The Experience is the Brand

I wasn’t impressed by the first gen iPhone, either.

When the first generation iPhone was introduced, my first thought was, “what do you mean, no 3g?” At the time, I’d already had a 3G smart-phone for about a year, and the lack of a speedy always-on connection was a baffling omission.

So, too, is my reaction to the iPad, which really does look like nothing more than an over-sized iPhone (sans camera, and phone, that is.) But the reality of how Apple develops and launches devices should make clear that the first generation of anything may not live up to the hype, but almost always catches up.

To wit:

• The first generation iPhone, in addition to lacking 3G, had no 3rd-party applications (just the dozen or so that Apple provided.)
• The first generation iPod had a 4-shades-of-grey screen, a mechanical and a UI that made Pong look like the sequel to Avatar.
• The first generation iMac had a 15″ CRT, and came in a teal-colored case.
• The first generation Mac Portable would fail today’s maximum carry-on luggage restrictions.

The fact is that, for the most part, Apple gets the concept right, even if the execution takes some refinement before it hits its stride. (More often than not, anyway. The Newton was a notable exception, though one could argue that Apple merely took it off the market for a couple of decades while they refined their execution into the iPad of today.)

Devices – especially mobile ones – are always the end product of a number of design trade-offs. Battery life, form-factor, weight, etc. – these things add up to make the difference between a truly revolutionary device, and another also-ran.

There is one seemingly obvious piece of hardware missing from the iPad, and that is a camera. But the omission actually makes sense. This is not a device that needs or would benefit from a forward-facing camera; you are not going to hold the thing up to someone and take a picture, and there are other devices that would work quite a bit better and always will (because of their pocket-friendly size.)

Nor are you going to use a user-facing camera to do video iChat. People, let’s face it: if we preferred to talk with our fellow humans face-to-face, we wouldn’t be sending IMs and text messages to colleagues in the next cubicle. (And I know for a fact that I am not the only person in the world who has emailed a link to his spouse, who also happens to be sitting on the same couch with her laptop.) Besides, adding a video camera for video chat to a handheld tablet means that the camera will need image stabilization, that is unless you everyone you’re chatting with to think you’re permanently stuck in a Blair Witch remake.

In the end, as with most computing platforms, the hardware is only half the story. Truth be told, there is probably a very large niche for the iPad: as a browser, an image and media viewing/light-editing platform, book reader, multimedia content consumption device – these things make sense, and the existing suite of options out there all fail in one form or another: too heavy, too hot, too clumsy, too colorless, what-have-you.

But what’s missing from the story so far is the compelling apps: scaling iPhone apps up to a larger screen is certainly nice; I’ve developed enough concepts myself to know that more screen real estate is going to make some apps easier to use, and more compelling. But this doesn’t justify the purchase of a whole separate platform for most people. (Yes, apps I’ve already purchased on my iPhone will work on my iPad. But will the app-specific data transfer? Will it sync? Will all those app developers need to create new syncing services?)

What’s missing – what will make this device an absolute game-changer – is a series of apps for creative professionals and the business class. Yes, I can use iWork. What about Adobe CS? iMovie? Dreamweaver? Garage Band? iPad-ready (and optimized) versions of these apps will turn a souped-up iPhone with a honking-huge screen into something truly extraordinary: a truly mobile computing platform for consuming AND creating content.

After all, it’s the intersection of these two elements – creative consumption – that will propel widespread iPad adoption.

Three issues with all the Apple tablet predictions

Besides the obvious – that I will want one – I have a few thoughts about the tablet Apple will supposedly unveil tomorrow. There are three areas which I think deserve some attention:

The Case
An enlarged iPhone-like tablet seems troubling. The case and screen of the iPhone seem unlikely to scale well to three or four times their current size, the end result of which would be a device which seems somewhat brittle. iPhone screens seems to crack like a pile of dry leaves, so increasing the surface area by two orders of magnitude seems a recipe for continual breakage.

The Weight
Again, simply scaling the iPhone up larger isn’t going to work – especially if the display uses the same optical glass and the case materials are similar. Assuming that the intent is to provide a device which, at least in some instances, can be held like a paperback book or magazine, the device has to be lighter per square inch than the iPhone – and significantly so.

It’s simply a matter of ergonomics: while you cradle an iPhone in your palm with your fingers and palm wrapped around the four edges, the weight of the device is distributed through your wrist and into your forearm. With a magazine-sized tablet, you can’t wrap your hands around it that way – you have to pinch the device with four fingers on the back, and your thumb on the front. While this is easy enough to do for extended periods with a magazine weighing less than an ounce, just try it with a tablet weighing a pound or more. Which brings us to the third quandry:

The Input “Device”
There are a number of intriguing possibilities, but one thing is nearly certain: your hands are involved. Voice control is clever, but pointless: in the best case scenario, complete and instant voice recognition still leaves you with a low-bandwidth control channel which can’t be used very well in public. (Most people can only say one thing at a time.) And some sort of facial recognition system is very futuristic sounding, but baffling: exactly what facial gesture does one make to “check email” or “empty the trash” or “redo last filter”?

And for anyone who wants to suggest some sort of eye-tracking technology, let me put that one to rest: even the best systems (my company owns one) require calibration each time you sit down in front of it, and the triangulation assumes that the screen itself remains fairly stationary.

OK, so you’re hands are involved. There are a couple of issues:

If you’re holding the tablet in landscape mode, with one hand on either side, then the UI controls need to be arrayed up and down each side. Ditto in portrait mode:

That’s all well and good, but while you’re holding the tablet with both hands, what are you using to control the applications?

The other possibility is that you hold it with one hand, and interact with the other. There are problems with this, too: single-handed interaction with a multi-touch display limits the kinds of applications you can have, and each tap with your free hand increases the fatigue on the other hand holding the device up.

So what about putting the device on a surface? Well, this frees up your hands, which is great: fully interactive display, multi-touch, virtual keyboard – all of these things become feasible and reasonable. But there’s another problem – with the device on a flat surface, you’d have to be hovering above it directly in order to have a good, clean view of the screen. At an angle (even assuming you don’t lose brightness and contrast) the perspective is going to make interacting with any application rather frustrating.

So, what’s the solution?

One possibility is the integration of a laser-based projected keyboard, and an integrated stand for propping the screen up on a surface. The former is already widely available, and the latter could be accomplished with with a built-in “wing” that worked much like the flap on the back of a picture frame backing, or as an optional wrap-around case.

It will be interesting to see what solution Apple chooses.