Josh Keady- Entry thirty-four point three (34.3): The big, huge iPad entry: Part 3 of 3
(If you want to read my thoughts on how technology like the iPad plays a part in adding to the widening gap between the upper and lower classes, go back to the first part. If you want to read my pre-amble about workflows and how to move beyond "gadgets" in your life, see part ][. If you just want to know what I think of the freakin' iPad already, cast your gaze downward.)
When I bought my iPod Touch, there were no apps. I mean, there were apps, but there weren't apps because the iTunes App Store didn't yet exist. In fact, version 1.1 of the iPhone OS was pretty miserable. It was slow, it was limited to either Apple's collection of applications or those that you accessed on the web, it was slow, it had no copy / paste, and damn that thing was slow. Honestly, shortly after purchasing my Touch, I accidentally lost it under the bed and didn't even miss it for a couple of weeks. It wasn't until version 2.0 of the operating system that the iPhone / iPod Touch really, as the kids say, blew up (and not in the same way that some individuals have claimed they're inclined). The App Store, the tremendous speed improvements, the stability, it all combined to make the iPhone tremendously useful. And now, I find myself stretching its abilities to the point where some things are a struggle. We're maxed. Along comes this natural extension of the iPhone / iPod Touch family and now I'm excited.
What it's not
The iPad isn't a big suitcase. It's not a trunk. The iPad is to the MacBook as an overnight bag is to a large suitcase. Apple is kind of implying otherwise, but they're overselling it. There, I said it. Apple hypes their products, whoopdeedoo, let's get over it. Steve Jobs can tell you that it will 'til he's blue in the face, but the iPad will not replace your laptop. It just can't. It won't replace your desktop, it probably won't be where you do the bulk of your creative work, and it may not even be where you do the bulk of your web surfing. The limited built in storage, the lack of external expansion, the lack of a keyboard [out of the box], and the lack of things like multitasking and user-generated applications just keep it from being your primary computer. It isn't that.
What it is
What the iPad lacks in fully-fledged computer features, it makes up for in spades with specialized excellence. First of all, it's small. It doesn't fit in a pants pocket like the iPhone, but it only weighs a pound and a half. It's got superb interfaces for your old favorites like Safari and Mail. The multitouch interface is there and as useful as ever. With WiFi and optional 3G, it's an on-the-road email, web, and document editing machine. iCal has a great planner-like view. Video, photos, music, all much easier to access than on iPod touch, with a much faster system processor and greater video capacity. It IS a device that you can use as a tremendous extension of your current desktop or fully-fledged laptop.
The capabilities
Processor: This puppy's quick. A 1 GHz "Apple designed" processor sits on board, but really the processing power is a design by Apple and ARM. ARM technology powered the Newton platform so many years ago. It's a cool design that incorporates a lot of system functions on one chip, and seems to be the customized hotrod offspring of an Apple (keep in mind that Apple owns PA Semiconductor since 2008) and ARM. It's going to offer performance that really -sadly- makes the iPhone seem slow.
Storage: Apple has gone the iPhone / iPod route and offered three base storage configurations for the iPad: 16, 32, and 64 GB. That's about all the good I can say about that, except that Apple's spec page for the iPad currently lists an SD Card reader as an adapter that connects via the dock port. It's unclear if this is going to be a read-only affair for iPhoto, or if you'll be shuttling files with that, too. (In my experience, I'd say don't get your hopes up for the latter.)
Battery: 10 hours. What else is there to say? Remarkable.
I/O: iPad comes with 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity in all models, but a more expensive model will feature a cell transceiver that does GSM/Edge/HSDPA (3G) connections. THIS. THIS is the thing. AT&T will offer something that we all thought AT&T was incapable of: a $14.99 / month contractless data plan for the iPad. Whooooo boy. Granted, that $14.99 only gets you 256 MB of data transfer per month over your cell connection, but if you download large things (like application updates, video, music) over a WiFi connection and save your cell connection minutes for checking email, getting map information, light web browsing, etc., it ought not be so an issue. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway. $30.00 / month gets you unlimited data.
(Interesting tidbit that I'm trying to find out: there's nothing I've seen saying that the iPhone's data plan and iPad's data plan can be combined. That is to say, if you have an iPhone and want to use the iPad, you may have to cough up an extra $14.99 - $30. Sure would be nice if you could mirror your SIM data on to another card and use it in the iPad.)
Something notable: the Bluetooth capability has been verified to work with wireless keyboards. Yes, you heard it. More on that in a sec.
The iPad also has a standard iPod dock connector for standard iPod stuff like charging, syncing, and getting tangled up with everything on your desk. Cell-enabled models have a SIM card slot, as well.
In case you don't have eyes (and haven't yet fervently demanded that someone describe the device to you), the thing looks like sort of a cross between a miniature MacBook screen and an iPod Touch. There is a single Home button on the lower (glass) screen front, a soft power button on the top edge, and the standard mute and volume buttons on the right edge. Volume buttons because this thing actually has speakers in it (plural, according to Apple), which is fantastic if you've ever heard an iPod Touch's mutilated warble (even worse, the piezo nightmare that is the first-gen Touch.) It's light at 1.5 lbs., thin at 0.5 inches and the screen resolution is 1024x768 (fairly high for a 9.7 inch screen).
Rounding out the list, is a regular old headphone jack and a microphone. It will be interesting to see if Skype works on it. Veeeeery interesting. I suspect that it will not.
Peripherals: While the iPad lacks on storage (more on that in a minute), Apple has done a very smart thing and announced a set of hugely useful accessories. The big thing that had live-bloggers all swooning today: a keyboard. iPad has a screen-based keyboard, but the damned thing will be offered with a real, honest--to-God, tangible, hold-it-in-your-hands-style keyboard. Yes. Not only that, but the keyboard is offered as a docking stand that supports the iPad in a suitable typing position. Sweet. Not only that, but Bluetooth keyboards are supported. Double-sweet.
Also offered is Apple's camera connectivity kit which has USB port and SD card adapters that will plug in to the iPad's dock port. As was said, it has yet to be seen if these accessories could be exploited for other uses, but as it stands, they're only approved for sucking up digital images. For video output, there are adapters for VGA, composite, and component video displays. This means projectors, TVs, etc.
Apple is listing a standard dock and a folding stand / cover as accessories, as well (considering that there are still two months until the thing actually ships, and people's propensity for making iPod jackets, sleeves, covers, cases, and cozies, one can assume that many more accessories will be available when the iPad ships).
Software: Here's where this device shines. Mostly. I'm a big fan of the iPhone interface on the iPhone. The user never has a chance to get lost because you can only be in one place at one time. Multitasking applications on a phone seems cumbersome any way that you slice it. But things change on a big device like this. Multitouch, however, in such a large format, seems to die for. Thanks to the hardware, applications should run very quickly, and thanks to similarities, existing iPhone and iPod Touch apps should run almost flawlessly. iPad has built-in abilities to upscale those smaller applications to full iPad size. Worked really well in the demos.
This thing should be a great gamer. Nine inch screen, fast as balls, good graphics set, this is the Need For Speed machine that I've been waiting for.
Here's the "killer app" that makes the iPad worth every nickel: iWork. Yes, complete versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote will be available for 10 dollars and that's an incredible value, if you ask me. What a way to make a presentation, eh? Never mind the fact that you can do legit word processing work on something like this, but you can do spreadsheet work, too? THIS is what's going to reel in customers.
Not to mention the hundred forty thousand apps that are in the App Store currently. As I mentioned before, the iPad will upscale iPhone / iPod Touch applications to the full 1024x768 screen size (and it looks pretty good in the demo video). Something that's been going through my mind: iPad applications don't necessarily have to run on the iPhone, so we soon might have a little bit of a division occurring. Will developers turn toward the iPad and begin abandoning the iPhone? It makes sense to develop for both platforms simultaneously because they're not all that dissimilar, but there will be applications for the iPad that don't lend themselves well to living on the iPhone because of limited speed, limited screen size, or both. Time will tell how this plays out.
The last thing that really has my attention here is the iBooks application (it seems noteworthy that iBooks is only one letter off from iBook which was the name of Apple's low-end laptop line for several years). iBooks is a combination book store and reader application that has the potential to, if not kill, at least knock a big hunk out of Kindle's market share. Apple has publishers signed on (Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, MacMillan, and Hachette; book publishers are only slightly more flexible than music publishers, I guess) to provide a formidable library of books for purchase and viewing. The store and reader are all self-contained in the same app (something for which we're all thankful, because the iTunes store is feelin' pretty crowded) and the reader has quite a few view customization features built-in. There's a downside to this, but I'll get to that in the next section.
The limitations
Storage: iPad has a maximum of 64 GB of internal storage. It has no official provision for any other kind of storage and if its OS is as similar to iPhone's as we're led to believe, there is probably no way to attach external storage. This limitation might be overcome in future versions of the OS, but for now, it's a no-go. This raises the obvious question: how am I supposed to store all of my media on the device? The answer is, simply, you're not. Apple -who did a miserable job of explaining this during the introduction- is treating this much the same way that they do the iPod / iPhone concept. The iPad connects to your Mac or PC with the sync cable, and you sync. The idea is that you don't take all of your information and data with you, you simply take the data that you need.
Apple has a service called MobileMe which had a miserable launch full of bugs and delays. The product has since then become (in my opinion) excellent, hugely useful, and almost essential for the iPhone or iPod Touch user. MobileMe not only provides useful basic features such as email and web hosting, but it also allows for advanced internet-based syncing and a little something called iDisk. iDisk is a cloud drive, i.e. wireless disk. It sits on Apple's servers, you can access it through the operating system just like a disk on Apple devices, and you can hit it through any web browser.
Unfortunately, MobileMe: it ain't free. It's really not free to the tune of $99 per year. Somehow I've managed to scrape together $99 every year for the last 3 or 4 years, and I find the service invaluable, but the average user could get by without it. iPad is another story. iPad needs cloud storage, push notifications, and email. Apple should be giving this service away to iPhone and iPad users, plain and simple.
I/O: No provision for USB or flash storage. Apple does offer the camera connectivity kit with a USB connection for cameras and SD card slot for cameras, but as I said, you won't be doing much more with that than moving pictures on to the device. 64GB is not a lot, and it'd be easy to fill that thing up with apps alone, let alone apps, music, and video. A flash memory slot would be very nice.
Only Edge / 3G networks on the cell transceiver. No Verizon, no Sprint, and probably no T-Mobile despite their network compatibility. This is a downer, particularly considering that multi band cell transceivers exist that let a device use multiple networks. I understand that it's a little cheaper and less complicated to stay with AT&T, but nobody likes it.
The actual display is a good size, but the device itself is too large. Sad but true. That large black border on the edge is seriously unattractive, and if they shrank the total screen size, it'd increase portability by a significant factor.
Fine, fine. I'll buckle. Fine. No camera. There. Are you happy? I wanted this thing to have a user-facing camera for video conferencing. Can you imagine that? That'd be incredible. It's obviously fast enough to run iChat, what was the thinking?
Actually, the thinking was price point. Steve Jobs is the father of the Macintosh, a product that was originally intended to cost ~$1000 and gradually crept up in price and features until it finally shipped at $2,500. "Feature creep" is the downfall of many a product, and if there's one thing that Steve has learned, it's how to stop feature creep. The question then is, for $499 are we willing to forsake a camera?
Though the iPad has the same Maps application as does the iPhone, it has no official GPS transceiver, so its accuracy is very limited. Apple has this software called "Location Services" that lets any Location Services-aware application discover the location of the device on which it's running. On Macintoshes and the iPod Touch which have no cell chip or GPS chip, the Location Services taps in to a database of WiFi hotspots that have been mapped (and that is an extensive database, my home router is even in there) and determines the device's location by searching for hotspots, checking their signal strength, and comparing that to the map.
Example: I'm standing at on Conifer Blvd in Corvallis. I have a 95% signal from SquirrelNet which is located at 287 Conifer, I have a 30% signal from linksys which is located at 285 Conifer, and I have a 5% signal from NETGEAR which is located at 283 Conifer. Location Services knows that SquirrelNet is at 287 and that it has the strongest signal, thus we must be close to 287, and that's where we get placed on the map.
iPhones, however, have a cell chip and a GPS chip. A location system exists for cell towers that is similar to the WiFi location system. Location Services looks at the three closest cell tower signals and attempts to triangulate your basic position from that signal. Then it uses the GPS chip to home in on your location and provide a pretty accurate (within a few meters, usually) idea of your location.
iPad will only have WiFi and cell Location Services abilities, and as such, it will not be able to do turn by turn navigation or augmented reality apps like the iPhone can. There is the possibility of an add-on GPS chip being developed as has already been done for the iPod Touch, but it remains to be seen how this plays out. Full-on GPS capabilities would be a boon for this device.
Software: I hate to say it, but after sleeping on it for a night and conferring with Ryan the next day, the iPhone interface really holds back the iPad. I get why multitasking isn't a great idea on a smart phone: it's just too small an environment to really conceptualize different applications working in the background. But the iPad is begging for a multitasking environment, one where you can have a video window open at the same time as a text editor, or a stock ticker open while you play solitaire. Or a damned chat window open while you're taking notes! The whole look and feel of the iPhone OS on the iPad just seems out of place. Not to the point of being a turn-off, but nevertheless, it's something that you know could have been done better.
iBooks: Too expensive. There. I said it. 8-14 dollars for most titles. BS. Give me a free library based on the iTunes Movie rental model (something like one month to start reading, three weeks to finish once you start). I realize that's something that you can only dream of in this world of copyright-infested lockdown on entertainment and publishing, but still. "Pay me what I'm worth" ≠"Pay me what I think I'm worth".
Only Apple-approved software. This is something that's never bothered me as much as the EFF says it should, but it's a legitimate concern for a lot of people. Just like the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can only install applications to the iPad from the iTunes store. This doesn't mean that there aren't free apps, there are thousands of freebies, but if you want it, it has to come from them. I won't lie: I like the model. Cory Doctorow can tell me until he's blue in the face that it hurts me as a consumer, but it keeps (I can't believe I'm saying this) the platform pure. If you want to install your own applications on the iPhone, you can jailbreak it and install them right on there. The number of phones that are actually "jailbroken" and functioning out there pales in comparison to the number of phones that are running a standard Apple OS installation.
There are a couple of schools of thought on this subject that I'll discuss briefly.
Anti-Apple techies want people to think that Apple users are sheep and will do whatever Apple tells them because they believe that it's right.
Apple purists will tell you that users do whatever Apple tells them because they've never been wrong.
Unfortunately, just as extreme left and right wingers don't (or didn't used to) represent the average voting American, the pro and anti-Apple techies don't really consider -or try to consider- the legitimate point of view of the average consumer which is simply: I just want the damned thing to work. And that's what Apple delivers. Like it or not, forcing all applications to go through a review cuts down significantly on the chance that malware makes it on to the platform. It makes sure that some QA has been done. It at least does something to preserve a consistent UI experience, and you just can't argue with the results. People love the iPhone for its consistent ease of use and reliability.
Obviously, you're giving one corporate fruit-shaped megalith control of a big chunk of your digital life when you buy an iPhone. My quibble with Apple isn't that they maintain that control, it's that they don't give you a good way to pack up all of your things and leave. That is, if you buy books and music and movies with Apple's Digital Rights Management, you can't take said media to the hot new tablet computer that HP or Dell or Asus just brought out (I don't know, do those guys do that stuff?). There's an entire philosophical debate to be had here, and I'm not going to engage in it, I just wanted to present that bit of information in the context of this article. For what it's worth, I have hardly purchased any TV shows or movies from the iTunes store, simply because of the DRM. Thankfully they've scaled back their DRM on music, though I really fear what the books in the iBooks store will be like in terms of my right to actually, you know, own them. Because, if I can take a buck to Staples and copy passages out of a Clymer motorcycle repair manual, I damn-well better be able to copy the e-books that I've purchased.
iTunes. iTunes is great software for organizing and playing back media. It is not great at managing the iPod, iPhone, and I assume, the iPad. It's big ugly tabbed interface is even more big and ugly than I let on, its sync features are confusing (I almost never really know what it's going to do when I hit Sync), it always tries to take over everything, and it gives you an extremely vague idea of what is actually on your mobile device.
Listen to me, Apple. Get rid of the stupid tabs. Build in to iTunes a pop-out window that is essentially another application. And in that window, give me a good graphical representation of the stuff that's on my iPad. When I click Sync, don't just give me a cryptic message saying that something might be changed, for Pete's sake, just have a box pop up that says, "Listen, stupid, you're trying to sync your applications. That means you're going to have the same freaking applications on your computer and iPad. And that means that you're going to have, like, an extra 30 apps on your iPad after the dust settles. You really think you want to do that?" And I'll be all like, "Uh, no. Sorry."
And now we play the waiting game
The iPad rolls out in 60 days, the iPad with cell capabilities rolls out in 90. There's a lot left up in the air, however, and a Steve Jobs demo is not exactly the same as a bulk of user reviews. We have yet to know how a lot of features will work in the wild, namely the on-screen keyboard, the cell connectivity, actual battery life, portable convenience, etc. We do know that it will sell. At $499 base, this thing is going to be a birthday present, graduation present, back to school present, Christmas present, you name it. It's highly givable. That said, I've been a good boy and Easter's just around the corner…