Is The iPad A Revolutionary Device?
Wednesday 27th January was a very interesting day, and also a very disappointing day...
...It was disappointing because I was hoping for some other announcements. When are we going to see MacBook Pro’s with Core i5’s in them? Where is iLife 10? I have a freshly rebuilt MacBook pro sitting here without iLife installed because iLife 08 has major issues on Snow Leopard (particularly iMovie) and I don’t want to buy iLife 09 if a new one is coming out. I could use the install disks that came with our Mac Mini but that would be naughty...
...It was a very interesting day because Apple changed the face of mobile computing yet again.
I rushed home a little earlier than usual (ok 2 hours earlier than usual) to watch the live feeds on the various sites and I have to say, at the end of it all I was somewhat underwhelmed by it all. What we had just seen was a big ass iPod!
That was until I watched the Promotional video and the Event Stream.
What I believe Apple have done here is produce something quite remarkable, something so tactile, you just want to be the person lying on the sofa using this thing. The interface is beautiful.
Tablet computers have been around for a long time, really long. We had a sales rep demonstrating one to us back in 1998/99. It was almost 2 inches thick and ran windows 98, had no keyboard at all, and back then we really could not see the point. The handwriting recognition was slow.
They made a resurgence around 2001, this time with keyboards so you could use it like a laptop and with a flip screen so you could use it as a tablet. My boss had one and apart from the initial demo he gave me, I cannot remember him ever using it as a tablet.
The problem with tablets back then was they were almost always less powerful than a similarly priced standard laptop, and using a normal desktop OS on them is never straight forward, with a retro-fitted floating keyboard to drag around the screen using a pen, and dodgy handwriting recognition. Although they have never really gone away, they have certainly never taken off in a big way.
Microsoft never ever took the initiative with these devices and built an interface that actually made them usable. It’s always been about market penetration, which is why the Netbook market is all but dead. Here we had a range of smaller lower spec machines that had a robust lightweight OS on (Linux) with a nice simple interface (Ubuntu for Netbooks is rather nice). But Microsoft forced their way in and by selling low-priced XP Licences (at a loss) they were able to persuade manufacturers to switch to Windows. This resulted in larger Netbooks with mechanical hard drives, running windows, and the price increased on average by about £100! They are more like small laptops, than Netbooks now.
At CES Steve Ballmer demonstrated (in his usual uncharismatic way) the new range of ‘Slate’ PC’s from HP, Archos, etc., and these run Windows 7, but they still use a Windowed interface, and a dodgy floating Keyboard! This makes them difficult to use In my opinion. Before Windows mobile moved into the Smart-Phone arena it was a pretty good OS, apart from the terrible browsing experience, but nowadays its become bloat-ware, its slow and awkward and generally unpleasant to use, and Microsoft (thankfully) now recognise this. So this is not a suitable candidate for use on a device of this type.
Apple has taken a bold step by producing a tablet which runs the same (almost) OS as the iPhone, and this is a stroke of genius. People are complaining about the iPad, without really getting it, in my opinion. This is a consumer multi-media device, which is compact and ideal for reading or watching movies on the train, conducting presentations, or making last minute changes to that important document, whilst on the move. The increase in screen real estate is a fantastic opportunity for developers to enhance their applications with great new features that would not have otherwise been possible, and it allows for a whole new wave of application development that was impeded due to the iPhone’s screen limitation. I for one, would love to see an iPad edition of RapidWeaver (which I’m using right now) for keeping sites up to date whilst on the move.
Some applications, on the other hand, just wont benefit from the larger screen, imagine holding up a giant Agile Poker card in a meeting! Would look pretty silly.
The main focus of this (from Apple’s perspective) is about providing all the content you could ever need on a mobile device at the users finger tips, and with the introduction of iBooks, Apple have done an amazing job of bringing the biggest media providers together under one umbrella. Whether you like it or not, you have to agree that the iTunes music, movies and app stores are so convenient, and its so easy to find what you are looking for without Googling and trawling the net, dismissing the numerous false-positives that so frequently appear in the top 10 results.
The iPad is not without its limitations. They should have put a webcam in the bezel, for instance, I don’t think a camera on the back ads any value, i’ll use my iPhone, or, maybe even an actual camera for taking pictures, now there’s an idea! Personally, I can also live without a webcam, I only tend to use the iSight on my MacBook Pro for scanning barcodes into Delicious Library!
File handling is still a big area for debate, although some questions have been answered in this area. There is indeed support for PDF generation, which is something I’m really excited about, and it certainly seems that there is support for a camera in the OS also. USB over bluetooth too.
Lack of support for background tasks. But I can see that being addressed with iPhone OS 4.0 when Apple release an A4 powered iPhone in July.
I was discussing this a colleague earlier and we predict that we might see a bluetooth webcam that can attach to the edge of the iPad for use when video conferencing. This would be an advantage because you can then orient the device in either landscape or portrait and place the camera anywhere that is most comfortable. Also, recent posts suggest that there is space in the iPad for a camera, and indeed the camera from a MacBook fits perfectly, so, maybe it will find its way in by the Launch date.
This is a whole new paradigm in mobile computing, one which I am prepared to embrace. Chris Heatherly has written an interesting article in which he talks about how he believes that The iPad will spell the death of the PC. I don’t personally subscribe to this, but I think it will certainly shake things up a bit. I can certainly see this being a suitable alternative to a laptop for my parents for instance, but without Flash, it wont work for my niece and nephew, who like to play online Flash games.
So, to answer my original question: Is the iPad a revolutionary device? I’m not convinced it is. I just hope that by the launch date, we see the cool items that people have found lurking around in the bowels of the SDK rise to the surface.
Will I be buying one? Yes. I’ll be buying one, and have already started developing for it.
...It was disappointing because I was hoping for some other announcements. When are we going to see MacBook Pro’s with Core i5’s in them? Where is iLife 10? I have a freshly rebuilt MacBook pro sitting here without iLife installed because iLife 08 has major issues on Snow Leopard (particularly iMovie) and I don’t want to buy iLife 09 if a new one is coming out. I could use the install disks that came with our Mac Mini but that would be naughty...
...It was a very interesting day because Apple changed the face of mobile computing yet again.
I rushed home a little earlier than usual (ok 2 hours earlier than usual) to watch the live feeds on the various sites and I have to say, at the end of it all I was somewhat underwhelmed by it all. What we had just seen was a big ass iPod!
That was until I watched the Promotional video and the Event Stream.
What I believe Apple have done here is produce something quite remarkable, something so tactile, you just want to be the person lying on the sofa using this thing. The interface is beautiful.
Tablet computers have been around for a long time, really long. We had a sales rep demonstrating one to us back in 1998/99. It was almost 2 inches thick and ran windows 98, had no keyboard at all, and back then we really could not see the point. The handwriting recognition was slow.
They made a resurgence around 2001, this time with keyboards so you could use it like a laptop and with a flip screen so you could use it as a tablet. My boss had one and apart from the initial demo he gave me, I cannot remember him ever using it as a tablet.
The problem with tablets back then was they were almost always less powerful than a similarly priced standard laptop, and using a normal desktop OS on them is never straight forward, with a retro-fitted floating keyboard to drag around the screen using a pen, and dodgy handwriting recognition. Although they have never really gone away, they have certainly never taken off in a big way.
Microsoft never ever took the initiative with these devices and built an interface that actually made them usable. It’s always been about market penetration, which is why the Netbook market is all but dead. Here we had a range of smaller lower spec machines that had a robust lightweight OS on (Linux) with a nice simple interface (Ubuntu for Netbooks is rather nice). But Microsoft forced their way in and by selling low-priced XP Licences (at a loss) they were able to persuade manufacturers to switch to Windows. This resulted in larger Netbooks with mechanical hard drives, running windows, and the price increased on average by about £100! They are more like small laptops, than Netbooks now.
At CES Steve Ballmer demonstrated (in his usual uncharismatic way) the new range of ‘Slate’ PC’s from HP, Archos, etc., and these run Windows 7, but they still use a Windowed interface, and a dodgy floating Keyboard! This makes them difficult to use In my opinion. Before Windows mobile moved into the Smart-Phone arena it was a pretty good OS, apart from the terrible browsing experience, but nowadays its become bloat-ware, its slow and awkward and generally unpleasant to use, and Microsoft (thankfully) now recognise this. So this is not a suitable candidate for use on a device of this type.
Apple has taken a bold step by producing a tablet which runs the same (almost) OS as the iPhone, and this is a stroke of genius. People are complaining about the iPad, without really getting it, in my opinion. This is a consumer multi-media device, which is compact and ideal for reading or watching movies on the train, conducting presentations, or making last minute changes to that important document, whilst on the move. The increase in screen real estate is a fantastic opportunity for developers to enhance their applications with great new features that would not have otherwise been possible, and it allows for a whole new wave of application development that was impeded due to the iPhone’s screen limitation. I for one, would love to see an iPad edition of RapidWeaver (which I’m using right now) for keeping sites up to date whilst on the move.
Some applications, on the other hand, just wont benefit from the larger screen, imagine holding up a giant Agile Poker card in a meeting! Would look pretty silly.
The main focus of this (from Apple’s perspective) is about providing all the content you could ever need on a mobile device at the users finger tips, and with the introduction of iBooks, Apple have done an amazing job of bringing the biggest media providers together under one umbrella. Whether you like it or not, you have to agree that the iTunes music, movies and app stores are so convenient, and its so easy to find what you are looking for without Googling and trawling the net, dismissing the numerous false-positives that so frequently appear in the top 10 results.
The iPad is not without its limitations. They should have put a webcam in the bezel, for instance, I don’t think a camera on the back ads any value, i’ll use my iPhone, or, maybe even an actual camera for taking pictures, now there’s an idea! Personally, I can also live without a webcam, I only tend to use the iSight on my MacBook Pro for scanning barcodes into Delicious Library!
File handling is still a big area for debate, although some questions have been answered in this area. There is indeed support for PDF generation, which is something I’m really excited about, and it certainly seems that there is support for a camera in the OS also. USB over bluetooth too.
Lack of support for background tasks. But I can see that being addressed with iPhone OS 4.0 when Apple release an A4 powered iPhone in July.
I was discussing this a colleague earlier and we predict that we might see a bluetooth webcam that can attach to the edge of the iPad for use when video conferencing. This would be an advantage because you can then orient the device in either landscape or portrait and place the camera anywhere that is most comfortable. Also, recent posts suggest that there is space in the iPad for a camera, and indeed the camera from a MacBook fits perfectly, so, maybe it will find its way in by the Launch date.
This is a whole new paradigm in mobile computing, one which I am prepared to embrace. Chris Heatherly has written an interesting article in which he talks about how he believes that The iPad will spell the death of the PC. I don’t personally subscribe to this, but I think it will certainly shake things up a bit. I can certainly see this being a suitable alternative to a laptop for my parents for instance, but without Flash, it wont work for my niece and nephew, who like to play online Flash games.
So, to answer my original question: Is the iPad a revolutionary device? I’m not convinced it is. I just hope that by the launch date, we see the cool items that people have found lurking around in the bowels of the SDK rise to the surface.
Will I be buying one? Yes. I’ll be buying one, and have already started developing for it.