Chasing Apple
Yonhap News Agency (via Macrumors):
Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, said that Apple has presented new challenges for the South Korean company with a thinner mobile gadget that is priced the same as its predecessor.
“We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” Lee told Yonhap News Agency. “Apple made it very thin.”
Translation: off-the-shelf components just aren’t going to cut it anymore.
“The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over,” Lee added.
So you’re going to engineer it to be thinner and sell it cheaper? Good luck, Mr. Don-joo.
This brave new Apple is fast, agile and and above all, cool. Well, to be fair they’ve almost always been cool, but there’s something different this time. This isn’t like the iPod or the iPhone (or even the iMac for that matter.) The iPad marks a shift in the company. Before 2010 they had the luxury of waltzing into an existing market, picking a product, reinventing it and saying, “look how much better we made this.” With iPad, all that changed. Now that they’re creating markets Apple is finally forcing the competition to ask, “how are we going to keep up?” This is perhaps the first time a successful Apple product is in the lead and a generation beyond the also-rans. And they’re scaring the pants off of the competition.
I Want a Stupid 7-inch iPad
If you upped the pixel density on a 7-inch iPad (132ppi) to that of a non-Retina iPhone (163 ppi), you get almost the exact same number of pixels. Put it this way: You could double the number of pixels on the current iPad, and still comfortably fit them in a Retina-display, 7-inch iPad. The current iPad’s battery, which constitutes the bulk of it’s weight/size, also lasts much longer than I need. With a smaller display, the loss of any battery space would go unnoticed.
Put me in the camp that thinks a 7-inch iPad is a wonderful idea. But there’s not going to be a Retina Display version any time soon. That would mean the embedded hardware would be pushing nearly the same amount of pixels as the forthcoming 27-inch Cinema Display. It wasn’t all that long ago that we could run a 2048 x 1536 display without a powerhouse video card.
It’s more realistic to expect that the 10 and 7-inch iPads would share the same resolution (1024 x 768). The delta between screen sizes wouldn’t reduce tap targets too dramatically and the display would appear more dense and crisp. It would also have the added bonus of keeping developers from doing more somersaults to support yet another resolution standard, which all of us would appreciate greatly.
Some initial thoughts on the iPad
It really is that big of a deal.
The screen is wonderful. Bright, vivid and dense. The viewing angle is more than acceptable but you will notice that the falloff point where it becomes dim is only about 20°. Not really an issue after you start your first 2-player game of Orbital, Flight Control or Scrabble with a friend; you won’t really notice or care.
Typing is arguably the iPad’s weakest point. In portrait it’s surprisingly annoying to use. Landscape mode is much better, but you’ll find that you have to hunt for characters and inadvertently tap the spacebar quite a bit. It will probably get easier after you have a few long posts under your belt. The addition of enhanced selection controls does help a lot although it makes me want system-wide define even more.
For some reason apps that are compiled as universal or for iPad specifically have a sharper icon. Maybe this is some kind of hint from Apple to devs to get crackin’.
Non-iPad native apps are pretty bad looking but functional if you need them. I expect you’ll hear much bitching about this for the rest of the year until it is remedied.
You’ll also hear from tech writers that it’s a device without a segment in a strange cannibalizing market. That happens often when a new segment gets created. In a year from now when the major hardware manufacturers get to market with knock-offs and Microsoft announces Windows Touch Series 1 Child Edition those people will probably not have jobs.
Apple’s apps are, as expected, wonderful. I won’t describe them here because a) the walk-throughs that Apple posted a week ago are very good descriptions and b) you need to use them to understand further just how great they really are. 3rd party apps are, as expected, pretty good. The ideas behind them are almost always great but the execution behind them is usually lacking. It can be attributed to rushing to market in just about every case. That said, many of the 3rd party apps are well done. The NPR app is a revelation and Plants vs. Zombies on iPad shames the other platforms the game is deployed on.
Safari is a thing of wonder. It’s so fast and capable. It’s so good that it made me think twice about the need for a native Tumblr iPad app (for reading anyway). If you doubt me go to the Apple Store and load your Dashboard on a demo unit. Other sites that are typically terrible on the iPhone version of Safari shine. Facebook. eBay. Basecamp. This is not the same Safari that you get on iPhone.
So what isn’t to like? I think the biggest oversight might be that there are no user profiles. This is not an iPod. It is meant to be personal, but at a minimum of $500 per unit I don’t think you’ll find too many households that pick up one iPad per family member, but each family member will want to do different things with it. Dad might want to check email but that doesn’t mean he wants little Sally bulk deleting messages to check out the animation (which is super-cool, by the way). Different music and photos are going to be an issue too. For an OS built on separate home folders it seems a rather obvious core feature to leave out. And then there’s always multitasking. I hate to even bring it up, but this device needs it very badly. To be clear, I don’t even really care about traditional multitasking. What I actually care about is backgrounding. A daemon process that lives in the internals and allows for the audio stream to keep playing, the file to keep downloading, the timer to keep firing or the posts to keep fetching. Yes, it gets heavy after holding it in the air, but you won’t be doing much of that. You’ll find a comfortable way to place it so that it is almost always resting.
Outside of those few things I’m extremely happy with what Apple has delivered here. Sure, everybody wants video iChat but that isn’t a necessity. Not this cycle anyway.
Lastly, I strongly encourage you to go use one in the store. Even if you think it’s dumb. Because you’re looking at the future of personal computing, even if you don’t buy this one from Apple and you buy the knock-off from HP and Microsoft in 2 years.
I’m sure I’ll have more impressions in the coming weeks but if you have any specific questions about the iPad feel free to ask.
Finally had to break down and mock up an iPad. Unfortunately I had to print it in black and white because I was out of color ink (of course).
But that’s ok. I needed to get a better sense of the size and screen dimensions. This is definitely doing the trick.
