A week with a UK iPad
The long and the short of it is that I have an iPad – almost a month before it officially comes out here in the uk. After living with it for a few days, it’s inspiring quite a lot of thoughts on the subject of the fabled device.
The first thing that was obvious is that un-boxing it in the office was a little underwhelming, initially. That might sound a bit radical in light of it’s “magical” reputation, but it was just the context. Surrounded with iMacs and MacBooks humming with Adobe and HTML, it seemed a little lightweight. But after I got home and had a while to play with photos, video, email, and a few choice apps, it seemed much much more to my taste – simple, beautiful and obviously just the tip of a digital iceberg. Some wag on Twitter said it comes with a built in work-life balance; but that’s exactly it, it does feel happiest away form work.
The obvious bits: the screen is gorgeous (bright with a huge viewing angle). The battery is phenomenal (although charging is slow through iMac/MacBook). The touchscreen feels a level above in accuracy. It never gets warm, and is completely silent. The speaker is not too shabby. And it feels unbelievably fast, so much so that you wonder where all that weight, power and short battery time is wasted in a laptop.
Ergonomically, it has a few problems in this incarnation. The weight makes it tiring to hold in one hand, plus the shape of the casing makes it both slippery to hold and digs into your hands slightly. But you have to hold it most of the time because unlike a laptop screen, it isn’t pointing at you unless you hold it that way. Plus, the curved back means it rocks or spins when you try typing on it flat on a desk, and you never feel comfortable typing in your lap despite two handed typing being easy and fast. Most (not all) of these observations are true of any tablet.
The question of 3G vs wifi is a conundrum. My logical side says that I’ll probably hardly ever use it in a place where I don’t have a wifi password. At the same time, I took a ride on a train, and the ingrained experience of using an iPhone left me confused that this uber-iPhone was network dumb away from a router. I still don’t think I’ll ever be without wifi enough to justify another phone payment plan, but it’s a thought, having a possible 3g plan sign-up in reserve if I ever needed it. The GPS in the 3G model could clinch it for some.
For a geek like me, the “single window” interface is kind of liberating, but will always be frustrating until OS4 brings multitasking in November. I’m too used to doing a task – be it browsing, email or watching video – and monitoring something else at the same time such as a Twitter stream or an IM buddy list. Until I can jump in and out of other programs and have them update me at any time, the iPad is going to only fill a part of my needs.
The context of using this in the uk, especially before the official launch is interesting. Although the uk iPad itunes store hasn’t launched, you can easily download lots and lots of apps just by searching the apps store for “iPad”. But the omissions from that list are the apple iWork productivity suite, plus iBooks, and a few others (the BBC news app for one, the fault of BBC trust beaurocracy I suspect – pretty ironic as it’s available in the states). On top of that, no access to US specific apps like ABC tv cuts down on the magical media tablet feeling, and although reading the NYT is fascinating, it’s still not what I’m likely to look forward to every morning.
The iPad will be more essential to a UK audience when we get localised content, which I guess will come around the uk launch date. Give me a Guardian or Times app and I’ll be subscribing. Give me a BBC iPlayer app that allows me to temporarily download and watch shows offline and I’d be overjoyed. But the BBC trust is under commercial pressure to not provide content for free as it could skew the market for other content providers (even though that content is free on the BBC website – sigh), so an ipad iPlayer or news app from the BBC might take time, at least until 4OD or ITVplayer apps surface. Even the iphone iplayer website doesn’t work with iPad (browser sniffing snafu) so I just hope that points to the BBC wanting to do a decent job on an iPad web interface rather than the trust putting the kibosh on it.
In the meantime, you CAN watch UK tv through iPhone.tvcatchup.com – phew. And the Amazon kindle app does e-reader duties brilliantly.
I make websites for a living and the current iPad gives and takes away. Looking at websites in portrait on a beautiful screen is wonderful. It really does change my perception of a site. And building sites with the JavaScript touch gestures and webkit html5 features is really exciting. I’m trying to envision web projects as glossy magazines, not as conventional two column HTML – although it’s very early days and we’ve all got a lot to learn there. The lack of flash doesn’t bother me a huge amount as I understand why it’s missing (even if I don’t completely agree) although it does severely limit most peoples’ web experience – they’ll simply ask why they can’t see the beautiful website they see on their computer.
More problematic to me are the little things in the browser. Rich text editors don’t work – so you can log into wordpress but not click on the text area to write a blog. CSS Overflow:auto doesn’t give scrollable areas, a trick that is used all over the web. The viewport style of page rendering means fixed positioning isn’t possible (eg facebook’s chat bar). We kind of forgave the iPhone browser of these things as we still saw it as trying to make the right decisions about a user experience on a small screen, but on the iPad there’s no excuse, and it leads to a little bad experiences here and there that will just annoy people, and possibly turn them off using iPad. Here’s hoping for rapid updates to iPad safari.
The most positive aspect to the iPad is that the form & hardware is essentially right for a tablet. Everything else that niggles me can be fixed in software. UK tv, newspapers, multitasking, browser bugs, support for clip-on cameras for Skype calls, it could all just be an iTunes sync away.
As it is right now, it makes me look at my girlfriend’s white MacBook – heavy, dark screen, expensive, short battery life – and think how much better a replacement it is for her needs already. For me, I’m not sure I currently have that need for a third device between my iPhone and my MacBook, I find myself just carrying a heavier bag with all three. But I suspect that at the end of the year, this same device will have grown in capability so much that I’ll hardly even need to think about if I need it or not.
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