Apple's iPad: Thoughts on the actual product (Part 2 of 2)
Make sure you read Part 1 before continuing with the second.
The iPad is a horrible device. It tries to bridge the gap between PMPs (or portable media players) and laptops by doing little more than stretching out an iPhone. Gone is the ability to make a phone call, any sort of integrated camera, and a form factor that made up for limited utility. In their stead is a fast [for the device] processor, a higher resolution IPS display, and some UI tweaks.
Boasting a 9.7" capacitive touchscreen, the iPad is roughly the same size as the Kindle DX and weighs in at a surprisingly heft 1.5 pounds, more than my Touch Book tablet (not including keyboard) from Always Innovating. It is too large to pocket and not much smaller than a netbook which will, strictly on merit of portability, place it in a very precarious market. Despite its low price tag amongst Apple gadgets, even the base configuration is higher than practically any netbook on the market. While netbooks are hardly powerhouses, their broad utility can be tremendously useful for the geek on the go. Afterall, the iPad still relies exclusively on Apple and their online stores for content.
On the subject of stores, Apple is once again fragmenting their content delivery by not only introducing another hardware configuration that will present compatibility concerns among current and future apps, but creating a brand new store dedicated to eBooks, predictably name the iBook Store. Poised to take on eReaders such as the Kindle and Nook, the iBook app has to rely on the quality of the IPS panel alleviating the eyestrain issues currently associated with extended reading sessions on LCD/TFT displays that made e-Ink such a promising technology in the first place. The price for the ePub books is not nearly as ambitious as other online repositories, charging $12.99 or $14.99 for bestsellers and new releases with some titles at the $9.99 the Kindle store made so popular.
Even with the iPod Touch, Apple has been calling their App Store-populated media player a gaming device. It is not. There are a few truly enjoyable games on the platform, but finding them amongst a sea of tens of thousands of shitty ones almost requires more luck than anything. The iPhone platform has only a camera, GPS, touchscreen and accelerometer at its disposal, no physical buttons or pads, creating gimmicks such as virtual joysticks and sliders to replace the significantly more precise directional pads, analog sticks, and face buttons adorning virtually every controller for every major gaming platform. The iPad features some keyboard support, but the impact on the pick-it-up-and-play factor will keep control mechanics (minus anything to do with the camera) in line with the other iPhone OS devices. In addition to the larger size, which may have problems of its own with long term comfort, the iPad introduces a bezel surrounding the display. That means games with these virtual pads/buttons or other complex control scheme will require stretching thumbs and fingers to use. It doesn't matter how pretty a game looks or how well it runs if nobody can play it.
On the topic of control issues, the iPhone keyboard is back again as the primary text entry method, just bigger this time around. Lack of any sort of haptic feedback causes hell for touch-typists, even with the assistance of predictive input and in-place auto-correction, especially when those tools back fire. By default, hitting space substitutes your most recent text with its suggestion. Faster typists will find themselves having to retype frequently to correct these "corrections". The combination of the larger screen (and hence keyboard) and increased number of touch sensors should make it a better experience than on the iPhone, but settling for "better" instead of good is a compromise that won't please many. Since productivity was singled out in the keynote, the iWork apps are being ported for $9.99 each, there is keyboard support. External keyboards can connect by Bluetooth and Apple is releasing a $69 dock that features a full-sized Apple keyboard.
As a media player, it should do as well as other iPods, featuring a UI closer to the desktop iTunes than the other portables.But even Apple's bread and butter features a glaring flaw: the 4:3 aspect display. With videos increasingly shifting towards widescreen, especially on iTunes, it's absolutely mind-boggling why they would pass on a widescreen display for their most recent venture. Considering the addition of various transitions and browsing systems for their various apps, all basking in the power of the new custom silicon, it's another mystery why Cover Flow, the handy view that shows full album covers, present on the desktop iTunes clients as well as the iPod Touch and iPhone, is notably absent from the iPad. Also missing is iTunes LP support, a mechanic to allow bonus content (pictures, videos, etc) to better compete with physical media. Although the player starts at $499 for the 16GB model, a player advertising HD video playback needs much more. Even a modest music collection can make a dent in that meager storage, and a single HD episode of House on iTunes measured it at nearly 1.7GB! The standard definition episodes are about a third smaller, but why pay for the HD screen for SD? Realistically, the 16GB and potentially even the 32GB models are present if only to allow Apple to flash a sub-$500 price tag on the iPad splash page.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the iPad's success is the release date. The announcement event preceded the actual launch of the device by 60-90 days giving upward of three months of careful thinking and potential launches/announcements of other tablets to those who sat at their computer screen yesterday with credit card in hand hoping to have one this week. While the world was buzzing about a then-potential tablet from Apple, other computer manufacturers such as Dell, MSI, and Lenovo went to work on their own slate and some of them are looking pretty darned spiffy.
What we are left with is not the tablet computer we were hoping to see, but the next generation of iPod Touch, a device that years ago had started a revolution, changing our expectations on what such a small device can do. We accepted, grudgingly, the limitations imposed for the privilege. That paradigm no longer holds. The hardware is far more powerful now and we are no longer dealing with a convenient, pocketable device. The ability to multi-task, run multiple applications, is still nonexistent outside of a mere couple of capable apps, despite the A4 using a dual-core ARM CortexA9. The same protections are in place, the same hand-holding, short-leash providing, woefully apathetic to our plight system of controls that spawned the jailbreaking movement. Steve Jobs called out netbooks at the keynote, saying that they weren't good for anything. Besides, of course, allowing someone to browse the web, watch Hulu videos, keep track of their Twitter feed, and have an IM client running at the same time for chatting on the side. He claimed the iPad provided "the best web experience you've ever had" and that apparently means losing tabbed browsing, support for a majority of web-based games, and lost of nearly all embedded video content. We've seen Windows tablets fail, primarily because of trying to mold a non-touch OS to support some gimmicky interfacing, but if the iPad is supposed to be the [better] alternative, the tablet truly is dead.
The iPad is a horrible device. It tries to bridge the gap between PMPs (or portable media players) and laptops by doing little more than stretching out an iPhone. Gone is the ability to make a phone call, any sort of integrated camera, and a form factor that made up for limited utility. In their stead is a fast [for the device] processor, a higher resolution IPS display, and some UI tweaks.
Boasting a 9.7" capacitive touchscreen, the iPad is roughly the same size as the Kindle DX and weighs in at a surprisingly heft 1.5 pounds, more than my Touch Book tablet (not including keyboard) from Always Innovating. It is too large to pocket and not much smaller than a netbook which will, strictly on merit of portability, place it in a very precarious market. Despite its low price tag amongst Apple gadgets, even the base configuration is higher than practically any netbook on the market. While netbooks are hardly powerhouses, their broad utility can be tremendously useful for the geek on the go. Afterall, the iPad still relies exclusively on Apple and their online stores for content.
On the subject of stores, Apple is once again fragmenting their content delivery by not only introducing another hardware configuration that will present compatibility concerns among current and future apps, but creating a brand new store dedicated to eBooks, predictably name the iBook Store. Poised to take on eReaders such as the Kindle and Nook, the iBook app has to rely on the quality of the IPS panel alleviating the eyestrain issues currently associated with extended reading sessions on LCD/TFT displays that made e-Ink such a promising technology in the first place. The price for the ePub books is not nearly as ambitious as other online repositories, charging $12.99 or $14.99 for bestsellers and new releases with some titles at the $9.99 the Kindle store made so popular.
Even with the iPod Touch, Apple has been calling their App Store-populated media player a gaming device. It is not. There are a few truly enjoyable games on the platform, but finding them amongst a sea of tens of thousands of shitty ones almost requires more luck than anything. The iPhone platform has only a camera, GPS, touchscreen and accelerometer at its disposal, no physical buttons or pads, creating gimmicks such as virtual joysticks and sliders to replace the significantly more precise directional pads, analog sticks, and face buttons adorning virtually every controller for every major gaming platform. The iPad features some keyboard support, but the impact on the pick-it-up-and-play factor will keep control mechanics (minus anything to do with the camera) in line with the other iPhone OS devices. In addition to the larger size, which may have problems of its own with long term comfort, the iPad introduces a bezel surrounding the display. That means games with these virtual pads/buttons or other complex control scheme will require stretching thumbs and fingers to use. It doesn't matter how pretty a game looks or how well it runs if nobody can play it.
On the topic of control issues, the iPhone keyboard is back again as the primary text entry method, just bigger this time around. Lack of any sort of haptic feedback causes hell for touch-typists, even with the assistance of predictive input and in-place auto-correction, especially when those tools back fire. By default, hitting space substitutes your most recent text with its suggestion. Faster typists will find themselves having to retype frequently to correct these "corrections". The combination of the larger screen (and hence keyboard) and increased number of touch sensors should make it a better experience than on the iPhone, but settling for "better" instead of good is a compromise that won't please many. Since productivity was singled out in the keynote, the iWork apps are being ported for $9.99 each, there is keyboard support. External keyboards can connect by Bluetooth and Apple is releasing a $69 dock that features a full-sized Apple keyboard.
As a media player, it should do as well as other iPods, featuring a UI closer to the desktop iTunes than the other portables.But even Apple's bread and butter features a glaring flaw: the 4:3 aspect display. With videos increasingly shifting towards widescreen, especially on iTunes, it's absolutely mind-boggling why they would pass on a widescreen display for their most recent venture. Considering the addition of various transitions and browsing systems for their various apps, all basking in the power of the new custom silicon, it's another mystery why Cover Flow, the handy view that shows full album covers, present on the desktop iTunes clients as well as the iPod Touch and iPhone, is notably absent from the iPad. Also missing is iTunes LP support, a mechanic to allow bonus content (pictures, videos, etc) to better compete with physical media. Although the player starts at $499 for the 16GB model, a player advertising HD video playback needs much more. Even a modest music collection can make a dent in that meager storage, and a single HD episode of House on iTunes measured it at nearly 1.7GB! The standard definition episodes are about a third smaller, but why pay for the HD screen for SD? Realistically, the 16GB and potentially even the 32GB models are present if only to allow Apple to flash a sub-$500 price tag on the iPad splash page.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the iPad's success is the release date. The announcement event preceded the actual launch of the device by 60-90 days giving upward of three months of careful thinking and potential launches/announcements of other tablets to those who sat at their computer screen yesterday with credit card in hand hoping to have one this week. While the world was buzzing about a then-potential tablet from Apple, other computer manufacturers such as Dell, MSI, and Lenovo went to work on their own slate and some of them are looking pretty darned spiffy.
What we are left with is not the tablet computer we were hoping to see, but the next generation of iPod Touch, a device that years ago had started a revolution, changing our expectations on what such a small device can do. We accepted, grudgingly, the limitations imposed for the privilege. That paradigm no longer holds. The hardware is far more powerful now and we are no longer dealing with a convenient, pocketable device. The ability to multi-task, run multiple applications, is still nonexistent outside of a mere couple of capable apps, despite the A4 using a dual-core ARM CortexA9. The same protections are in place, the same hand-holding, short-leash providing, woefully apathetic to our plight system of controls that spawned the jailbreaking movement. Steve Jobs called out netbooks at the keynote, saying that they weren't good for anything. Besides, of course, allowing someone to browse the web, watch Hulu videos, keep track of their Twitter feed, and have an IM client running at the same time for chatting on the side. He claimed the iPad provided "the best web experience you've ever had" and that apparently means losing tabbed browsing, support for a majority of web-based games, and lost of nearly all embedded video content. We've seen Windows tablets fail, primarily because of trying to mold a non-touch OS to support some gimmicky interfacing, but if the iPad is supposed to be the [better] alternative, the tablet truly is dead.