There’s apparently a lot to complain about since Apple launched the iPad era yesterday. A gauntlet of Engadget writers gave a series of ho-hum, “who-needs-it” reviews today. Some wanted to chide Apple for not reinventing the personal computer, especially after the rumor mills and hypesters had lifted this tablet to breakthrough status.
It still looks to us like a good tool for a small or home office business. Apple wants us to believe this, or it wouldn’t have spent so much time showing off its Excel echo (Numbers) or PowerPoint knock off (Keynote) facets from the iWork suite.
In practice the iPad will have to deliver real-world results. What doesn’t look sexy and necessary onstage alongside Steve Jobs? (I know, CEO Paul Otellini of Intel, even if you put him in a clean suit at the 2006 Macworld.)
The complaints about a lack of phone ability are off base, though. You’d never put this thing to your ear, but if you use a laptop to Skype-call today, the iPad will permit you to do this. Permit, I say, because yesterday Apple dropped its restrictions so apps can use Voice Over IP, the engine that enables Skype, over 3G networks. Skype already runs on the iPhone.
But Skype illustrates one of the biggest questions about the iPad. The new device is supposed to be a step up from a smartphone, but not so smart as Apple’s laptops. Using Skype on a laptop enables an add-on like eCamm’s note-taker Voice Recorder. Since the iPad runs only one app at a time, how will applications like Voice Recorder and Skype integrate? Never mind multitasking, I just want helper applications. And how do we get our documents onto and off this thing? Please don’t tell me that iTunes is in charge of synchronizing that, too.
On the other hand, Apple’s Mac applications are changed on iPad. Most for the better, from first-hand-user reports out today. Mail is a smoother interface. iCal a better calendar than on the Mac. And Numbers, and Pages and Keynote? Now $9.99 each. They cost $79 retail (for all three) in the Mac version
The iPad won’t displace the Kindle mojo at Amazon. But you’ll never get anybody to call a Kindle a business tool, even with its not-widely-discussed 3G capability to let you browse the Web via Sprint, a free service. The trouble is the Kindle uses a crude, experimental, text-mostly interface. And that’s the heart of the Apple difference: how it feels. Literally, in this case, since touching the iPad is almost the only way to use it.
I’ve got a friend who dreamed of the ability to use iPad as a phone if you’re paying for the 3G service. Well, 1. The iPad-as-phone is not a great business policy to protect the juggernaut of iPhone sales, and 2. The iPad is telephony-capable already, via iCall (VOIP) or Skype.
Nothing’s perfect. A vendor’s business plan always has more sway over success than technology advances. Apple is calculating enough to let three product lines rise at the same time. It practices a prickly business mantra of crippling each of its devices with some key feature missing — like a phone, or a video camera, or Flash replay, or a still camera, or 3G. Currently it sells nothing that has all of these features in one product.
What comes next is the actual iPad rollout experiences and the look toward the promised HP Slate, if a tablet is on your list of business tools. HP sure has a fresh opportunity to release such a magic product, with multitasking, head-turning performance and 140,000 apps ready on Day One, plus heavy TV ad rotation to sell it to the consumers. Let’s give HP the Apple dream-up treatment for the time remaining until the Slate shows up. Or are we jaded enough to set our expectations lower? Aw, why be cynical?
We already have a good list of what the iPad lacks — the Slate needs to deliver most of it, right? Let’s just be sure to insist the Slate’s got things the iPad has at debut, like 10 hour battery life, a custom-built chip by the vendor (drat, no more PA-RISC built by HP) to optimize speed and contain costs, display technology built for sharing (IPS), and a 22-ounce total weight. Don’t forget about the revenue streams from music, movies and book content, too. I mean, where the device maker takes 30 cents of every dollar to defray the development and advertising expense of the Slate.
I’d also like to see HP open up, oh, 284 high-profile retail stores worldwide to shape the customer’s initial experience. Perhaps the Best Buy-level of retail clerk would not be the best baseline to populate these HP stores. Try to get 50 million visitors through those 284 doors over the year, okay? Because you’re establishing a breakthrough product nobody’s ever seen.
This isn’t a Mac, but it’s more than a big Touch. (I own one of those, too. Pretty small screen, but I love the Wi-Fi browsing I hold in my hand.) The expectations were as high as the stock price yesterday morning, $208. Not even Apple, which could polish up a river stone and sell it as technology, could create the magical device the tech world dreamed up over the last few months. At least not in a 1.0 release, while protecting its lucrative phone, iPod and Mac businesses.
I’ll be goofy enough to buy an iPad soon. No guarantees on iPad success. It may take awhile, since Apple wants to open a new niche. What a concept — selling hardware to people who don’t own your products yet, trying to create demand. Watch the slick opening salvo in Apple’s rollout party video. Don’t expect Apple to give up, like it did on its Newton, on this one.
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