The Magical and Revolutionary iPad
A lot of people just don’t get it yet. And I think there is a reason that almost every person on stage at the Apple event on Wednesday kept talking about holding it (the iPad) in your hands. They’ve been working on this for years, and they have come to understand that just *telling* or even showing someone an iPad doesn’t do it justice. They understand that only when you hold one and start using it will you ‘get it.’ And that’s where the magic comes in.
Think about it for a minute. How did you use cell phones before the iPhone? You punched physical buttons and talked, period. Or, if you were on the cutting edge maybe you had one of those spiffy Windows Mobile ‘smart’ phones where you poked at the screen with an itty-bitty pen, if you hadn’t managed to lose it yet. I had a few of those phones, and I remember how I was always attempting to use my finger on the screen to avoid having to pull the stylus out. It didn’t work very well. I also remember giving up on ever trying to see the screen in sunlight. I also remember how damned difficult it was to ever find any sort of application anyone was willing to make for it. And if you did find one, and were willing to spend a LOT of money for it, good luck getting it loaded on to the phone. It was just one big hassle-filled experience, yet I was willing to jump through all the hoops because I’m a geek and I love gadgets. But never in a million years would I be able to get my wife to use one. She would have laughed at the idea.
And yet now my wife is a huge fan of one of the most advanced smart phones in the world, because the iPhone changed the whole game of how users interact with it. It’s not so hard. Apps are a few pokes away. Easy. It’s all about easy. And yet the iPad has more detractors than the initial iPhone did, possibly exceeding the detractors of the original iPod! They are adamant that it will either completely fail or will stagnate in mediocrity. Here’s why I think they have it all wrong.
First, it seems that they expected some sort of miraculous swiss army knife type of hardware device that is laptop, tablet, phone and Kindle all in one package. They wanted it to run on Verizon too. No device could ever meet all these expectations.
Second, they misunderstand the iPad’s target uses. Steve Jobs spelled them out in detail: Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, Ebooks. And yet they still insist on saying things like “It’s literally a bigger iPod Touch - for what?”
Third, they miss some things that weren’t specifically said out loud at the recent event. For example, web pages with multitouch. Forget the iPhone - the only multitouch needed was zoom. Too small. But imagine a web page on a laptop screen, no keyboard, no mouse. All interaction is by touch. I can even see a complete redesign of all web pages to be optimized for a touch screen experience. Take a web site and put it all in an app. Informational ebooks, make them an app, or make them a paid ‘extra’ tab in your app. There are a lot of possibilities here.
So I guess I can’t stop the whiners, and I’m definitely tired of attempting to explain my thoughts on the subject to raging nerds, but those are my thoughts. I look forward to revisiting this topic in June or July. Hopefully by then I’ll have my own iPad and can expand on the topic.