WhyPad?

Posted July 2, 2010

Apple’s iPad has been subject to two prevailing narratives: one sycophantic (“a magical and revolutionary device”), the other scornful (“an overgrown iPod Touch”). Here is a fast first reaction that reconciles the two and argues that for many if not most people, a tablet is in your future.

1. Well, it is revolutionary. And as close to magical as a computer gets.

As a media device, the iPad is simply amazing. I have read nine books, watched three downloaded movies and several more on Netflix, used it daily for news feeds, music, games, and photos. It is much more intimate for these things than a laptop. Indeed, many people find that they like movies in bed on their iPad better than on the huge flat screen downstairs.

As a business device, it is surprisingly capable. Email rocks. I scan and delete mail at very high speed on the tablet. Surfing is great — it is very fast and you never want to touch another mouse. Skype works well and 3G AT&T on the iPad does not suck. I have yet to exceed $15/month (250MB) of 3G data. With some attention to apps and accessories (below), it is much better than a laptop for airplanes and road work. It also works surprisingly well for small group presentations.

2. It is an overgrown Touch — but you can hack what it lacks. For example:

The iPad has no built in file structure or file replication. An astonishing ommission. Our content lives in files, but you cannot create file folder hierarchies, rename, send, delete files, etc. and although you can always email yourself a file, version control becomes a big problem if you are active. The solution is Quickoffice and DropBox – by a considerable distance the two most important business programs for the iPad.
There is no MS Office. A computer that cannot write, add, or present? Apple created an iPad version of its Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet, and Keystone presentation applications, but these are not set up well for most business users. They are pretty, but they are not fully file compatible and they are absurdly oriented towards graphics. If you stick giraffe photos in your memos or embed slick graphs in your styled tables, you will love the Appleware. Others should ignore the Apple programs and use the killer word processor and spreadsheet built into Quickoffice. These are completely file compatible with Word and Excel and a PowerPoint editor is promised for later this year.
There is no keyboard. Like a Touch or an iPhone, the iPad contains a screen keyboard. It feels very unnatural — one writer compared using it to playing with her food. For most people, the solution is not a bluetooth keyboard unless you write massively and constantly — a student with a long term paper or a professional writer. For business users, give it a bit of time. After 5 weeks, I type nearly as fast on the iPad as with a regular keyboard — but it is a new skill and feels very different.
There is no Ethernet port. This is lame. In Europe last week, hotels had free and easy Ethernet connections but flaky or expensive wifi. But you cannot plug an iPad into an Ethernet port (and if you tried to do it with the camera USB adapter, the OS would not recognize the connection). The solution turns out to be 3G, which works fine everywhere at moderate prices, or Airport Express. Plug AX into the wall, connect the hotel Ethernet cable to it and (if you have done a bit of configuring before you left home) you have a secure and usable a local wifi connection. A kludge, but it works.
There is no USB port or SD slot. Competitors will force Apple to rescind this dumb decision like they did Firewire on MacBooks. For some but not all applications, the camera or projector adapters will work, but this is silly. People want to connect and share. Leaving out small, easy, battery-efficient ports is just dumb — and Apple has a history of doing this with version one products.
There is no way to use standard 3G SIM cards when you travel overseas. The authorized iPhone carriers (T-Mobile, Orange, O2, NTT docomo, or H3G) are not yet set up to sell microsims to travelers. Note that the AT&T overseas 3G plan is not a silly solution for brief business trips if you combine it with hotel wifi. A 3G plan that solves the problem in almost every country costs $30-50/week. For those determined to buy cheap, prepaid 3G SIM cards in the local Tabac, newsstand, or vending machine, go to CutMySIM for the tool you need to turn an ordinary SIM chip into a microsim (it turns out the pins in the new micosims are identical, so trimming a big SIM gives you a perfectly usable microsim).
There is no video camera — yet. Once is clearly planned and it might be cool to use Facetime on an iPad. But I have a hard time seeing how you you would hold the tablet during a conversation so that your face stays visible to the camera. On a desktop, laptop, or even an iPhone this is not an issue but on a freestanding tablet it may be. So, I don’t care about the video camera yet (then again, I have not yet tried Facetime, which looks very sweet).

3. The iPad creates unforseen disruptions and second order effects.

Surfing alone. iPads are intimate, absorbing, addictive, hypnotizing, and fundamentally antisocial. You don’t share your iPad — even less than your phone. If you are working on one in a meeting, you are not in the meeting even if you look up like you are only taking notes. You can use it to share media in person or online and to maintain friendships of course, but often the iPad is another way to spend time alone. Sociologist Robert Putnam famously wrote about Americans bowling alone. His next metaphor may be surfing.
Simplicity sells. As desktop software became needlessly complicated and bulky, we turned to desktop web applications, which were often slow and too often tried to prove their manhood by copying their feature bloated predecessors. In contrast, whether they are native apps or built as websites, mobile apps are as simple as WordStar under CPM but with even less code and much better graphics. Apps on the iPad install in seconds and update regularly and painlessly. Most run well and look great. None have manuals and very few have help buttons.
Vertical integration is viable again. Vertical integration never completely disappeared from Silicon Valley, as a close look at Apple or Cisco reveals. But what used to be a weakness is now a strength. Apple’s control over iPhone and iPad components creates both powerful benefit and a powerful check on the tendency of components to add features and capabilities just in case customers want them. Apple’s vertical integration allows it to enforce focus and simplicity because its components have only one customer. This may may slow down the pace of innovation for Apple (not a ton of evidence of this, BTW) but it also reduces down needless complexity.
Man your purses. I am getting to know my second murse, having dumped a cheap little bit of north-south nylon trash for a solid east-west leather man bag that I snagged in Shanghai a couple of years back. (Amazingly, it has the word “Apple” tattooed on it in a spot you can hardly see. We may have been meant for each other). I have begun to use it for my sunglasses but have not yet granted it my keys. I doubt that I could ever go so far as trust it with my wallet (although local hero and author Michael Chabon, makes a hysterical case for doing so in his recent essay “I Feel Good About My Murse”).
HP is back. Final oddball prediction: the iPad will help resurrect HP. HP has just purchased Palm and with it the powerful PalmOs, which should make the forthcoming Slate into a dandy tablet. If HP addresses the weaknesses of the iPad listed above, drives hard for the corporate market with solid business features and security, HP could end up a strong #3 in what will surely be a global tablet market worth tens of billions of dollars (and hundreds of billions if you count apps and advertising). We used to joke that had HP invented sushi, they would have gone to market with RDF (Raw Dead Fish). They are engineers with absolutely no feel for creating and selling a compelling user experience instead of gee-whiz tech specs. If you hear the Slate advertising its megapixels and CPU speed, you can safely sell HP short.