The reaction to the official iPad announcement has been hilarious. Pretty much like every official announcement, it seems like you have to either completely love or hate something in order to give your opinion about it. But while this way of thinking doesn’t work in real life, so it doesn’t in technology. You can’t judge a new device in 2 hours, just as you can’t in a week or in one month. And please notice that the iPad it’s only been announced: it will be out in 2 months.
That said, I think people are missing the whole point about Apple’s newest creation when comparing it to a big sized iPhone. Sure, it looks like a fat iPhone if you ask me. Point is, it doesn’t feel like an iPhone at all and the fact that it looks like the iPhone is actually the explanation of what I’m talking about. Plain and simple. Don’t get me wrong: the user interface is very similar to iPhone OS, it takes some elements from it (toolbars, buttons, icons) and pushes them into another dimension. I don’t know how this OS will be named, but iPad OS doesn’t sound bad at all. The big difference between the looks like and the feels like problems lie in the screen size itself. Many people can’t look beyond the form factor thing and they just go out and say “it’s a larger iPhone”. I can’t blame them if they don’t have a vision. By creating a product with more screen real estate, Apple will provide a device with more information on it. All those menus that you used to have in a dedicated tab in your iPhone can now be accessed with a single tap on a button without losing the information you’re looking at. It’s in the user flow where the iPad will be different from the iPhone: you can do things faster, in one place, without losing or breaking the experience.
Take a look at the Mail app, my favorite so far: you don’t have to go back and forth between the inbox and the single message view, you just hit a button and boom, here’s the “contextual menu” for that, with the inbox listing your incoming messages. I can go on with this for hours, but I’m pretty sure Tweetie for the iPad won’t have a single compose window anymore.
Second of all, the iPad we saw yesterday isn’t about tech specs. Neither it will be in 6 months or later this year. Sure it’s got a pretty aluminium case, a gorgeous shiny screen and 802.11n wifi, but I believe Steve wanted to put the focus on the reason you need it rather than plain numbers.
“We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts - we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad”
A great piece of tech, which has to be so great and yet intuitive to establish itself in a third category of products. This leads me to the question “Do I need an iPad?”. Yes I do. Speaking for myself, I need a device I could carry around the house, in the garden or in bed that lets me access and work with my stuff. That lets me check and manage my stuff. Couldn’t I use an iPhone for that? I could, and I’m currently using it. But this doesn’t mean it could be a lot better and most of all, the iPhone doesn’t let me manage data. I check things (stats, docs) but I don’t manage them. The iPhone is a device meant for “checking and accessing the most important things of your life” on the go. Nobody ever said it could be your mobile office, and Office clones apps in the App Store don’t justify that. I don’t write posts on my iPhone. With an iPad running iWork, I probably will.
I’m not saying the iPad it’s perfect, because it’s not. The OS is still incomplete, it’s a first iteration and we all know how much the iPhone got better in 3 years. I’m just saying that the iPad has a reason to exist, that there’s room for a 3rd category of products and Apple can fill that empty space. And as Josh Helfferich said yesterday “this is how past computing dies — with thunderous applause”.
