The iPad continues to sell like hot cakes and there’s no doubt it’s beautiful, shiny and wonderful to behold although basically, as a colleague said to me over the weekend, it’s a toy. And it’s a very expensive toy indeed – in the UK the very very high end with 64GB of memory plus wi-fi and 3G costs £699.
And you can’t even print from it yet.
Of course, Apple really does know to make expensive shiny toys – a colleague at the Intel Developer Forum showed his off to us a couple of weeks ago. It’s shiny, it’s compelling, it’s only £129. It has the cachet of having the Apple logo on it. That means a lot. At a conference a couple of years back one of the delegates had a Dell machine with an Apple logo pasted onto the back. This wasn’t very compelling, it was very very sad.
This Apple logo means oh so much. It sets you aside from the hoi polloi – it shows that you have the money to lash out on something your next door neighbour might think twice about. It shows you are hip and it shows you are cool. And perhaps it also shows you are firmly in the talons of a marketing machine that has got you exactly where it wants you.
As usual, the rest – that is to say the rest of the industry – has been completely sideswiped by Apple and is playing catch up as fast as it can. And there is light at the end of the tunnel. The bill of materials (BOM) on an Apple iPad doesn’t match what people pay for it.
There are plenty of tablets coming along too – while it may be the case that they don’t have that expensive Apple logo on the back, quite a few of them will be pretty functional, run the Android OS, and have a heap of applications available that can match the very pretty ones we’ve seen on the iPad.
And you won’t be in a walled garden where Eve, or you if you’re Adam, are tempted by the devil in disguise into eating the forbidden fruit that is the knowledge of good and evil.
Android based tablets – even if they haven’t got an Apple logo on them – are likely to be as good, if not better than the iPad or the iPad to come – whatever that’s going to be called. Of course, you can't discount the genius of Apple's marketing and advertising team, but there is a future for Android. Google's no slouch at the marketing game, either.
The discerning aren’t necessarily gulled by that Apple logo and personally I think I’ll just wait for another shiny toy to come along that’s half or much less than half the cost of a shiny shiny iPad. I'd buy an iPad if it was £150 and was functional. An Android tablet seems a logical choice to me in the future. And no, it won't displace a fully fledged notebook PC although we think everyone has kind of wised up to netbooks by now. They just don't cut it, do they? And neither do the "App stores" for netbooks that Intel pushed like crazy at the last IDF.
Price is all dependent on how much your time is worth. If you enjoy fiddling around positioning a tiny pointer on the cramped display of your netbook with a tiny trackpad and then wasting 25% of your time re-arranging windows, you will have cost yourself the price of a top of the range iPad within two or three days, if you are billing at professional hourly rates.
I will NEVER go back and in fact, dread returning to my otherwise steller desktop machine, a 2.53Ghz Mac Mini connected to a super Dell U2711 27" monitor. It may be sexy, it may be quite fast, and it may be versatile, but the barrier between what is in my brain and getting that into the machine is 5 or 6 times as complex and fiddly as that using the iPad and some of it's apps.
Just wait for when Apple get iOS on their iMac Touch, then we will be talking! (Or a 15-17" iPad / MacBook Pro Touch hybrid or whatever they have cooking in Cupertino.)
The Table is currently a toy, but it's a toy with a great deal of potential for taking over the functions of:
1. The netbook
2. The cell-phone
3. MP3 player (bluetooth ear-phones, probably)
4. TV and video on the go
5. eReader (and eNewspapers)
6. Portable games systems
all in one neat little package.
I expect that once the performance improves (and the screen resolution) PC games will feature on it. I even think that the "Smart" home, if not your home entertainment system, will eventually be controlled from it.
At this moment, we're at a transition stage, and the majority of users will want something that costs substantially less than Apple is offering. Apple products are more fashion accessories, or their primary function is essentially tribal markings, which the more sensible amongst us can easily dispense with.
Well, actually, I'm using it as an X terminal so it's the remote client application, that's actually printing. And putting the graphical touchscreen display on my iPad.
I guess that's cheating. I'm doing the same thing from my iPhone.
But a few incidents have made me realise Apple really has its finger on the pulse of what people want.
Using my HTC Desire, held it to my ear, the pressure somehow managed to rearrange the widgets on my home screen. More than once. Infuriating. Couple with poor battery life and very laggy scrolling between screens. Can't happen on an iPhone.
Fixing a friend's desktop PC, bloody heatsink was broken. Cut my finger while putting it back. Not an issue with all-in-ones like the iMac.
On phone to an aunt whose PC had been infected with "Vista Security Center 2012" rendering entire computer useless. Ok, OS X definitely gets viruses too, but it's far more tightly controlled, simpler, and its better for it too.
Android is just total rubbish. It simply doesn't work very well. Apps and the entire OS with the bloated HTC Sense garbage is simply unstable and slow. Perhaps ICS will fix it. Once your phone's manufacturer actually bothers to update your handset, your phone provider may, or may not push it to the phone.
I bet by the time iOS 6 is out, some Android handsets will still be waiting for ICS.
I sold my HTC Desire to Fonebank and bought a 4S. Battery life may suck, but it's still better than the Desire. Otherwise, I can't fault it.
I used to defend Windows vehemently against graphic designers who were Mac-obsessed. I called them Mactards. No more.
Microsoft aren't thinking about what the user needs. The user doesn't need a registry. The user doesn't need a Control Panel with stupid categories that takes 5 clicks to open what you want (XP was far better than Vista or 7 in this regard). The user doesn't even need an OS that supports a billion different hardware configs with a vast library of drivers (any more, since this was once one of the best things about Windows, now a chain round its neck)
Apple has realised this. And that is why they are the second biggest company in the world now. It isn't just a distortion field, shiny logos and clever marketing. There's plenty of that, but there's genius as well.
To blindly deny this makes you as bad as the fools whose genitals dribble a bit when they see a picture of Jobs.
But you're right, tablets are toys. All tablets though, not just the ipad.