It’s Sunday night Australian time and still the world rages and swirls with the crys of “tech pundits”, “tech personalities” and “tech investment analysts” praising or bemoaning the iPad.
No surprise, but very few of them seem to get it, Gruber is obviously in the get it camp and he’s tracking the who get’s it crowd and who doesn’t (probably for future “Claim Chowder”). Somewhat sadder though, is the debate over the iPad’s lack of support for the already in decline Flash, the best two articles to date on this are Scobel and Gruber.
All of that doesn’t really matter though. Not to my Mum (or Brent Simmons “Mom”); nor to my clients that stopped installing Flash 2 years ago, nor to the 99.98% of the world that doesn’t want to hack every gadget they use.
I don’t think everyone sees what I see either.
Step back and look…
Pull back for a second and forget that it’s an Apple product (that you immediately want/hate). Have a look at it from the point of view of the mother with a flat-out family life, or the working stiff that wants desperately to keep up with friends and family without fighting with his computer or maybe read up on something that affects his working life.
How about that family member that keeps calling you for tech support? The lady that runs that small business on the corner and just wants to place a stock order online or do some online banking or approve an advertising brochure that’s been emailed to her.
Honestly, in the 21st Century why should you have to fire up a full blown computer to do this? Sure, I can hear the voices saying “I do this on my iPhone already” - but seriously that big screen is just going to be easier on the eyes (and the eye strain).
So simple to use
Without a doubt a highly usable, intuitive, portable computing device that lets you consume and create content.
So cheap
One of the big shocks was the starting price, at the low end US$399 only US$10 more than a mono-chrome ebook reader of the same size (although cheaper second hand Kindle’s are now turning up).
It’s got your documents, photo’s, movies and music
The nice thing about the iPad is that lets users share files amongst apps and storage locations (like your desktop). So, why not your Dropbox account or even better all that unused disk space you have on MobileMe - and you know all of that stuff is nicely backed up.
iWork for iPad
The basic tools for working are a word processing/page layout program, a spreadsheet and for the exhibitionists amongst us a presentation program. They create files, which with the 3.2 OS you can now share back and forth with your desktop versions of iWork.
Of course it’s much easier with a keyboard, that’s probably why you can use one with the iPad.
Have you seen how easy and intuitive and just plain fun the iWorks apps are on an iPad? Why not? Go watch the video.
As the better half said, “Can you imagine, people will get paid to use the iPad for work!”
Of course being able to create, save and backup your work is great. Add a little cloud based sharing for collaborative work and you’ve addressed a big chunk of the work environment that most people use. iWork.com of course adds that collaborative feature - and like any good cloud based service it’s in “Beta” for a long time.
Of course, everyone has different interests and has different applications they need to use. With your iPhone many people have gotten used to the concept of downloading from the App Store and syncing to their iTunes account. Gone are the disks and shelves of boxes, gone is the need to hunt around for the application CD’s to re-install, in fact you don’t even need a Mac with iTunes unless you want to erase or restore you iPhone.
The iPad will have all of these benefits.
One important thing the iPad should be able to do that the iPhone 3.1 Apps can’t currently do is store data in a common user space and that should be possible to automatically backup to could services.
MobileMe is one of those polarising services that Apple offers, some people hate it, some love it. We fall into the later category, it works for us. Our Mail, Contacts and Calendars are all synched from our iPhones to MobileMe, and from our Mac’s to MobileMe. Notice it’s not iPhone -> Mac -> MobileMe.
Other handy features of MobileMe? Web Slideshows, Find My iPhone, File Sharing, Calendar Sharing.
Can you believe it will be any different for the iPad?
An interesting and discussed aspect of the iPad, is that it allows you to load your photos directly from the memory card or camera on to the iPad’s storage. It’s only a short step from there to cloud storage on MobileMe or Dropbox or any similar service for your photo’s and eventually videos.
That leaves your music and video library - wouldn’t it be great if you could buy you music/movies/TV shows from iTunes and keep them in the iTunes cloud until you wanted to play them? Sure, bandwidth isn’t up to the job everywhere you go, you’d need a good streaming technology too, something like the Lala service.
Wrapping it up…
Sure, there are a few connections/features not explicitly laid out by Apple yet, but if Apple don’t do it someone will, maybe even the champion of all things cloud - Google - will do it. Google have practically done it already with their web based services, imagine if they made nice swipey, touchy versions that ran on the iPad and gave them away for free?
Ok, that maybe a stretch to far but then I use Google Earth, SketchUp and Gmail and lots of other free Google services even some very nice iPhone apps. I’m told people love Picasso as well so how big a stretch is it?
Apple’s iPad and ecosystem have the potential to do away with the traditional computer, to bring the cloud into everyday use for Joe & Josephine Normal. Imagine not having to worry about your normal (non-technical, non-geeky) family members data, mail services and back-ups? Imagine not worrying about them loosing all their honeymoon photo’s or music collection?
Imagine not having to worry about your non-technical staff’s data? Imagine having a locked down computing platform that your staff like using and don’t have to fight with.
Sounds good to me, lets hope shall we?
I've been described as a lost technocrat or a wondering luddite, personally I just like everything that takes us forward.