It’s been fascinating to read all the immediate feedback to the Apple iPad launch. Most bloggers seems to have gone on the attack – no multitasking (pow), no Flash (slap) etc etc. I’ve been holding fire. When asked, my opinion has been that I love my iPod Touch. I watch video on it, I read books on it, I check email and write email, I hit Facebook, I tweet and so on. So, for me, straight out of the box, the iPad is a no brainer. Bigger screen, faster, redesigned apps, productivity tools and so on.
So, why the hate?
I think it comes down to one thing. This is not for the geeks. The row is a distillation of the same PC vs Mac argument I’ve heard more times than I care to count but with the added layer that this isn’t even directed at the Mac geeks (a special subset of the PC geek clan), so Apple has opened the door to a much wider audience and I think that the geeks don’t like that everyone will be able to do some of the things they consider their domain.
Going all the way back to the Mac launch, it’s a computer for the rest of us (OK, I’m a bit geeky). This is computing power for everyone. No extra bits, keyboard, mouse and so on. It’s tactile, simple, ‘just works’ as was often quoted by Steve Jobs on the launch. It’s a no brainer for the majority of people, not the computer users but the computer user world and everyone else besides.
As a user experience, this is computing or digital life made simple – I hold it like I would a book/magazine, I can share or simply enjoy whatever for myself. To be fair, I haven’t touched one (yet) but while acknowledging that version 1.0 of any technology should be dodged, I instinctively know that this fulfils a need for me. There are things I do with my iPhone and iPod Touch that the iPad will simply do better and faster.
However, the iPad genuinely offers developers an amazing opportunity to reimagine their desktop/laptop and iPhone applications. This product will sell by the boatload, if I produce media or make games, I would get the SDK and get cracking.
Is the iPad a game changer? After 20+ years working with computers, the Net and so on, I’m pretty damn sure it has certainly raised the bar higher than it’s been before and at the same time made the entry point lower than ever before. That’s a game changing combination.
Oh, and check out what will be possible for v2…
Below is a great cut of the presentation, focusing on the UI for iPad, fascinating multi-touch potential…
There’s more here on LukeW’s blog – nice job guys!
One the interesting things about having your iPhone unlocked (or freed from the tyranny of a mobile company, as I prefer to call it), is that the phone is effectively wiped clean. All those apps I’d collected, use or discarded, the history of my iPhone to this point were gone.
