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.
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