People keep asking me why I bought an iPad, and then what I think of it. Since there seem to be many who care, here’s why I just had to have one and my thoughts on it:
1. I’m an early adopter and love gadgets. I am always curious on where technology is going and love to be the first to try it.
2. I need to maintain my geek cred by always getting the latest device before everyone else.
3. As a UX person, it is important for my profession to keep up to date on the latest in design so that I can know what others are working on, and add it to my own my work. Thus, while these early devices can be expensive, I see them as part of my ongoing education as a designer and in my work with startups.
4. I learn by experiencing these devices first hand, which makes more effective as a designer, and an advisor to startups who are working on the latest and greatest. If I did not experience these products firsthand, meaning living with them and using them day after day, my knowledge of what is possible is going to be limited by my imagination and not by actual experience. Also, when I live with devices, new applications, interactions, and methods come to mind through these devices being with me constantly. If something wasn’t such an integral part of my life, I would not know it well enough to extend and be creative with it.
5. Besides being experiments, some of these devices actually do improve my life. At the same time, I’ve been burned by many early devices whose businesses died underneath them. It’s almost like picking startups to invest in; I try to pick the devices to try by hypothesizing whether or not they’re going to be around in a year. So Apple is probably a good bet for longevity as a corporation, but in the past they have launched and then killed products just as us early guys fell in love with them.
OK now specifically about the iPad
1. Some of you heard me talk about this already, but one of the biggest reasons why I bought one was to replace my Taiwanese crappy netbook Hakintosh. When I used to go out to meetings, I would bring my MacBook Pro which was heavy and also has my life on it. To lose or crash that MacBook Pro would mean the death of me! So I bought a netbook, installed Mac OSX on it thanks to the hacker community, and life was much better as the netbook was perfect for email and blogging during breaks between meetings.
Then literally 2 weeks ago, it stopped charging the battery. Weeks before, the WIFI stopped working and so did the ethernet port. Slowly but surely, as all PCs do, it just started disintegrating before my very eyes. I needed a replacement solution but didn’t want to spring for a MacBook Air; too expensive!
I was ecstatic to see the iPad come out AND let you dock a full size keyboard to it. If I could have docked a full size keyboard to my iPhone, that would have also worked for me. A long time ago, I had a folding IR keyboard which I would use with my Palm Treo 680 and it was great sitting at a cafe blogging or emailing away because I could type fast. Switching to the iPhone removed this functionality and I waited patiently for an Apple solution. Thankfully in a few weeks when my keyboard dock arrives, I’ll have it!
By the way, I trust Apple’s quality a lot more than any PC manufacturer out there, as evidenced by the slow self destruction of my netbook and every other PC I’ve ever owned. When I bought my iPad, I shelled out another $100 for AppleCare which is by far the best extended warranty/service plan ever.
2. Noting the larger form factor for touch computing, and having had the experience of small format touch computing with the iPhone, I suspected something revolutionary that would happen with such a platform for touch computing but wasn’t completely sure.
I have seen touch screen PCs before but they were awful. Well, running Windows under anything is pretty bad! But forcing a touch screen onto Windows makes it doubly bad! And it doesn’t have all the rich touch gestures that Apple built into the iPhone and iPad. This drove part of my uncertainty on whether or not the iPad would truly revolutionize computing or would it just be a larger screen touch device that wouldn’t go anywhere.
Knowing Apple’s great work on the iPhone, I had to see for myself whether or not it would go somewhere. And the only way was to get one and play with it.
3. I’m not sure I would use it as a media viewing device. It’s still primarily a blogging and email tool for me, and I think I would also use many of the same useful apps from the iPhone here on the iPad too.
4. I think gaming will be good. I’ve heard about some of the cool multiplayer games already, and also have fond memories of those video game tables where the screen was under the table surface and you could play Pac-Man against someone.
5. Don’t need 3G. No way am I paying for another wireless contract from AT&T! I have a Verizon MIFI card and am going to use that as an untethering device. Besides my netbook-like use case means I’ll mostly be in a cafe or somewhere with free WIFI.
6. My hope is that it will be a replacement for my Kindle 2, which I stupidly left on the seat of a plane flight last year.
First Experiences with the iPad
1. Definitely excels as an email and blogging tool simply because the screen format is much bigger. Typing is much better but I really want the keyboard dock.
2. Touch typing really tough. I brace my left thumb on the bottom edge to stop it from sliding down, and I use a modified hunt and peck to type. Still, faster on this keyboard than the iPhone keyboard.
3. Regarding the early games, all I gotta say is WOW. The large touch screen allows some dramatic imagery to display during game play, ie. Tap Tap Radiation. It also provides a larger gaming surface via touching, ie. Smule Magic Piano. The iPad’s connected nature also easily allows gaming with other people, like with Smule Magic Piano’s duet feature. Very well done.
4. Larger screen really makes drawing programs shine, like Adobe’s Ideas app. Much closer to real life canvases now, which makes for better drawing opportunities.
5. I like it that Apple allowed iPhone apps to run. But some of them crash or behave funny. Most do work thankfully. The 2X screen magnifier is very nice.
6. Touching on large displays of data really causes me to think of new interaction paradigms. I love the Weatherbug Elite app and the ability to look at large weather maps and lets me interact with them via touch versus a mouse.
7. Reading is AWESOME. My Kindle app is that much better, especially after I lost my Kindle 2. But who cares now!!! With my Kindle 2, I always wanted to swipe to turn the page and now I can (although, yes, I could always do this on the iPhone).
8. I loaded my favorite movie on it, Star Trek. Playing it was cool, but it didn’t blow me away, the fact that I could play movies on it. Nor did playing music on it. I think that my iPhone will still be where I will consume most of my music, and my Apple TV or my MacBook Pro is where I will watch TV shows and movies.
I think that if there were some other features alongside it, that might make it more interesting. Social features? Chatting? Commenting? Additional info on the movie/show? Otherwise, it’s not that exciting to me. Nice to have, but not necessary.
By the way, streaming still sucks in general. It even doesn’t always work on my fiber optic line back home. When it does work, it’s amazing, like when Hulu actually plays a full show without stopping in the middle. So much for the internet in the US, the crappiest broadband in the world.
9. I am officially “swipe-happy”. The real world interaction style of using your gestures to make logical interactions on stuff on the screen is amazingly natural and I want to swipe every screen now.
10. This is now where I think the iPad is a revolutionary platform. The use of real world interaction styles makes it a ton easier for not-so-computer-literate computer users to quickly be able to interact with such a complex device. Giving my iPad to my kid was definitely a mistake; now she won’t give it back!
I think this is where the App Store will truly make the iPad something beyond anything we have now, leveraging the creativity of 1000s of developers to make the most amazing applications utilizing the swipes and gestures of this platform.
11. By the way, now I can sit up at night in the dark and email, blog, and tweet effectively. My iPhone wasn’t bad, but it’s just too small for a lot of things. A bigger screen that does not have another flapping part of it (ie. the keyboard) is sometimes really nice to not deal with especially when you’re curled up in bed.
12. I would also like to note that it was also Apple’s attention to detail on the screen technology (unfortunately the Nexus One’s touch screen really is lacking compared to the iPhone’s), the richness of the gestures available, their amazing hardware/software interaction that makes iPad’s response to gestures quick and natural (you can notice the difference already with a Mac mouse and a PC mouse; just see the subtle differences in which they behave when you move either. The Mac’s mouse is so much better) – all of these details that Apple makes sure are taken care of and maximized means that apps which use the functionality feel natural in response and execution. There is no annoying hesitation on when you swipe…and then something happens. It just does as you and your senses expect.
When the platform is so well done, the apps on top shine even more. Too bad the PC guys will never ever figure this out. They are perpetually in a mode of cost savings and processor performance enhancement. These other more “human” details are lost and certainly misunderstood, and it means that Apple will always be the leader.
Long live my iPad! (…and I most certainly will buy the next generation, which will undoubtedly have a camera in it yeah!)