Is the iPad the Future, or Just a Clever Mockup?
I'm not sure: I think its virtual keyboard needs to do a lot better a job at giving feedback to touch-typists before the iPad can place itself on the path to world domination. But I'm also a person who for a decade thought that Apple Computer was about to breathe its last.
Charles Stross plays with an iPad:
Gadget Patrol: iPad - Charlie's Diary: [T]his isn't a PC or Macintosh or UNIX experience, this is something New.... A lot of attention has also gone into making the user interface responsive.... I bought my iPad with the idea of using it for a variety of tasks. It's a convergence device, for one thing: I want to use it as an ebook reader. I want to use it for the obvious cloud-computing tasks — email and web browsing, running an RSS reader, and so on. Some light gaming would be nice. Music and video I will take as read. And I want a reasonably powerful portable word processor....
Ebooks.... If I didn't have forty-something eyes with presbyopia, I'd be sold on the iPhone or iPod Touch as a killer ebook reader. As it is, it's the iPad that does it for me.... Email, Web browsing, RSS.... Suffice to say, I'm writing this piece on the iPad, have got it sorted out as a tool for managing my blog, and move on swiftly. Gaming: It's as powerful as a circa-2000 laptop.... This gizmo is clearly going to be a major gaming platform, and Nintendo know it; they recently named the iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem as the biggest threat to the DS. But I'm not (despite "Halting State") much of a gamer....
Word Processing: Now this is currently a bad situation.... Let's leave aside the lack of core functionality (who would try to sell a word processor in this day and age that doesn't even have a word counter?); the real killer is synchronisation.... Hope is at hand, but not from Apple. I'm a fan of Dataviz's Documents-to-Go suite. DTG has been around for donkey's years on PDAs, and arrived on the iPhone last year. It gives you a cut-down but surprisingly functional Word/Excel/Powerpoint file editing suite. More importantly, the last release of DTG Premium includes DropBox support, making it effectively a thin client for Microsoft Office files.... Dataviz have announced that the next release of DTG Premium will support the iPad native screen resolution, and they're probably working on it hard because of the iPhone 4G lurking in the wings....
Now. What's wrong with the iPad? In a nutshell, the whole walled garden experience.... I'll put up with the walled garden for a while. I know why it's there; it's to force the development of a mature computing ecosystem. And I suspect it'll crumble under either an anti-trust probe... or external competition from the likes of Google....
The iPad doesn't feel like a computer. It feels like a magic book.... The sum is much weirder than the aggregate of its parts. Criticizing the iPad for not doing Netbook-or laptop-like things is like criticising an early Benz automobile for not having reins and a bale of hay for the horses: it's a category error. While we've had experimental multitouch devices for some years, the iPad is the first true representative of the breed to hit the mass market, just as the original Macintosh 128K was the first computer with a modern graphical user interface to ditto. (If you want to be pedantic you can cite the Xerox Star and the Apple Lisa ... then I shall mock you.) The Mac 128K had numerous flaws, but it's still the direct ancestor of the Macbook Air sitting behind me. It'll be interesting to see what the iPad gives rise to, 26 years from now...
And Fred Wilson:
A VC: I've Changed My Mind About The iPad: Over the past week, I have fallen in love with the thing. And so I am telling you why. It may be the best email device I have ever owned. It took me a while to warm up the way Gmail is rendered on the iPad and I really miss my Google Labs hacks, but I prefer doing email on the iPad to my two phones and my laptop right now. Part of it is the fact that I can go out on my terrace with a cup of coffee, a glass of lemonade, or a glass of wine and do email in a relaxed mood. If my wife or kids interrupt me, it's easy to put the thing down and engage in a conversation. The iPad makes using a computer less of a commitment and that has important implications for the way I compute. I like how I feel when I am using the thing.... I realized that I had become smitten with it yesterday when I was headed to a place I like to grab a cup of coffee and a bite to eat and read alone before work.... I wanted to take the iPad with me but decided not to so it could stay at home on the kitchen counter. Then I thought seriously about getting another iPad just for me.... So I've changed my mind about the iPad and tablet computers... tablets are stuck between the power and utility of the notebook and the size and features of a smartphone. But they also create a middle place in terms of usability. And that is what I missed in my first day with the iPad. It feels less like a computer than any computing device I've owned. It's easy on me in a way that the other devices are not. So I'm now convinced that tablets will have an important place in our homes and our lives.
