iPad: What’s It to You?

2010-04-09

by Richard White

I’ve had my iPad for just about 5 days now, which means I’ve started to figure out a little bit about what it means to me.

The biggest question most people have, before they’ve used it anyway, is: “What is this? Is it just a big iPod Touch?” I think one of the really cool things about this new device—and I think it’s fair to call it “new”; like most Apple products, it’s not technically a new device, but Apple has gone and made this thing so well that it IS new, for all intents and purposes—is that it can be different things for different people.

• It’s a big iPod Touch
  It plays games and movies like nobody’s business. Two days ago, I made the mistake of leaving it out on my desk at school. When I returned an hour later and started it up, the game “Plants and Zombies” started up, with a “Welcome back, Matthew” opening screen. “Uh, I hope you don’t mind, Mr. White—I didn’t want to mess up your game, so I made my own game account on their,” explained Matthew, a little embarrassed.
• It’s a small computer / netbook killer
  Netbooks, for some people, have been the ideal device for light-duty computing: answering email, surfing the web, working on cloud-based documents, or doing some light word processing. The iPad does at least the first three really, really well. And it’s a super-sexy chick magnet, so… that’s worth the price of admission right there.

  

• It’s a book reading Kindle Killer
  It’s true, the plastic, gray-scale Kindle is doomed. The iPad’s ability to display epub-format books beats the competition all up and down the block. Colors are crisp, the page turn motion is realistic (if that kind of thing is important to you), and their bookshelf metaphor (ripped off from Delicious Monster’s amazing Delicious Library) is stunning. It beats the heck out of sitting in bed reading the dishwater-gray Kindle with a freaking reading light clipped to the screen.
• It’s a Media Consumption Device
  Music, books, and especially movies are SO good on this. How good? Last night I sat on the couch with my girlfriend and her son watching “WarGames” on this machine, streaming over the wireless via Netflix. The giant wall-mounted flat screen hooked up to DirectTV? Yeah, it didn’t even get turned on…
• It’s the Next Big Thing
  Awesome 10-hour battery life, a cool running processor, blazing fast graphics, bright screen, razor-sharp touch interface… It all screams “I am the future!” At least if you’re into consuming media.

I’m not that guy, though—I’m not the media consumption guy. I don’t typically play games on my computer, except for the World of Warcraft years… but there’s no app for that on the iPad. I don’t usually watch movies on my computer. I do record movies on my camera and edit them on my laptop… but you can’t do that on the iPad. I surf a little on the web, but I also create content for the web… and you can’t easily do that on the iPad. I edit Word documents, and you can’t do that in any serious way on the iPad. I do computer-based presentations (PowerPoint/Keynote) for my students… and the iPad has only limited functionality in that area.

I talk a lot about workflow, so what I’m saying is this: I like the iPad in a lot of ways, but it’s not as useful to me for my own workflow.

Not yet. I’m willing to wait a bit.

In the meantime, I’m not the only guy who’s trying to figure out if this is “my thing.”