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iPad Thoughts
Feb. 1st, 2010 08:52 pmSo we've had the best part of a week to think about the iPad. After an initial flurry of rather polarised comment which ran on rather predictable lines ("it's rubbish!" "it's wonderful!" "it doesn’t do X!" "good! it doesn't need to!") pretty much everyone has realised that until we actually get hold of iPads to play with it's going to be very hard to judge how useful and attractive the thing is, or whether the selling points Jobs and co have selected will be the right ones.
One aspect that's not very easy to judge just from pictures is actual physical size. So, to satisfy my own curiosity I printed out some carefully scaled pictures of an iPad (front and back – I am a completist!) and found a suitably-sized book to wrap them around, giving me a full-size, although about one-third weight, iPad mockup.
First thoughts – it's bigger than you might think, which is both good and bad. It's noticeably smaller than an A4 pad, but not dramatically so; it's a good bit bigger, albeit rather thinner, than even a large-format paperback. This may limit its portability – I can't imagine any realistic way the iPad will be 'pocketable' – but it could well make for a much more effective e-book experience. Even so, the virtual keyboard would still be a bit poky for my hands, and without some form of tactile feedback I still think typing would be cumbersome. Yes, in terms of size and typing sensation, Steve Jobs has reinvented the ZX-81!
I also wonder how the weight will pan out. My faux-iPad is not featherweight, and the real thing will be much heavier (700g). Casual hand-holding of this is going to do wonders for your forearm strength. I can certainly see the attraction of Apple's folding case that converts into an angled stand; did this come out of early usability testing, I wonder?
As to whether anyone would want such a device, I can actually see that I might find a use for it. I am not personally big on the concept of having a laptop as my primary computer, and prefer to have a nice powerful desktop machine with plenty of screen real estate, hard drive and processor power. When my G5 Powermac comes to the end of its life (and it's already more than four years old) I will probably replace it with a top-end iMac. As such, I'm not sure I want a full-featured laptop too, even a cut-down one like the Air. I don't do enough on-the-road typing to make it worthwhile. But having the ability to review and make minor edits to documents via a reasonable-size screen is attractive.
For me though, the killer iPad app would be a reasonably well-featured photo processing package, capable of handling RAW files and applying basic image workflow tasks. Combined with the digicam interface kit Apple has already announced this would allow me to use the iPad as a combined photo archive unit, image viewer, initial image editor and uploader to Flickr and similar. Something like that, at a fraction the size and weight of a laptop, would almost be worth buying on its own; add in all the other super-iPhone (minus phone) functionality and it would make the iPad a no-brainer for me. Canon, if you aren’t working on an iPad lightweight version of Digital Photo Professional, start now.
One aspect that's not very easy to judge just from pictures is actual physical size. So, to satisfy my own curiosity I printed out some carefully scaled pictures of an iPad (front and back – I am a completist!) and found a suitably-sized book to wrap them around, giving me a full-size, although about one-third weight, iPad mockup.
First thoughts – it's bigger than you might think, which is both good and bad. It's noticeably smaller than an A4 pad, but not dramatically so; it's a good bit bigger, albeit rather thinner, than even a large-format paperback. This may limit its portability – I can't imagine any realistic way the iPad will be 'pocketable' – but it could well make for a much more effective e-book experience. Even so, the virtual keyboard would still be a bit poky for my hands, and without some form of tactile feedback I still think typing would be cumbersome. Yes, in terms of size and typing sensation, Steve Jobs has reinvented the ZX-81!
I also wonder how the weight will pan out. My faux-iPad is not featherweight, and the real thing will be much heavier (700g). Casual hand-holding of this is going to do wonders for your forearm strength. I can certainly see the attraction of Apple's folding case that converts into an angled stand; did this come out of early usability testing, I wonder?
As to whether anyone would want such a device, I can actually see that I might find a use for it. I am not personally big on the concept of having a laptop as my primary computer, and prefer to have a nice powerful desktop machine with plenty of screen real estate, hard drive and processor power. When my G5 Powermac comes to the end of its life (and it's already more than four years old) I will probably replace it with a top-end iMac. As such, I'm not sure I want a full-featured laptop too, even a cut-down one like the Air. I don't do enough on-the-road typing to make it worthwhile. But having the ability to review and make minor edits to documents via a reasonable-size screen is attractive.
For me though, the killer iPad app would be a reasonably well-featured photo processing package, capable of handling RAW files and applying basic image workflow tasks. Combined with the digicam interface kit Apple has already announced this would allow me to use the iPad as a combined photo archive unit, image viewer, initial image editor and uploader to Flickr and similar. Something like that, at a fraction the size and weight of a laptop, would almost be worth buying on its own; add in all the other super-iPhone (minus phone) functionality and it would make the iPad a no-brainer for me. Canon, if you aren’t working on an iPad lightweight version of Digital Photo Professional, start now.
