mikemchargue.com

As you can see, my iPad is here.  Thoughts, impressions and comparisons to follow.  In the meantime, I shoot an album to give perspective versus other similar gadgets.

You can view the full gallery here.

It’s nearly impossible to visit a website today that offers news or user posting today without running across Apple’s new iPad.  Mashable’s coverage shows Twitter mentions at truly obscene levels.  Love it or hate it, you can’t deny the impact the device has already had.  I believe the praise, and the criticism, are well deserved.

I’m a serial early-adopter.  I own most of the devices the iPad seeks to supplant.  Here’s my early assessment of the iPad and it’s role in the market.

iPad the eBook

I’m a Kindle user.  I had the first Kindle, and I have a Kindle 2.  I’ve watched the Nook, the Skiff and the Que with great interest.  I’m also an avid reader.  I read several books a month, subscribe to multiple magazines.  I read my news online, as I find the latency of newspaper bothersome and the format cumbersome.  The Kindle has been a dream for book reading.  I have a large library of new material available via the Kindle store anywhere there’s 3G coverage.  The e-Ink display is quite easy on the eyes for multi-hour reading sessions, largely thanks to its reflexive nature (there is no backlight–as you see with the printed page).

It seems to me that the iPad may reverse this equation.  The LED backlight supporting the IPS LCD display means the announced iBooks app renders books far more artfully than the Kindle, and in color.  The ePub format offers native support for GIF, JPEG and PNG images.  I’m concerned that the bright screen may ultimately fatigue the eyes over continuous hours of viewing.  You don’t state at your phone or computer screen for as long or as intently as you do a book in most cases.  Likewise, LCD screens aren’t all the readable in sunlight, and I see little support that the iPad screen is any different.  The iBooks app has a much smaller library than the Kindle as well, although I find this mitigated to a large degree by the availability of a Kindle app for the iPhone.  iPhone apps, of course, work on the iPad.

The Kindle clearly wins on battery life.  Frequent travelers know that it’s often trying to get charge time while on the go.

Of course, books are not the only content available on the Kindle.  You can get magazines and newspaper subscriptions as well.  They are easy to purchase and are automatically delivered to the Kindle.  Unfortunately, the magazine experience is poor on the Kindle.  Glossy, 4 color printing really defines what it is to read a magazine.  Rich photographs and illustrations mix sublimely with the copy.  For content that isn’t time sensitive, like product reviews and deep analysis of current events, the magazine offers a superior experience to not only the Kindle, but indeed to the web.

Consider the newspaper instead.  Color is less of an issue, but the power of a newspaper is not the quality of its printing.  Here the format is the king.  The large size of a newspaper makes it easy to scan a large, diverse body of information quickly, and then focus on content you want to review in depth with a couple of folds.  The very linear orientation of the Kindle UI works against this model–it’s easiest to read something from start to finish.  Scanning is painful thanks to e-Ink’s glacial refresh rate.

I see real potential for the iPad to revolutionize not only book publishing, but newspaper and magazine as well.  The iPad addresses both limitations: the screen is in brilliant color, and the Touch UI makes scanning a breeze.  Like the Kindle (and unlike computers) the iPad is a comfortable format for reading almost anywhere.

The New York Times app demoed today shows the promise here, but I think the app model is wrong.  Apps are too hard to develop, and I’d rather buy newspapers and magazines along side my books.  Apple needs to build an extensible format like ePub, but with greater support for interaction and rich media.  Heck, it could be HTML in WebKit for all I care, just make it easy for old media companies to make beautiful content for the device, but give them the ability to serve video and interactive elements alongside it.  People will pay for it in a way they will not pay for something seen in Safari.

iPad the Netbook/Mobile Internet Device

The computer and consumer electronics industries are focused on filling the gap that exists between the smartphone and the notebook computer.  We’ve seen netbooks running Windows and Linux.  We’ve seen netbooks oriented toward cloud computing with no local storage.  We’ve seen tablets and Mobile Internet Devices.  None have made the splash that the iPad did today.

Steve Jobs was very direct today that Apple believes the iPad is the right approach to a device and platform that fits that space.  As a rabid capitalist, I believe there’s plenty of room in the market for multiple approaches, and that the competition is good for the competitors and consumers.  The iPad does draw a strong philosophical line in the sand.

The iPad, like the iPhone, is geared toward simplicity and elegance over flexibility.  The technologically savvy cry against the lack of Flash, multitasking or ports.  In the netbook space, many people debate the merits of local vs. cloud based storage.  On a netbook, you choose what your OS is, and you can install whatever apps from whatever source you please.

On the iPad, you don’t have to know what Flash, multitasking, ports, Operating Systems or cloud based storage is.  You just use the device.  There’s no visible file system.  No obvious distinction is made between local and cloud storage.  Apps only install via the App Store.  This offers great protection from malware, but much less flexibility for developers.

The inclusion of iWork shows Apple is making the iPad a content creation platform, instead of a pure content consumption platform.  I’ll be interested to see if Microsoft Office comes to the iPad, and how Mac/PC application devs approach this development.

iPad the future of computing

It’s clear that Apple sees the iPhone/iPad model as the future of computing, and is actively migrating their product family toward it.  The iPod is evolving via the iPod Touch and the iPad pushes the iPhone model much farther into “computer” territory.  I wonder if Apple sees PCs and Macs as HAM Radios in 20 years: tools for a specific, passionate niche.

With the iPhone and iPad, you touch information.  There is less abstraction than we see with the keyboard and mouse, although Apple’s support of keyboard on the iPad shows they understand the efficiency of that device.  I hope Apple is busily pushing this model toward the Mac and OS X.  While touch-only is a poor model for displays on desktops and notebooks, the compromise offered via multi-touch trackpads and mice isn’t enough.  Why can’t we use a mouse and direct touch?

Also, when does the iPad get a camera?

;)

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked in conversation is "What's next?" This is certainly a fair question as my job description contains the words "new media." The engineer in me always wants to say no one knows and offer a list of disclaimers. Even those industry moguls and mad scientists working for startups generally can't get a clear picture of what the market will reallydo with their shiny new toy. For this post however, I will throw caution to the wind and reveal to you the trends I see emerging.

We're all experiencing the transformative effects of the much-hyped social media technologies. The decentralization and democratization of human communication warrants the discussion volume we see–after all, any voice in the crowd can now address millions of people. The effects on human communication, and even human consciousness, from things like Facebook and Twitter will reshape much of western civilization. Even without the development of new technology, or even iterations of our current platforms the effects of extended mind theory are surfacing. There's no doubt in my mind that Google has become a vast, shared extended mind for many people. As more and more people adopt Facebook, Twitter and other tools, our extended mind may begin to become even more collaborative--and the emergence of a primitive collective consciousness will follow. In fact, I believe it already has--but that is the topic of another post for another day. The fact is, new technologies are emerging.

One of the most exciting emergent tools is geo metadata. Thanks to the increasing amount of devices that incorporate both digital logic and GPS receivers, applications are emerging that take advantage of location to offer compelling services. Urbanspoon and Yelp on the iPhone are great examples. They show you restaurants and/or other local vendors along with reviews of those locations by people who have been there. Extending this model further leads to social networks build around location like Loopt and Google Latitude. These networks let you see where your friends are in relation to you and what they are doing. None of these services offer the user base or depth of functionality of Facebook, nor the quirky charm of Twitters communal stream of consciousness but they are great sings of what's to come.

As GPS hardware becomes ubiquitous, it will make sense for Facebook (or whoever the leader in social networking may be) to add geo metadata to their platform. Imagine if you could sort the Facebook Newsfeed by proximity to you instead of time, or if you could view your friends photos by location instead of by who's in them. The technology to do this exists today. All we need are more people accessing social networks from mobile devices with GPS to make this critical mass technology.

The addition of geo metadata sets the stage for the really amazing stuff--augmented reality. Augmented reality is a modern cousin to virtual reality of old. Simply stated, augmented reality is the ability to accurately place computer generated images in 3D space over live video. Most of the accessible iterations of augmented reality so far have been impressive marketing initiatives. My favorite is a site that will turn you into a Transformer if you have a web cam. It's completely useless but fun.

Much more useful, exciting and transformative is augmented reality applied to mobile devices. The easiest way to show the potential here is to share a video of an app already released.

In this demo, the iPhone becomes a veiw port to a hidden world.  It takes data and turns it into a virtual, physical world invisible to the naked eye.  Now imagine if the data set accessed by this application was not subway stops, but instead the location of your friends.  Or, your friends status updates.  Or, the sushi restaurants nearest to you, along with reviews made by your friends (or strangers if you choose).  What if images taken by your friends appeared in the locations they were taken?

The technology exists.  All of it.  Once these data sets connect and become accessible, books like Daemon and Snow Crash are less science fiction and more social commentary.

I can't wait.

I'm number 4 in line at my local AT&T store. That was a feat easily accomplished because my dad waited in line for me starting at 6 PM yesterday. Tallahassee is not a big town, so the fact that there's already a good-sized line at one of out three stores tells me this launch is going to be big.

I'll post updates through the day.