What better place to begin than with a very basic basic question:
What the hell is an iPad?
The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on who you ask.
Most folks take a look at it and say “it’s a big phone,” while others see a robust gaming platform, a shiny futuristic gadget, the transformational piece of consumer tech or another fix for cultish Mac zealots. Others see a dangerously monopolistic business model, a thumb in the eye of the Open Source community or the death of recreational computer programming.
Different strokes, I guess.
But let’s start with a look at the hardware itself, and gradually wade into the cultural/business/techno perspective.
iPad Mugshot (from the Apple site)
The Thingy
Sitting in your hand, the iPad is a slab of glass and aluminum roughly the size of a thick letter-sized legal pad. It weighs about 1.5 pounds and feels like an iPhone with a SERIOUS thyroid condition.
As the iPhone’s gigantic baby sibling, it’s got strong familial resemblance to its older brethren. There’s no keyboard, mouse or visible controls, just a few switches along the edge (volume, on/off control) and a single “go to home screen” button on the front. Dead minimal.
Look with Your Hands
The shiny glass front acts as a single touchscreen that reacts to fingertip motions instead of mouse clicks. Want to launch a little application (to look at photos, for example)? Tap the icon and the screen changes to a screen of snapshots. Touch a picture and it zooms to fill the screen.
An intuitive set of fingertip gestures (pinch thumb and finger apart/together to zoom in/out, sweep fingers left and right to turn pages/switch screens, etc.) A quick tap of any text field (email address, password field, text address) brings up a full (though admittedly tiny) QWERTY typewriter keyboard.
(Inside Baseball Alert: Yeah, it’s a Flash movie. We’ll talk later about the hilarity/irony.)
Deeply Practical Technology (DPT)
So, it’s a big phone. Big deal.
Well, not exactly. As any designer will tell you, it’s hard to make a complex project simple. And any iPhone user will tell you that the tiny little slab in their pocket isn’t so much a phone as a powerful computer, infinitely customizable with little programs called “apps.”
These apps help you do things like instantly check weather forecasts, read/write email, edit photos, surf the web, search recipe databases, check stocks, do language vocabulary quizzes, get customized maps, check Facebook updates or twitter to your heart’s content.
Once you get the hang of the apps, the iPhone — along with its non-cellular twin the iPod Touch — you realize that these devices are like an electronic Swiss Army knife. Infinitely customizeable and always in your pocket.
NYC, When's the next train? (CityTransit on iPhone)
Sports geeks can grab the latest live scores from the ESPN app. New Yorkers always have a updated subway map on hand. Photographers can check how sunrise/set and weather conditions will affect a shoot. Gym rats can mix up their workout routines and track goals with fitness apps from Men’s Health magazine. Perspective parents can track “ideal times” with ovulation trackers and other fertility-related apps. Fishermen can tag into live radar feeds via the Weather Channel. Mostly free, a few bucks tops.
A lot of information that you might find on various websites (in the office, back at home) are accessible from anywhere you can get a phone or wireless signal. IMDB, Wikipedia, Dictionary — they’re all there.
Of course, NONE of these things might sound interesting to any given reader — but I guarandamnTEE you that if you’re a Twins fan, photog, commuting Brooklynite, or wannabee babymama, these little things might make your life easier.
If you’re looking for your pocket device JUST to be a phone (and that’s a viable emotional response to technology and change), then this might not be for you.
But when technology makes anybody’s life easier, it gets truly personal and deeply practical.
Family photo: Phone and Pad on Pad (legal)
Extra Real Estate
Of course, a lot of people never see the practical side of the iPhone because they see it as a phone instead of a miniature computer. The very limits that make it pocket-friendly make it a deal killer for most uses.
If it’s going to fit in your pocket, the words are going to be rendered in Matt Groening’s patented technology from Life in Hell: Teeny-Tiny Squint-o-Vision.
By making the whole unit bigger (basically running a steamroller over an iPhone), the extra acreage makes it more practical for traditional uses. (Books, magazines, etc.)
The iPhone’s DPT can now appeal to people who wouldn’t touch Squint-o-Vision with a ten-foot stylus. (I’m lookin’ at YOU leading-edge Boomers.)
It’s a matter of interface, and we’ll dig into more of that later.
The Functions
Which brings us to the last bit of hardware overview (and a riff on our initial question): What does this damned thing do?
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in late January, he put it through the a series of paces in a invite-only dog/pony show for the press. He walked the audience through a series of functions
Little Brother and Big Brother reading Alice
- Ebook Reader
- Gaming Platform
- Photo Viewer
- Internet Device: Web Browser, Email Client
- Video Player
- Audio Player
- Bare-Bones Work Computer (versions of Mac’s Powerpoint equivalent, a word processing program, spreadsheet program).
And of course, he made sure to emphasize that all the apps written for the iPhone would work on the iPad come LaunchDay.
So if you used some combination of iPhone apps to simplify your everyday life, it would be the same. Only bigger.
I gotta say, I love, love, LOVE my iPhone, and I’m very excited about the possibilities of the iPad. I can’t wait to get one.
But those of us who keep an eye on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) note that adoption of these expensive devices is likely to remain a Western phenomenon for a very long time. What implications does the fact that majority of people in the world who access the information, stories, entertainment, services, e-government, etc., will NOT be adopting these technologies, and instead will be developing the much cheaper mobile phone for these info wants and needs?
Below is a snippet of an article by Anand Giridharadas, tech columnist for the International Herald Tribune. This appeared in the April 9 edition of the New York Times. In it he illustrates this point, and underscores the question that I ask.
Where a Cellphone Is Still Cutting Edge
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
What if, globally speaking, the iPad is not the next big thing? What if the next big thing is small, cheap and not American?
America went into a frenzy last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone.
Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing, lending, and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones as flashlights, televisions and radios.
And many do all this for peanuts. In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than $25, with one-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and one-cent text messages and no monthly charge — while earning fat profits. Compare that to iPad buyers in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smart cellphone, and who could pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.
Not for the first time, America and much of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiraling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.
Rioux,
Consider this as a beginning of a nascent form — much the way that cell phones were about fifteen years ago. The initial cellphones were big, expensive and not-at-all democratic in the way they are today. It took some time for the infrastructure to build, adapt to differetn circumstances (land line scarcity in the developing world, for example) and become the phenomenon they are currently.
No doubt that the iPad is the first solid, viable entry into the multi-use tablet category — and more will likely come. The iPad might not be for everyone, but then, neither is the iPhone — or any technology. When the iPHone first launched, the high price point made it seem like a near-impossible luxury — but then prices came down (from $699 to 99 in some cases) and now there’s an installed base of over 75million of the devices (including ipod touch). I see people with these things that i’d NEVER have thought would use them just a few years ago.
But as the man said, right now we’re just at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. As more programmers, companies and users get involved, situations will likely change in ways we can’t see now.
Just think of how we looked at early adopters of cinderblock-sized cellphones twenty years ago. DId we think that those things would change how we communicate?
Yep, that’s true. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.