Having watched the Apple keynote presentation I can safely say it’s been mostly… mediocre. They spend too much time showing off how websites can be visited and zoomed in on and don’t seem to have any genuinely new focus to drive the product around.
As has been said before: It’s literally a big iPod Touch. I don’t mean that as an insult, by doing this the iPad becomes a powerhouse of a mobile device with long battery life and software written especially for it instead of the fate that awaits most PC netbooks: Small scrawny computers suffering as they try to run the same desktop software as their bigger brothers. Apple has chosen a fine platform. But the problem is Apple doesn’t seem to have innovated much on the software side. It’s mostly the same apps as the iPhone, with very little innovation thrown in.
*
Look, I get it, they claim the iPad is the best Apple browsing device and I believe them. I also agree it’ll be an awesome eBook reader and photo displayer. They have a concept here with value. But to sell it they need to make us want it, and to want it we need to understand the product. Back with the iPhone they certainly delivered on that, from day one the iPhone was a device streamlined to find information on the go and access a subset of features from the desktop world. It offered new solutions wrapped in a shiny friendly interface. But they don’t seem to have the same focus with the iPad. Is the iPad a mobile device just for finding information and consuming media like the iPhone? Or is it a new class of device, with features unique to its form factor?
*
All the built-in applications seem very limited in scope: It’s for displaying photos, for playing music and video. And to show off software compatibility with iPhone apps they pull up the Facebook iPhone application. Of all the apps available they chose an app whose entire purpose is granting access to a subset of features from a website, because the actual website doesn’t fit on an iPhone. That’s what they show us on a device specifically engineered to be the ultimate browsing experience? Surely on the iPad you’d just hit up the website itself? Why not choose a more suitable app to show?
And since they play up software compatibility so much does that mean Apple intends the iPad software to fill a similar niche as the iPhone? That its software will be of the same limited scope? It’s fine for a cellphone to be mostly about looking up information and consuming media, because what else am I gonna do on it? Write a document? Sketch a drawing? I don’t think so.
But y’know, the iPad could probably do some of that…
*
And that’s the confusing part, it actually does do just that! Apple is making iWork applications available, to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations all from the comfort of your recliner. So it is a content creation device after all! When they present the iWork applications I get the same dizzying feeling I got from the original iPhone presentation: This is something new. The iWork applications look to be great productivity tools without being tied to a full computer. The iPhone can only ever display such information, with the iPad it becomes practical to edit and create it. I bet the iPad applications do 90% of the most common use cases, thus being a perfect fit for most casual users.
Along the same vein they also show a 3rd party app called Brushes that looks really promising. It’s a paint program that handles several different brush types, layers, color picking and much more, and it’s actually already out for the iPhone. But it’s clearly a very ambitious program, all that functionality really struggles under the chains of the small iPhone screen. But on the iPad it comes to life, the big screen offers a gorgeous inviting canvas to draw on, and the menus slide elegantly into view without obstructing the entire area. The iPad’s additional processing power and memory will no doubt further boost Brushes’ usefulness.
These are awesome-sounding applications, taking innovative advantage of the multitouch interface and offering unique non-desktop solutions to being productive.
*
But, uh, what part of the marketing do we pay attention to? Will iPad apps mostly focus on iPhone-like mini-apps or will it shift toward something closer to desktop functionality? How will this play out?
*
Besides the iWork suite only one other thing stand out as exciting and innovative:
Apple are going to totally change the eBook market. That’s a market so thoroughly run by incompetent publishers incapable of reacting to new emerging technologies, it’s just like looking at the music industry from fifteen years ago. But between the Kindle and this we’re headed for a promised land of finally getting books electronically in an easy and enjoyable manner. I bet they’ll make an iBooks app for the iPhone too, at some point.
All I can hope for now is that the iBooks service will arrive in Europe before the end of the decade. Sigh.
*
Conclusion
Y’know, I’m not complaining about missing pie-in-the-sky features, and I’m not bemoaning the core concept of iPad. I just want to know where it’s headed, and I don’t feel Apple has done a clean job of telling us that yet. Imagine a graph that has full OSX desktop functionality on one side and the iPhone on the other, where do you feel Apple is positioning the iPad at?
I have a feeling that by the next hardware revision they’ll have added a lot of needed functionality and polish to this product and it’ll be much more obvious why we’d want to purchase one.
*
Well, yeah, that’s a safe bet when it comes to Apple hardware, but in this case it’ll be especially true.
