Having just finished watching Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco on Wednesday on the Podcast streamed to my Apple TV while texting a friend on my iPhone in front of my MacBook displaying the latest iPad news connected to my Mac Mini downloading the latest Apps for my iPhone using Apple Screen Sharing, I think it’s safe to say I already play well with the “eco-system” Apple has created in the past.
But the iPad is a new departure in technology – an attempt to create a new market for a device that is essentially a large version of the iPod touch. While it’s powerful and clearly a very beautiful device, I fear that its failings as a whole product could damage its long-term appeal. While a lot of people have been shouting for a front-facing camera on the device, most people I know don’t even use the cameras in their laptops. Video conferencing is not popular in Europe from what I can see – mostly because of the poor broadband penetration, but also because Europeans are more texters than talkers or see-ers.
That aside, I think the iPad has a major flaw. It looks like something it’s now. The iPad is a fantastic departure from the folding laptop or the static desktop or the tiny smartphone. It’s the thing I’ve wanted since I was a little boy – a pad just like they used on Star Trek. But where it falls down for me is in the interface. I would have preferred a more unique system, or a better scaled UI unlike the almost barren-looking iPhone OS. On the demo screens Steve showed during the keynote, the app icons look miles apart, the “Slide to Unlock” button looked lost in the middle of the screen. It just looks a bit hashed together.
But would I still buy one?? Certainly. OBVIOUSLY I’d go for the one with the 3G built in. However how long it takes Irish cellular operators to introduce micro SIMs here remains to be seen. A non-3G iPad is like an iPod touch… it wants to be an iPhone but lacks the chips. I can see how the internet browsing would be amazing, and that if the evil empires that are the record companies and studios got their head out of their asses and allowed Apple to just start selling Movies and TV Shows in Europe, then it’d be a great device for viewing that stuff too. I’ve long since become annoyed with having to double-tap on sites on my iPhone when I want to browse the net for something I just thought of when I’m not near a computer… at least with the iPad I’d have a slightly easier time of viewing it.
But what strikes me as amazing is that the iPad has so much potential that few are talking about. Remember TabletPCs?? They were supposed to revolutionize the healthcare sector with doctors and nurses having these TabletPCs which would substitute the need for notepaper and pens. That was a damaging and dramatic failure because Microsoft let the software side down long before the hardware vendors and designers let the hardware side down with clumsy and ugly hardware that was brittle and bulky and with LCD screens that were unprotected. They attempted to build LapLets – Laptops that were Tablets. Apple’s product is different. A solid .5″ thin light device that can be carried anywhere. And with the App store SDK available for everyone to use – the market for an application for the healthcare sector is really just waiting to be tapped.
Another place I see this really taking off is perhaps one most think of – education. With the iBooks store, the education market is just waiting to be tapped. If the game is played right, the days of lugging large 25kg backpacks to school every day as a child will be over. Spine development globally will result in taller humans in 20 years or so thanks to the iPad. I’d love to be a kid again in a future-looking forward-facing school system which employed these amazing products. Handwriting is already becoming a pointless art for kids as they text their friends constantly in this foul abomination of text-speak, but teaching them to type properly on a device that would likely inspire them to read book, browse the internet and discover the world through their own fingertips would be a nice world.
Overall, some flaws – but massive potential. And I for one will have one. Sometime. With 3G. If the movies and tv shows come to Ireland’s iTunes store.
diarmy
