MattMaroon.com

So the big news of the day before, you know, that whole State of the Union thing, was, of course, the announcement of the iPad. Love ‘em or hate ‘em (and don’t tell anyone I said this, but I actually moderately like them) everyone pays attention to Apple. They’ve been disruptive to the music industry, are running the show in the high-end PC market, and have sparked a wave of innovation in the mobile phone one, so when they launch something new it’s worth attention.

This particular product has had more speculation than any device since the original iPhone. I may be wrong, but unlike the iPhone, it feels like everyone is underwhelmed. Except, perhaps, their competitors, like Amazon and HP, who are probably ecstatic.

If I were an OEM already making a tablet, I would be very happy about today’s announcement. The only thing surprising about it was the total lack of surprises, which is unusual for Apple. Everyone’s been expecting basically a large iPod touch with books in its app store. That’s exactly what they got, and it doesn’t even have that many books either, with only a few publishers signed up.

So if I were prepping a tablet of my own, or the Kindle, the iPad we saw today would be what I’d consider best case scenario. It would be what I’ve been planning around for the last six months to a year. I would have been holding my breath, waiting to hear “Oh, and one more thing, it can READ YOUR MIND!” at the end of the Jobsnote, and when it didn’t come, uncorking a bottle of champagne that cost about the same as the 16 GB version.

Do you think the cell phone OEMs, when they saw the first iPhone, said “yeah, that’s about what we expected”? My guess is their reaction was quite the opposite. Guys at RIM and Motorola were probably thinking "holy shit, I didn’t know a phone could be that good looking or good at web surfing." They still weren’t going to shut the company down and give the money back to investors due to the iPhone’s exorbitant pricing and single carrier, I’m sure, but you know they were steaming. It was a curveball. They caught what they knew was at least a glimpse of the future, and they were already a year behind.

Does HP feel that way right now? It seems doubtful. Their Slate device has everything the iPad does, except the App Store. But is the App Store better than having available to you every program made for Windows? You can’t play League of Legends or World of Warcraft on your iPad. (You may not want to on your Slate, depending on what’s under the hood.) You can’t play Flash games from Kongregate or chess on Yahoo Games.

And while the App Store is the best thing to happen to the iPhone, it’s raison d’être, as Gabor Cselle points out it’s largely due to the iPhone’s limitations: slow processing and a tiny screen. And, I’ll add to that, the inability to run the programs you already use. The App Store isn’t a feature; it’s a clever hack.

Even Apple didn’t allow apps for the first year because they thought web apps would be sufficient. (Also Apple did not understand what I call Maroon’s Law of Platforms, which is that any sufficiently popular technological platform will evolve into little more than a method for playing games, but they get it now.)

The iPad doesn’t seem to have those limitations, or at least if it does, they’re self-imposed. Same goes for it’s competitors. They’ve got laptop-like screens, and will probably have way better processors than whatever you’re reading this on now within a few years. They can run Windows, and could probably run full-fledged OSX if Apple decided to put it on there.

But the question people seem to be asking the most is “why?” Why would I want this?

I admit, it would make a good toy. It’d be fun to play with, and that’s good for some number of sales right there, but at $500 not many. Anyone who has an iPhone, Android, or WebOS phone will tell you that web surfing on it is somewhat painful. Far less so than on the Treo 650 we had previously, but still no picnic. There’s all this pinching and swiping. It’s kludgey. Even the sites and apps designed for it entail fat-fingered misclicks and slow page loads.

But you put up with it because it’s always with you and it takes no extra effort. You don’t surf the web that much from your phone at home (other than maybe on the john, if you don’t have a PC in your bathroom yet) because you’ve got a computer right there. But when you’re walking down the street and you need directions, or you get stuck in a traffic jam, or you’re in line at the grocery store, or any of the other hundred reasons you find yourself bored on a daily basis, it’s a godsend.

The iPhone and it’s generation of smart phones kicks ass when you’re on the go. It’s always with you, and that’s why it works. Nobody wants to carry a laptop everywhere, and even if you did, you couldn’t use it while walking. You wouldn’t pull it out and start surfing in a line at Starbucks. And that is true of a tablet.

It’s no more convenient than a laptop. You can use it pretty much only when and where you could use a laptop. It’s better for some things (surfing the web from your couch, perhaps) but no matter how much effort they put into iWork, are you really ever going to want to do real work on it? Can you imagine editing a spreadsheet on that thing? Typing has to be less brutal than the iPhone, but it’s still going to be painful relative to a keyboard.

Unlike the iPod , it doesn’t replace your Walkman. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t replace your crappy clamshell. Unlike the Mac, it doesn’t replace your PC. It doesn’t look very compelling as a book reader, so it won’t make you ditch your Kindle or good old papyrus. It has to create it’s own usage case somewhere in between, and that’s tough.

So I’m sticking with my guess before that this is going to be about as successful (or failureful) as the Macbook Air. It won’t be a total flop (Apple TV) but it won’t be an iPod Nano either. It’ll be something you hear about for awhile, then becomes just another item on the shelf behind the Genius Bar. 

This entry was posted on January 28, 2010 at 5:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.