One has to hand it to Apple, the world’s greatest marketing company. What Steve Jobs and company have done since the beginning of the world of personal computing is to provide the world with some of it s most innovative technologies. They seem to have this incredible knack for providing us with something we know we want but don’t know we do. When they came out with the MacIntosh computer in 1984, they realized that people wanted to use computers but for most people, it wasn’t about being computer scientists. So they came up with simple things that had already been invented and repackaged it for public consumption. They made computing fun and useful.
What does the iPad bring to the public today? Some say its a tablet computer. Well, tablets have been around for a long time. This device enabled folks to work directly on the screen. You had a stylus that enabled you to write on the screen and that could be saved. Using your stylus, you could do all the things you would with a mouse. Unfortunately, tablets didn’t sell well. Most of the folks that use them are field service engineers, technicians, nurses, doctors, pharmacy sales people (They’re always interrupting my visits to my doctor armed with these things) people who need to work with a screen instead of a keyboard. Most of us who use computers do so sitting down with a screen and a keyboard so we opted to buy desktops or laptops. We didn’t need tablets.
Like everyone else, at first when I heard of Apple bringing out a tablet computer, I thought why? What I should’ve paid attention to was what was also going on in other areas of the computing world. A few things happened in 2009 that few realized changed the whole idea of personal computing.
1. Netbooks:
With netbook computers, miniature laptops, there was the realization that people didn’t really want the big bulky laptops that weighed 5-10 pounds lugging around. They wanted something small and portable that they could take anywhere and download email, surf the web, essentially do anything that you could on any full size computer. At one point, netbooks outsold their laptop counterparts and brought a sliver of hope to the the computing industry with everyone pitching in their model. Dell, HP, Gateway, Acer, Asus (yeah, the motherboard makers).
2. E-Readers:
I lump them all, the Kindle by Amazon, the Nook by Barnes and Noble, Sony’s Reader and all the others. They’re called e-readers since they enable users to read books electronically. With them, you can buy books, magazines and an assortment of different literature and read them. The idea is that you now don’t have to carry around the big books, having them all fit in one device. E-readers have the potential to do what MP3 players did for music, practically doing away with CDs, not to mention records and tapes (gasp!). Already this is causing a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, not unlike what is already underway in the newspaper and magazine industries which is finding itself under attack from bloggers and folks who can access the same news online without having to pay a cent for it.
3. The iPhone:
Yes, this has been out for a few years now and is in its 3rd generation at the time of writing but in 2009 something very significant occurred where this phone was concerned. 64% of the the use of the World Wide Web by cell phones is attributed to this device. What this represents is the staggering percentage of smart phone users that own this device. Much of this is the result of the many mini applications or “apps” with which you can do just about anything on these devices. You want to go shopping, there’s an app to help you keep your list. You’re lost? There’s a GPS app to help you find your way. Want to use Twitter, there’s a few hundred apps for that. Want to update your Facebook? There’s an app for that (smart Facebook, only 1 app for that so far). This is not a new phenomenon. The PalmPilot came with lots of little applications which provided users with the same capabilities. The iPhone just made it way sexier and with Apple being the grand overseer of all iPhone application development, users demanded more and developers were just happy to oblige, especially with the unprecedented payment concept where applications can now be either free or cost as little as 99 cents to a lot more. In other words, with music, applications, internet, the iPhone became the true smart phone. I won’t say it did anything new, it just perfected it from a users perspective, essentially giving people what they wanted.
So what do we have here? From people using notebooks, we know they don’t want to be carrying around big bulky laptops, with e-readers they wanted to read but didn’t want to carry around big books and with the iPhone, they wanted to be able to access the web and use their device to do some very specific things. You may ask, why couldn’t the iPhone be enough? Well lets not forget, its really a phone and people want that to be as portable as possible. Surfing the web, folks want to see a web page, not a little thing they have to magnify to properly read. People want to access the world wide web but need something that would be big enough to read from. So you crunch all of these capabilities together and what you get? The iPad.
People liken the Apple iPad to being just a big iPhone. They may be right since it looks that way. The only thing missing is the phone. Others try comparing the iPad to the tablet computer. It is not. Its not about the use of a stylus to gain access. Its a completely different device. So what does it really do? The iPad to my mind is the first fully defined and developed content consumption device.
Of course there are other content consumption devices but none like the iPad with which you can consume music, photographs, newspapers, books, videos, movies and of course anything on the web. All of this on one device. With the iPod you can consume primarily misic and to a very small extent videos and photos. But with this device, you can consume them with a much larger interface.
Surely other content consumption devices are going to hit the market. Google is coming out with what is dubbed the “gPad”. It remains to be seen how well this does in the global marketplace. Expect to see serious competition in this space.
Now this darling device is not without its share of problems the biggest of which is absence of support for Adobe’s Flash. On the web, Flash has been the driver of rich content. With Flash you get to see super sophisticated animations, interactive videos, and best of all games. For some reason, Apple decided it was not going to ever support Flash. Of course there are some third party situations where this can be done on the iPad but the reasoning behind it not being natively supported is locked up with Apple’s other industrial secrets. One has to wonder about this. With the same situation on the iPhone, whole advertising campaigns came out featuring this with the moniker of “iPhone can’t do this” with the main feature being other systems such as Android being able to support Flash. Go to some pages on the iPhone and you get a request for the Flash plugin. Problem is that you can do nothing about it. More and more third party things are coming out to support it though so all is not lost.
As I post, many competitors have come out. There are a few from the Android world. Samsung came out with the Galaxy tab which is a 7 inch pad that was laughed at by Steve Jobs. HP which recently purchased Palm, the producers of the Palm Pilot, came out with the TouchPad, a tablet which is powered by the latest version of the Palm operating system, WebOS. RIM, the makers of the Blackberry came out with the Playbook, a 7 inch pad. And oh yeah, iMito also has one as does a few others running on older version of Android. Windows is supposed to come out with their own tablet. When? Stay tuned.
WiFi or Data Plan?
For these things to work, they need data. Question here is how do you get it. All of these devices come equipped with WiFi so you can connect wherever you can get it but to move the thing forward, everyone is pairing up with phone companies offering cellphone like data access.
With this you don’t need WiFi. All you need is a data plan and you can go anywhere. Data plans start from as low as $16 a month (possibly less) to as much as $65 for unlimited access. If you’re a business person, that’s chump expense but for other suffers Starbucks and their free WiFi would have to do. You also pay significantly for the cell phone adapter that provides you with network access.
How Much for Memory?
You will ask this question given that for machines with 32GB the price being roughly $525, the 16GB is $450. Not bad. A 16GB flash drive is around $18 so that’s sounds about ok. Add network access (3G) and you put on another $100.
So . . .
You get the picture. This device, providing the capabilities of the iPhone with a bigger screen promises to open a new frontier in computing and hopefully in the coming months we’ll see intensified competition in this space. I am sure it will be a hit for giving consumers a new way of acquiring and consuming content. Whatever the case, I can assure you that I would like the Apple iPad more than the others. I already hate the Android OS and will post later about why I do. Maybe I may fall in love with the Windows pad whenever that comes out.
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