My turn with the Apple iPad

The iPod Touch has become my primary platform for consuming RSS feeds, financial data and email, I love the immediacy, being able to access these things at the press of a button with no bootup. Despite this my first reaction to the iPad was not for myself, but that it’s the computing platform of my Mother’s dreams, not that she thinks much about computing, but that’s probably because the iPad doesn’t exist yet.

The main limitation on my iPod use is the small size of the display at 480×320 pixels. It makes reading complex documents hard on the eyes, I doubt that my Mum’s eyesight could cope with the iPod at all, but scale the display up to the iPad — 1024×768 pixels — and the story might be very different. It’s probably no mistake that this resolution matches a long established web design standard size, an indication that the App Store isn’t the only way to get content onto the platform.

Web applications can be docked on the Home screen in the same way as Apps, and open the way to a graphically richer experience even without Flash. It also allows closer integration with proprietary database applications on private networks, I guess they’ll need redesigning to be less dependent upon IE6, but even Microsoft would be in favour of that!

We sometimes lose sight of the fact that this restricted platform isn’t aimed at us geeks. We want to customise everything about our desktop environment, and if that’s you want take a look at Linux. In my opinion it’s flexibility has kept Linux from many desktops. I’ve personally been asked to replace perfectly good Linux installations with Windows because it’s unfamiliar and looks really complicated.

This platform is aimed at the often insignificant majority of people that aren’t like us. They just want a simple to use system that works without any special incantations or sacrificing animals at a full moon. Give them a wide range of applications that are stupidly easy to install and an internet connection that doesn’t need fettling and they’ll be happy, and why not.

On the geeky side, the iPhone OS can’t multi-task and some don’t like the fact. As a seasoned iPod Touch user, I’ve found that the single app life can have advantages, it enforces simplicity and robustness in the platform and the user’s activities.

The fact that I can’t open everything at once means that I focus more closely on the task, or the feed, at hand: we could probably all do with more of that. Neither can I have all the usual junk running in the background like it does on my laptop, reducing a quick machine to a crawl. Truly mobile machines need to conserve power and rarely have the extra resources to waste, opting for a single application environment allows modest processors to run like lightning… apparently.

Whilst listening to the conversation about the iPad on the Dev Show from 5by5 it seems that those in the medical profession won’t like the on-screen keyboard of the iPad. Personally I think the iPhone implementation is very slick, but I wouldn’t want to use it for an essay.

Anyhow it transpires that Doctors generally prefer to dictate notes. This could be a driver for another interesting interface: the ability to dictate into text files, the Mac already has limited voice recognition functionality and I believe the iPad specifications include both a microphone and bluetooth.

Dan Benjamin said that he sees the iPad as a platform for content manipulation not creation, and he’s right. You can’t code software on it, or edit images, or even write a book, but you can consume all of these. I can see myself having an iPad to carry on where my iPod Touch leaves off… but not for a couple of iterations, let them fix the bugs first.