think about it. What do you do on a netbook? What CAN you do on a netbook? The physical keyboard may give it a slight edge on the text-entry front, in theory, but (in horizontal mode at least) the iPad’s virtual keyboard is every bit as viable as my netbook’s physical one in practice. I can check my mail, I can surf the web – well, the iPad does those things as well if not better (I’m generally stuck on webmail with the netbook, because using Thunderbird or Evolution is painful on that screen and with that processing power.) I could input with Google Docs or Evernote if I wanted text, I’ve got the WordPress app right there for blogging things – hell, right now the only thing I absolutely need the netbook for over the iPad would be video chat. And that’s not exactly a huge part of my life.

* If you’re doing all this stuff in the cloud anyway, you can get by fine with 16 GB of storage. Hell, get all your movies from Netflix and you don’t need to use your local space. I guarantee you that the notional Google Chrome OS devices aren’t going to have 16 GB of local storage. All the “cloud” really consists of is a move back to the old client-server days, and the iPad is the thinnest of thin clients.

* Yes, you can RDP back to your Windows machine – just not very well. Similarly, I expect VNC would be kind of a show. I don’t think you’re going to get Apple Remote Desktop for iPad for some time, unfortunately.

* The iPad, at its root, is a consumption device. You read mail, read books, surf the web, watch video, listen to audio. It’s necessarily compromised for things like churning out flashing newsletters or hammering out the Great American Novel or administering a rack of servers. I certainly wouldn’t undertake NaNoWriMo on one. But the people breathlessly intoning “this is your new TV” – I think they’re onto something. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, this is going to be a big part of how you see your shows. (The notional Hulu app will go a long way there.)

* I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android.

* All of this said, I’m probably going to pass it along to the next tech by the end of the week if not sooner. When you have a laptop and an iPhone, it’s definitely a device too far. It’s not a substitute for a laptop for people who legitimately have to work remotely or on-the-go (by contrast, it’s the IDEAL device to give your CxO so he can look slick in the first class lounge). And for my purposes, it’s neat…but it’s not really suitable for Twitter, or text messaging, or walking around with the headphones in on a constant stream of the Junks. I downloaded a ton of the free iPad apps, but most of them are things I don’t use or aren’t practical – Pandora, ABC Player, Y! Entertainment, two or three news apps, stuff like that. Until portable devices become the prime way of consuming media, the iPhone is still the best horse for the course for me.

This post is coming to you from an iPad. I have the Apple folio thingy, it is sitting on top of my net book on the coffee table, and I’m already seeing some of the compromises on the keyboard. It does a good job with some of the autocorrection, but also makes two words of netbook and doesn’t give me an apostrophe without using the shift. It also makes ozone curious decisions on what not to correct. That should be “some”, not “ozone”. You see the problem.
in the grand scheme of things, though, it isn’t bad. I daresay it’s as least as typable as the much maligned keyboard on the Dell Mini 9. Obviously I’m in landscape mode and counting on the spell check, but even so – it’s miles beyond trying to do the same on an iPhone. I wouldn’t dare try to write anything this long on there.
(An aside: Duke got freerolled into the Sweet Sixteen with a one seed they didn’t deserve, then managed to be two points better than a five seed in a game where the refs basically let them play Red Rover under the baskets. Least impressive champion of the modern era. And I’m all the more bitter that Vandy got skunked in the first round, because that Duke team is one we could easily have beaten. Douchebags.)
I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them. One device the size of a magazine, pound and a half – and it’s all your textbooks, all your notebooks, your mail, your TV, your damn near everything. If I were starting college this year, I would move heaven and earth to have one before I headed out the door.
Well, now to see if it can replace the DVR for strategic “V” purposes…