nonsensor:mike's blog

It was not too long ago that I sat with the rest of the Blogsmith crew monitoring the Engadget coverage of Apple's iPad announcement keynote. The near-universal consensus at the end of the day was, of course, "what is this thing and why in Jobs's name would I pay 500 bones or more for it?" We'd speculated that it'd be a full fledged MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, something resembling an Apple netbook, and a million other variations. But no one had really imagined that it'd be a giant iPod Touch with a 4:3 screen. The more we thought about it, the more baffled and frustrated we were that we'd been screwed out of our touchscreen MacBooks.


But the Reality Distortion Field does tend to have a way of creeping up on Apple watchers, and pretty soon people started grabbing them up. Fulfillment seemed to plague Apple, which meant that someone had to be buying the things, even if the shortages were artificial. And the more people I knew who had them, and the more applications that started to surface, the more I knew that the music performance laptop that I was in the market for was going to slip through the cracks. More on that some other time.

So what happened with this thing and how did it get to me?

Reading and Watching

This is huge. The iPad is definitely something different from an iPod touch and something less than a true netbook, but it's definitely more than a regular e-reader. On my last trip to Orlando I was seated next to someone with a Kindle on one leg of the flight and someone with a Sony Reader on the next leg. Neither come close to the beauty of the iPad screen, and it seems to be equally stress-free on the eyes even while being backlit. There are .CBR format comic book reader apps, free Project Gutenberg books in Apple's iBooks store, and of course there's the Kindle App. One thing that'll strike you immediately about the Kindle app is that not only is it better looking than an actual hardware Kindle, it's much nicer than Apple's iBooks reader. That amuses me to no end, especially with its WhisperSync and really competitive book pricing. But the Kindle app will ultimately face the same battle against iBooks that Amazon MP3 does against iTunes, another inferior Apple competitor: tight integration with the device. While Apple's iBooks store is a lovely thing that works with the iPad so well, Kindle simply takes you to a web browser to buy books on Amazon. Not so bad, sure, but put the experience of a built-for-touch interface next to a regular website and there's not much contest. And of course, credit card info is all tied into the same account you buy your apps with, so I'll bet you anything everyone's got that set up.

Add to that the power of the video iPod functionality, the Netflix video application, and all the myriad video programs that are sure to come out, and you have a really appealing media viewer. As for that 1024x768 screen or the huge black bezel, something odd happens when you watch a movie. The black bezel blends with the black bars around widescreen movies, and you get an effect not unlike two wrongs making a right. I feel really apologist saying that, but there really is a nice black viewing field that helps suck you into the video. I've never been opposed to Steve Jobs and co's decision to leave Flash off their devices - it destroys netbooks and phones, it's not even kind to computers. And honestly the big loss is not the format (it isn't even that great), but the content, which in quite a few cases (YouTube, ABC Video, Crunchyroll) has already been ported to a native viewing experience.

Apps and the App Mentality

The browser-vs-native app issue is one that permeates the whole device. That's the success factor right there.I have a more traditional netbook, the ASUS eeePC 900 (in fact, it's one of the first ever netbooks), running an Ubuntu variant specifically made for the hardware. And regardless of the large supply of programs available to Gnome users through Apt (the original app "store"), most of your world on a netbook is viewed through the lens of a web browser. Sure, I had MPlayer and Comix and AbiWord on there, but Facebook is Facebook, Gmail is Gmail, and Twitter is sorely lacking on Linux. Viewing all these sites technically works on a netbook-sized screen, but it's hardly ideal. Intense JavaScript operates really slowly, and heavy Flash use (such as watching Keyboard Cat for 30 seconds on YouTube or even pretending that Hulu will work) threatens to melt the plastic case. The only part about my eeePC that's really nice is the OS itself. Why? Because it was built by some ASUS and Ubuntu fans to run specifically on the hardware. With these Apple devices that piss off open-computing advocates so bad, that philosophy extends to literally every third-party software application that you can run.

And a really exciting thing is happening with those third party developers. Over the past few years as server space, storage, and bandwidth becomes cheaper, applications have moved increasingly to the web. Web apps allowed people with no previous experience in software to become UI designers, and after the initial horror of that, many became really creative within the limitations that the browser imposes. But Apple almost singlehandedly altered the progress of software design when the SDK for the iPhone came out. Suddenly, a full-featured web app is not enough. Suddenly there is a smartphone with so much market share that the small screen is a necessity to design for. And those web app designers who got really creative by working within limitations suddenly had some of their limitations lifted. Now, with the iPad, one of the limitations they traded for (a small screen) is out the door as well. Touchscreen apps are a new field anyway, but this new breed of software folks, trained in HTML and professionally re-tooled by Jason Fried and Jesse James Garrett blog posts, have the power to blow interface design way open.


And that's the ultimate thing that makes the iPad the complete 180 device: its interface. As XKCD pointed out, it makes you feel like you're living in the future. Combine it with the thin form factor and start living out your fantasies of the Minority Report movie, whether you're browsing the web, making music, or just reading a book. The iPod's major innovation was the hard drive, the iPhone's innovation was a touchscreen that was finally responsive and high-res enough to replace hardware buttons completely. The iPad has no such innovation, which is why that initial reaction was so ... meh at best. But what it does have is a user experience that intrigues, delights, and gets the job done in simple but enjoyable ways that computer users just aren't used to. And I'm having a blast with it.