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As an Apple customer and reasonably proficient user of Apple products, I’d been waiting with anticipation for the announcement this past week of what we now know of as the iPad. I was on the road on business, and so must send a big thank you to my buddy Paddy Hynes, who kept me up to date on the announcement from the live blogs he was watching while multitasking.

When I got back to the hotel I tried to watch the stream from Apple, blaming the hotel connection for my inability to do so and later discovering that the demand was so great, no one was getting a good stream. Testimony I suppose to the level of interest. Certainly every Apple oriented and most other tech blogs/podcasts/netdenizens made some note of the announcement as did most of the bigger print outlets.

By now we should all have the gist of the iPad. It runs the iPhone OS, allegedly a build called 3.2 and supports not only the majority of the 140K apps out there but also has a new SDK to leverage the near 10 inch display. It has multitouch and to some extent is a larger iPod Touch. While some see this as negative, the iPod Touch has been incredibly successful and has a very short learning curve. The new device when it arrives will come in six versions, two sets of three, the first group having WiFi connectivity and the second group having both WiFi and 3G connectivity. Both groups will offer 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flash memory options. The most inexpensive is $499 USD and the most expensive is $829 USD. Apple beat the estimates and have produced devices and pricing that could create a brand new category of personal interactive devices. They aren’t PDAs or Smartphones and they aren’t computers either. Some are calling the device a netbook, I don’t see that myself. The OS is too light to compare with a Moblin or Windows and the form factor makes it not a PDA. Everyone who got hands-on made note that the device is very fast, surprising considering a 1 GHz CPU given how pokey Netbooks with 1.6GHz CPUs are. It’s still at least 60 days before I’ll see one, so this post is very preliminary but here goes.

The Good Stuff

1. The unit is by all accounts fast. To have been slow, like my iPhone 3G would have been the spike through the brain at start. The screen looks sharp and the responsiveness to tap, drag, swipe looks really good.

2. The ability to use existing apps creates both an economy and a user base at launch, and there are a great many very useful iPhone apps out there, flashlights and gas passing notwithstanding.

3. I like the size. It reminds me of the Kindle DX, in that it’s large enough to get decent amounts of content on the screen without being so large to be cumbersome. The onscreen keyboard looks good in portrait mode and as a touch typist I expect that it will be usable. I’m not sure about the landscape iteration of the keyboard as the key spacing shifts meaning that there will not be common acclimatization between views.

4. I’m glad that there is a mic jack and a built-in speaker and that it will use the 30pin dock connector that is well known in the marketplace. I was disconcerted about the seemingly large border area, but then noticed where my hands fall on my Kindle II and see the design logic therein. It makes the screen look bigger than it really is, and your digits won’t block content while you use it.

5. Apple was good enough to allow their own Bluetooth keyboard to connect to the device, a missing from the iPhone and iPod Touch that they still need to rectify.

6. The small dock with attached keyboard looks pretty but I will have to wait to get hands-on to determine its usability. Gut check says the keyboard is too close to the screen and the screen will be too low for proper ergonomics. I know that a stilt or post would make it unbalanced and also ugly, but I’ll have to wait and see.

7. Hooray for external display support. Yes it requires a proprietary and likely expensive cable but at least you’ll be able to output to an external screen which is good because…

8. iWork retuned for touch. I am a big fan of iWork although I confess that my Numbers launch count is still less than 10, and my Pages launch count is less than 25. My Keynote launch count is a much bigger number. Keynote is a fabulous presentation tool and my favourite by far even though I am not allowed to use it at work for reasonable cause. I was hugely disappointed to hear CNET’s Brian Tong refer to Keynote as sort of a PowerPoint thing. Keynote is like PowerPoint like your grade one Jolly Numbers book is like, well like Numbers.

9. I like that the old apps work and that the SDK is already available. The company I work for full time has already updated our MonoTouch toolkit to build apps for the iPad. Encouraging the developer community is smart. I expect though that the iPad apps on the AppStore will cost more than the iPhone apps do today. Because they’ll drive a bigger screen. Kind of like changing the knobs on the Marshall so they go to 11.

10. Tap to change pages. When I saw the swipe to change pages in the demo, I cringed. My Sony PR 7XX eReader had that swipe to change pages. Unlike the 5XX series that had no touch screen, the 7XX did (resulting in lousy contrast and a horrible reading experience) and let me assure you that the swipe gets old fast. Fast like in ten or fewer swipes. Very glad to see the page change can happen with just a tap. It will be interesting to see how deliberate that tap will need to be.

The Seeming Disappointments

I accept that I may not the target audience for the iPad. I love the iPod Touch and my iPhone (except for data roaming charges, hopefully the Canadian carriers will stop assaulting travellers soon). I have two big displays on my Mac Pro, I chose the 17″ MacBook Pro and will again, and even was an early adopter of the MacBook Air (an action I am unlikely to repeat as its performance and storage are sadly lacking). For me, and for now, there are some significant missings on the iPad, that may actually keep me off the first generation buyers list. In no particular order;

1. No cameras. Yes I mean plural. The device needs two, one facing you and one facing opposite. Digital video cameras are very inexpensive and Apple could have kept the top end unit under a grand and put two cameras in it. There certainly is enough space. Given that they stuffed a video camera in the latest Nano and a still/video camera in the iPhone 3Gs, this is just a miss. I would certainly want to use this device for adhoc video conferencing.

2. Micro-SIM slot. Is space a problem on this thing? My iPhone takes an industry standard, universally available SIM card. The iPad takes a completely different micro SIM that most carriers don’t offer yet and that is not yet required by most any other device. Did someone get paid off to “think different” Dumb move.

3. Storage. 64GB? Max? Really? I cannot fit my iTunes library or Aperture library on my 64GB iPod Touch and I have no interest in doing even rudimentary photo editing on the small screen. The bigger screen could make this viable, but there simply isn’t enough space, nor is there any option for storage expansion. Instead of Micro SIM, they could have added a micro USB connection for use with an offboard storage unit. 500GB portable disk drives are highly affordable and I could use it for the lion’s share of content that I wanted close but don’t need live on the iPad.

4. No stylus. An iPad should have a stylus. Like the Wacom Cintiq idea but leveraging the touch interface. I would love to have one of these devices as a pad that I could take jot notes on or draw sketches or virtually whiteboard. When I saw the paint splotch invitation my hopes ran away from me.

5. I love the idea of the iBooks and the iBookstore. I also surprised myself after my Sony experience with how much I have come to love and depend upon my Kindle II. I do like the backlighting for low light conditions, the one place where the Kindle falls down. Some have said that the iPad is a Kindle killer because the cheapest unit is priced alongside the Kindle DX. Don’t forget that Whispernet is with your Kindle forever at no extra cost to you. Even if you could get by on 250mb per month with a device as rich as the iPad, it’s still an extra $180 per year for the equivalent of Whispernet. Plus the Kindle is designed as an appliance to do one thing, read books. I agree that the newspaper and magazine options on the Kindle are lacking, but you need to consider the cost of operation. We also have no idea what the books in the iBookstore will cost. Amazon is annoying customers by increasing the price of digital books. Apple has never been known as a price leader. Can we expect yet another DRMed ebook format? Oh boy.

6. Apple loves America. International deals coming. No dates, no costs. I understand selling to a target rich environment but do remember that there is a world outside the United States folks. You didn’t need to repeat the same crappy rollout of the iPhone on a global basis.

7. Ports. Where are they? When I first saw the pictures I mistook the speaker openings for USB ports. I think I’m still disappointed that they are not. A device likes this begs connectivity. We have no idea if it will support Bluetooth file transfer although given the lack of ports it had better.

8. I love seeing the enhancements to iWork. When pray tell will there be an update to iWork on the Mac? The only comment was documents will be compatible. I love the idea of Keynote on the iPad but I would really like more functionality in Keynote. Or even putting functionality back into Keynote that disappeared over the last couple of versions. Like Flash export.

9. Speaking of Flash. I’m not a fan of Flash not because it’s bad but because so many web designers use so much of it, and do so badly. HTML 5 may be the emerging standard but there is a lot of stuff out there that needs Flash and while Mr. Jobs may think Adobe is lazy, the customer could care less about his opinions on Adobe. Safari supports Flash on the Mac and on Windows. If it slows things that badly (I see it does) hop up the horsepower or provide some mid stream converter. I won’t be sad to see the bloat of Flash turn fishbelly white and float down the creek, but it won’t happen next month.

A number of people have rang me up to ask what I think of the iPad, and while I suppose it’s a decent first cut, I’m underwhelmed so far. Will I buy one? That will be highly dependant on the level of abuse the carriers in Canada will be seeking to apply for 3G always on connectivity including international use. I’m in the US very often and the idea that I would not be able to use 3G data without a second mortgage is highly unappealing. I would not go with the WiFi only unit because WiFi is neither as ubiquitous or as cheap as the mcmarketing professionals would have one believe. I think that the amount of onboard storage, lack of storage expandability and lack of video are all showstoppers for me. I use my kit to its maximum, and while I would love an iPad it reminds me too much of the MacBook Air, additional equipment instead of alternative equipment. Oh I will probably buy one when they come available, but I won’t be salivating waiting for the day. Unlike other reviewers who cannot see a use for an iPad, I can see several uses, but in the current form it doesn’t surface my needs well.

All images used in this post are the property of Apple Inc.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Apple, iPad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.