WordPress worked up an app ready for Day One that taps the internal keyboard
Of all of the surprises in the first two days of using an iPad, the biggest one may be the easiest to put my finger on. The keyboard built into this tool is good enough for a first draft at touch typing speeds. That Apple would have been able to concoct such a thing, when others have failed at including such a fundamental, says a lot about the creative utility of this device.
The paragraph above would have taken so much longer to draft on an iPhone, and would have been torture on a OLPC portable computer. I compare the iPad to the OLPC because the latter’s designers believed children would create music, stories, art, even programs with it. Apple hasn’t mounted a big push yet for creating via the iPad. It’s positioned this year as a tool to consume. But give the market six months to fire up the tools and attachments like mics, cameras, input devices and more extensive editing, and this might become the most mobile of workbenches.
The debate around the iPad has included questions about what it might kill, or just replace. These are the wrong questions, but it’s no surprise to hear them. Very new things rattle most of us. We need to find a place for them and so we compare. Like a Kindle? Not exactly, but you can read business books on it. Like a laptop, then. Not so much either, since local file storage and attached things like disks aren’t there yet. Like a netbook, maybe? The iPad might look the same size, but it won’t run several programs at once. Its Safari browser won’t even let you keep multiple pages open using tabs.
All such features that prove to be important to new users will surface. And some tools for existing Macs are already on hand to help. The Bluetooth keyboards and headsets, and a Mac app called PhoneView, are examples of how the demand will create tools for creation.
Phoneview is a gem I discovered during a Macworld 2010 session. You install it on your Mac, then tell it to talk to iPhone devices that plug in to your laptop or desktop. Phoneview knew how to let me move files between iPhone and Mac, giving me storage access to the iPhone’s disk. When I plugged in my iPad yesterday, PhoneView popped up, ready to let me swap work to and from Apple’s newest device, too.
That’s a sign that the future for this device’s creative powers will arrive sooner than later. Phoneview worked straight-off because the iPad shares its software with the 40-million-strong iPhone/Touch world. Some companies are rewriting software this week for the iPad, having just gotten their hands on a real one instead of a simulator. But for other tools, the leap is effortless.
Bluetooth keyboards work today. Phoneview is waiting. Editing software for video and photos is going to be arriving very soon, because there are millions more pixels of screen real estate to use than on the iPhones. (And make no mistake, there are already a raft of media editors on hand for the iPhone.) Dragon Dictation lets me cut a first draft without even using a keyboard, just by reading in an idea and then pasting it to the clipboard. Dragon’s a free app, somehow — just like it is on the iPhone.
Will any of this emerge so fast to kill off the existing tech business tools? Not this year, not even next. Change from the foundations up happens slowly, because the older tech hangs on so much longer than some mavens expect. Kindle, a great resource for reading business texts, won’t be killed off by an Apple iBook store that looks overpriced and understocked today. Amazon has too large a lead in titles to be overtaken on e-books, and the book vendor has already embraced the iPad as a supplementary reading device, if you own a Kindle.
The death of laptops and netbooks is a ways off, too. But for the most innovative — and, this year, stubborn — creators of content, a 24-ounce device that cooks up writing and ads and flyers and even blog entries over WordPress, plus runs for a full business day and a half between charges, the point of replacement, when their laptop gets old is the inflection point. Maybe I can get an iPad instead, just try it out. If that point is after the end of this year, they’ll enjoy a rich shed of tools. In the meantime, this Little Keyboard That Could again proves that Apple’s minimum standards will press the limits of expected value.
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