Apple iPad: The be all and end all of mobile computing

The Apple iPad has been bashed the blo­gos­phere over, even I took a swing at it. Read­ing through all the prob­lems, I believe we’re miss­ing the point. The iPad  is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary device and it will change mobile com­put­ing as we know it forever.

Apple iPad, the future is now

Pur­pose

The first thing that I’m going to tackle is where the iPad fits in. That, I believe, is the fun­da­men­tal key to its suc­cess. It cov­ers a lot of cat­e­gories under its umbrella, mak­ing it a ‘must have’ device among ‘must have’ devices.

E-Book reader

E-book Reader: There are plenty of e-book read­ers on the mar­ket and more on the way. Most are bogged down by E ink tech­nol­ogy in an attempt to mimic the ‘real’ read­ing expe­ri­ence. The iPad, like the iPhone, uses tran­sre­flec­tive tech­nol­ogy for its dis­play allow­ing for easy oper­a­tion even in direct sun­light. That makes it good enough for almost any con­di­tions thus eas­ily out­weigh­ing any advan­tages E Ink has when it comes to dis­play­ing con­tent. Con­cern­ing bat­tery life, the iPad doesn’t dis­ap­point with 10 hours of con­tin­u­ous use and up to a month of stand-by time. Mil­lions of e-readers have been sold world­wide with their lim­ited capabilities. The Kin­dle DX for instance is priced at US$489, just $10 shy of the iPad’s price yet it’s vastly infe­rior. Cou­pled with the iBook store, the iPad will be the best e-reader yet.

The Net­book

Net­book: The Net­book started as an in-between device; the device that bridged the gap between the mobile phone and the lap­top. With a low price and con­ve­niently smaller size, the net­book got really pop­u­lar. Run­ning Android, Linux and espe­cially Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tems, con­sumers started real­iz­ing just how lim­ited the net­book was; they wanted more from their Net­books at that same low price. Net­books started to grow in size and power to a point where the lines between a net­book and a lap­top are blurred. The big prob­lem with net­books is that they are wannabe  lap­tops. The form fac­tor, Oper­at­ing Sys­tems, and even man­u­fac­tures all reek of lap­tops; this is where they fail. They are delib­er­ate attempts to some­thing that’s already there, a step back­wards from the lap­top com­puter. The iPad on the other hand, is an entirely new cat­e­gory. It is an expan­sion of the bril­liant iPhone OS which rev­o­lu­tion­ized the mobile phone indus­try. In this sense, it is not a step back­wards from any­thing, but rather an exten­sion; a leap from some­thing that was already bril­liant but lim­ited by size.

Enhanced User Experience

One thing I took away from Steven Fry’s take on the iPad is the user expe­ri­ence. He said

The moment you expe­ri­ence it in your hands you know this is class. This is a dif­fer­ent order of expe­ri­ence. The speed, the respon­sive­ness, the smooth glide of it, the rich­ness and detail of the dis­play, the heft in your hand, the right­ness of the actions and ges­tures that you employ, untu­tored and instinc­tively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down mul­ti­touch enhanced lap­top – it is a whole new kind of device.

I used that extract as I have not han­dled it myself but his words say it all. From my expe­ri­ence with Apple prod­ucts, the iPhone and my iPod touch, there is no doubt in my mind that the iPad will deliver an unpar­al­leled user expe­ri­ence, unlike any­thing we’ve ever seen. Even with­out multi-tasking, which may actu­ally be a good thing, the device will be very pow­er­ful and extremely easy to use.

The num­ber of appli­ca­tions avail­able at the launch of the prod­uct, pretty much all the iPhone apps, is stag­ger­ing. About 140000 in total and obvi­ously more on the way. This guar­an­tees that users will never be bored and devel­op­ers will con­tinue to deliver on inno­va­tion in more awe­some ways.

Plenty of room for improvement

Apple is prob­a­bly one of the best in the indus­try at main­tain­ing their prod­ucts and keep­ing them up-to-date with the newest devel­op­ments. The iPod Touch 1st Gen­er­a­tion was launched in 2007. Over the years it has received updates that have taken it to a whole new level. In that same light, the iPad has defi­cien­cies with Flash Sup­port and other things but there is poten­tial for all that to be addressed. There are some hard­ware issues, such as lack of a cam­era, that are more per­ma­nent but that’s hardly a deal breaker. It’s pos­si­ble that Apple excluded the cam­era to keep the price down, a wor­thy com­pro­mise I think.

In a nutshell…

In a nutshell

The Apple iPad is an awe­some device by a com­pany with a lot of pas­sion for its prod­ucts. Despite a few short­com­ings, the poten­tial of this device is high. With its awe­some Oper­at­ing Sys­tem, wide vari­ety of appli­ca­tions and its mas­sive screen real estate, it will no doubt change the mobile land­scape and in some ways, it already has.