Observations on an iPad
The iPad (Jesus, this name is as bad as the “Wii”) came out yesterday and luckily for me I had no classes to interfere with me relentlessly following the keynote on the various gadget blogs. It wasn’t passive following either! As updates came out I kept imagining ways that I would use this in my living room and sheer puzzlement over the way certain things looked. Then I watched the torrential downpour of opinions that descended on the blogs. I have yet to see glowing praise, and though I admire healthy skepticism, none of these pieces seemed to take the iPad on its own terms. That is something I am going to try and do here…
Cameras Everywhere
Someone explain to me everyone’s incessant need to have a camera on all objects in their pocket and in their house. Alright, I get it, your phone is a perfect place to have a camera. It is in your pocket, you take it everywhere, and it helps in spontaneity. The same with the iPod touch too I suppose. So that justifies a camera on the back… What about on the front? Well some day we all want to make video calls it seems. I doubt that we will be doing that while riding the subway, but I get the appeal of that as well. The problem is that putting a camera on the front, i.e. where the display is, requires a camera to be present.
The inherent problem with Apple’s design for the iPad and putting a camera on the front is that you are supposed to be able to hold the device in any orientation you want. Yes we can throw a camera on there and solve the problem of orientation with the accelerometer. However, there is a reason that bezel is so huge. Now as you decide in which orientation you hold the device and which hand you use, you have to keep track of where the camera is so as to not obscure it. That takes away from the very intuitive nature of the device. No longer can you grab it and it just works. Now you have to wonder when you open the video chat, upon prompting from the person on the screen, why they can only see a swath of pink flesh. Apple does have a solution in the wings, but I am guessing that they could not get it ready in time yet or it was too cost prohibitive. But that seems a considerably more apt solution than what we could possibly have now.
As for a camera on the back, just because you can have a camera some place does not mean you have to. Who would seriously walk around shooting images with this hardly ultra-portable device? It would be an absolute bear and moreover it would be completely useless to most people and I think equally stupid.
The Screen Has Low Numbers
I get it, I was one of those people who lusted after numbers. But someone explain to how exactly a device suffers just because it only runs at a resolution of 1024x768. For all those of you incessantly whining about this, in 1996 we were running that resolution on 15-inch monitors. This happens to be a mere 9-odd-inches and more importantly who cares about the pixel numbers so long as it looks good? More importantly, there is a failure to understand how the device will be used. The mouse pointer is considerably more accurate for small elements. The greater you raise the resolution means that smaller the items on screen become and the harder they are to hit with your fingers. Yes, you can raise the size of the items. However, that adds considerable more complexity, particularly with graphical elements, and I doubt the pay off is particularly high. It may be a win for someone, I fail to see who.
Where Is My Stuff?
I agree that there is a point to argue with over Apple’s storage on these devices, but I disagree on what the point is. I don’t think there is enough space on here, I think there is too much. I don’t think Apple should have offered sizes above 16GB. I do think Apple should have worked hard to make the iPad part of a larger eco-stream that includes your computers and accessories at home.
What I mean is this, most uses for this device I foresee coming from the living room couch. Even Apple’s own setup at the keynote seemed to denote this. In your living room couch you are part of a connected household. You have your main computer up and running and maybe you even have a Network Attached Storage, NAS. Why store information on your iPad? Why not have it run its media off of that main computer or off of the iTunes server on your NAS? Have an AppleTV in your house? Even better. I think one thing that the iPad will need to succeed in such an interconnected household is the ability to hook into the iTunes databases on these various systems. Put them together and you have a potent combination and a valuable media player in your living room.
What about when you leave the house? I fail to see the iPad as a music player on the road. It is far too big and bulky for that task. Everyone owns an iPod or an iPhone that would take care of this problem. So what media would you consume on this device? I would say that would be primarily movies and TV shows. For that I find 16GB to be more than adequate on the road. Even at 2GB a movie that is still a lot of media to carry around and with five movies (at 10GB) you would be able to consume that entire battery and still have room to spare.
This is not a device on which to cart around your media or the entirety of your life. This is not a standalone device (people claiming it should exist sans-another-computer fail to see this device’s purpose). It has always been part of a larger ecosystem. However, Apple needs to strategically leverage that within its iTunes application and by interconnecting its products (aside from attaching the iPad to sync) for this to truly succeed with the consumer.
Where I do see the iPad failing is with the lack of an SD slot. An SD slot is now standard on most Macs and as a product that aims to bridge a gap, the inclusion of an SD slot I feel is absolutely necessary. Yes, I understand you can dongle your way to it, but that would work best for USB devices or the like. For just inserting an SD card in to drop your photos or some files, nothing else beats this simplicity.
Missing a Living Room Feel
One of the biggest failings of this device, for me and for where I see it positioned, is the inability of the iPad to account for multiple users. Here is a usage scenario, one that I doubt is very different from most households that shall buy it. I would leave this device in the living room, most likely on the coffee table. In its current iteration the product is essentially tied to one user and their media and their contents. You have their applications and their bookmarks, their mail and their cookies.
I think Apple fails to see how the use paradigm for the iPad is significantly different from the iPhone. In our household we find it only natural to buy each one their own iPhone. After all, these are highly personal devices that we take wherever we go. The desktop computer on the other hand we all would share. Everyone has their stuff on there and everyone has their own accounts and their own separate world. The iPad is closer to the desktop computer than to an iPhone. The iPad is more likely to be stuck in the living room where everyone in the family and guests will use it. It might get taken out, but its eventual resting place lies not in the study but rather in the living room. This is the tool to check morning email on and read the New York Times while I drink coffee. But when I am done my fiance will do the same thing with it. Except, she is stymied by the fact that the mail application, connected through my computer, has only my accounts on it. The iPad thus lacks the ability to accommodate multiple users and here is its greatest downfall for the niche that it wants to settle at.
This is the niche that my current Dell mini 9 sits at as a netbook and it is a niche that the iPad will have to occupy. The iPad needs the equivalent of “Fast User Switching.” It needs a way for me and my fiance to co-exist on the device, because I could never see us buying two of them. It also needs guest accounts because such a device left out in the open will attract attention from the friend over for dinner. That friend might want to jump on to a website to show me something and I may not want him seeing my bookmarks. If left out in the open, I do not want him switching to my calendar or mail. This should not be taken as requiring amazing security, most people who come over are likely to be deterred from snooping with the slightest hint of security. Mostly though, I just want a place for them to play. A place that has all the device’s apps, but does not have any of the data. A place that when they leave I do not have to worry about what they peeked into when they opened that browser and saw GMail staring them in the face. To be a true living room device, the iPad needs to able to be a part of my family and yet interchangeable amongst us.
A Problem with UI innovation
When I saw the new and redone apps being demoed on the iPad, I felt less wowed and only saw it as inevitable. Of course they had to redo their mail client and their iCal app. These things have become woefully inadequate on the iPhone and porting them over requires something to distinguish this new product.
Yet as more applications flooded through screen grabs I noticed just how unrefined everything felt. What struck me most was that extremely tiny slide on the lock screen in this very large display. The thing just feels completely out of place. The more I saw, as for example when only four icons fill the toolbar at the bottom in a cluster, the more I felt that Apple had done the opposite of what Microsoft has done for years with the tablet.
Microsoft took an operating system too large for a tablet and tried to shoe-horn it into there.
It left the user feeling bulky and complex and utterly incapable of dealing with a new paradigm thrust upon them with old ways. Apple instead has understood that its iPhone paradigms can translate over to the iPad, but they seem to have assumed that their software can just as easily scale. Unfortunately it does not seem like that is the case. The homescreen itself demonstrates this. There is no reason that the dock should have only four icons when there is more space on the screen. Could we have fit a fifth icon in there? For one it would not have looked so absolutely sparse. Could we have increased the icon size? No, because we are restrained by the constraints of the iPhone that we are trying to keep parity with. I understand the huge benefit that comes from porting those millions of applications over to the iPad, but maybe the cost is too much.
My last issue with the UI was what I would like to call a cacophony of UI. Those new popovers I think are just amazing. I cannot wait until they are more widely applied in the next OS X! The new chrome however on the Address Book and iCal made me feel like something was amiss. So I germinated on it and then it hit me, this is the new Brushed Metal! Here is a new UI meant to mimic a real world object for a special group of applications, those that traditionally live on your desk. In OS 4.0, the Finder (or the equivalent here being Settings maybe) is going to have that wonderful UI. Why? Because some product manager decided that being the cool new app means having this… The real issue though is that I just don’t see the need to have to resuscitate a real world metaphor on this device. Especially when it comes to the chrome of windows and the almost oppressive the new applications seem to have, coupled with having to read text on these elements.
Conclusion
I think the iPad is a fascinating product. Yet, I feel the iPad lacks direction. It intends to straddle a line, but I am unsure on which side it falls. It does not know if it intends to be a personal device or one for family. It does not know if it really means to be a device of productivity or instead one of largely consumption. There are too many lines and too many caveats. I am not even going to try and make predictions, because frankly I feel that this device can be quite polarizing. Nevertheless, most of what I suggest is in the software realm and I think the inadequacies of legacy and forethought can be easily compensated.
