One more thing...

Steve Jobs did not say ‘Oh, There is one more thing’ yesterday at Yerba Buena but this phrase is as familiar to the Apple audience as ‘I’ll be back’ is to Arnold Schwarzenegger movie buffs. Yerba Buena is where I launched an Oracle Collaboration Suite years ago which spectacularly failed to meet sufficient market requirements to be successful. People are wondering if the iPad is going to do well or do badly, and I think in order to answer the question you first have to ask a few qualifying questions. Do well -

• Against what competitor?
• In what market segment?
• At what price point?
• In what geography?
• Against what product plan and roadmap?

The trouble is, we do not have all of those things from Apples product requirements documentation. And therefore the picture is murky. The twitterverse is moaning today that the device does not somehow meet their lofty goals. If you load up your favourite twitter aggregator you’ll find by searching #iPad that there are muted sometimes disappointed reviews not helped by the early ‘leaks’ that turned out to be flawed high jinks by reasonably serious sources who turned out to be self publicists.

Twitterers are describing all the features and items they wished the device had which did not get demonstrated. It is precisely for this reason that I applaud the product management team at Apple who have I think created (for a second time, after the iPhone Edge) a perfect market entry product for a newly defined market segment of their own creation.

Competing with Apple magic?

So what are Apple competing with? In revealing some of the goals behind the iPad Steve Jobs talked about his competitors being mobile device companies, and especially Nokia, Samsung and Sony. His slide had the Apple logo smugly on top of all these others. It must be fun to be able to stand on ones competitors like that. Steve talked about these companies deliberately of course. They have slipped and fallen, accepting the mediocrity in product design and execution which causes product recalls due to buggy incomplete software, rotten batteries, poor functionality and user experiences born from interpretation of the spec rather than thought about the real person using the device.

To succeed in competing here in a newly formed market segment in between smart phones and laptop computers, a new device from Apple had not only to be better at some specific tasks than an iPhone or a MacBook. iPad had to blow everybody away. iPad had to point out that netbooks were just a crappy sum of the cheapest parts running clunky old XP SP3 or stripped down Linux. iPad had to move away from the tired and rotten failures that every single tablet computer running a pen based operating system in recent times has exhibited from compromised gestures or stylus based writing to retaining a keyboard and being able to be ‘like a laptop’.

An Apple product is always different. This much we know. But although they are erased from the marketing memory we remember that Apple have had some turkeys in the past particularly in this space (remember the Newton and its eWorld?). iPad is different, and it is better. From the demo iPad is better at browsing, better at email, better at photos, better at video, better at music, better at games, and better at reading books than any near competitor device. It also runs iWork so it is got a decent chance at being better at being a netbook too. Better than N900, better than PSP, better than Dell Mini 5, better than anything.

The fact is that iPad has a unique advantage - one denied to Palm with their ‘Pre’. It syncs over USB with iTunes on a Mac or a PC. It behaves exactly like an iPhone Edge, iPhone 3G, or 3Gs, or an iPod Touch. Everything works. All Photos, Music, TV Shows, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, Applications.

The EFF/Open Source brigade don’t like iPad DRM or the fact that the operating system is closed to terminal access and the like. No doubt geohot and his friends will find a way inside eventually and no doubt you’ll be able to find more fun things to do than Apple want but to criticise Apple for this is to miss the point. All those of you who want an operating system to do those things with have Mac OS X on the finest laptop, desktop and server hardware in the world. Knock yourselves out over there. Apple would love you to play. Join their programs and be part of fixing the kernel, or many of the open source components Apple rely upon. Rejoice in the fact that you can run vi, perl, csh, mailman, php, apache, mysql, etc etc etc and they are provided by and supported by Apple. But that is not what iPad is for. It is for work and play. For that set of tasks I am perfectly happy to trust Apple to deliver what I need. It is plenty good enough without my applying hacks to it. I know I am ceding some of my independence to do that, but you know what - the last three major hardware types I have bought, which are an Xserve, a MacBook Pro, and an iPhone are simply the best devices of their kind that I have ever had. Period. And I have had them all. You name it. So I think for Apple TV and iPad I am willing to trust Apple to give me what I need. And I am prepared to accept their conditions. And I am a tech geek - most consumers, the people Apple product management aim the device at - could not give a hoot about and do not understand or care about anything in this paragraph. That, is a mighty unique selling proposition to the market.

It truly does slot into my world, just as my somwhat clunky Apple TV does. I will put up with all the failings because it contains my content and I can re-sync it anytime I like if I lose it. My content happens to live on a MacBook Pro, but if I wanted to I could leave my content on a Windows PC. This kind of synchronised and symbiotic relationship has been tried before in many devices, notably the original Palm Pilot, and the Psion 3a and 5. But they did not have the richness of functionality to make it worthwhile in the way that the iPhone and iPad do.

Looking at the email client I notice that it has elements of the simplicity I love in mail.app on Mac OS X Leopard. This is no accident. Mail.app has had lots of user experience work, and went through something of a redesign a couple of releases or so ago on Mac OS X. It seems to me that the whole of Apple’s digital life strategy is being unfolded in a developing but wonderfully coherent product set that is emerging before our very eyes. Even Mac OS X Server plays iTunes - on an Xserve. Competitors must wonder where they have gone wrong with fits and starts in their strategies as they fail to comprehend the size of the task or the enormity and single (or at least like) minded nature of the vision and execution. Products like the Atom based netbooks look flimsy and Kindle moves from being a useful tool to a toy overnight. Sony’s book reader looks as anachronistic as the Clie Palm based PDA’s they produced. A whole generation of gadgets just became obsolete.

Spec and design

Of course, it has great design. What were we expecting? I have had an iPhone since UK D-day and have grown so used to the one button user experience that I forget how much that has freed me from the tyranny of the buttons on other devices. Have you ever tried to cut and paste on a Series 60 Symbian phone? For a one handed phone this is an IMPOSSIBLE task without using two hands AND it has a dedicated pencil button, which nobody but nobody know how to use! Have you ever had wifi issues on a Vaio - Windows thinks wifi is on, but shows an error and not until you push the clunky slider on the case and an LED lights up does it fire into life. These sorts of compromises would never be allowed by Apple. It is only natural that iPad should continue to force the design to be better by not allowing the engineering cop out of ‘we need a button to turn that on or off to be sure it works’.

The thin factor and lightness do not bother me particularly. I am sure once I have one I will appreciate them. But it *is* thinner and lighter than any netbook and has a much better display and better touch capabilities becuase it does not have a design point of cost reduction and vanilla operating system. It has a special Apple silicon chip, and can contain from 16-64GB of Flash storage. I imagine 128 is achievable since it is in the MacBook Air now.

It has a special operating system too, a variant of the iPhone OS which is as we know, based upon Mac OS X in some form. There is nothing vanilla or ‘plug compatible’ or ‘slot compatibible’ about it. I am glad thats so. Onboard there is no shortage of equipment too. With Bluetooth 2.1 , wifi based upon 802.11n, several Accelerometers, a compasss, speaker, microphone and 30 pin connector like an iPod complete with battery life of 10 hours one month standby. I did not get whether there was a headphone adapter. It might not be needed with Bluetooth, but I’d still like one being from the walkman generation.

It runs iPhone apps , either unmodified, pixel for pixel in the centre, or full screen with a zoom of 2x - this appears to work especially well because of OpenGL. The mighty thing about this is that is indicates to me that Apple had this plan all along. To make it so that existing applications run unmodified without a performance penalty is a truly awesome goal. Symbian did not achieve it with their ‘binary break’ which arguably destroyed them, Microsoft did not achieve it from MS-DOS to Windows, or from Windows 95/98/Me to Windows NT/XP/Vista/7. Their solutions here are woeful to the last.

Think about it. This means that iPhone is part of a plan, a roadmap, a vision, where software, devices, and people work in harmony with the cloud which provides them with games, books, music, news, TV shows and the Internet.

iWork or I play

But wait, it also has iWork with an entirely new user interface designed to work on an iPad. The fact that the iPad has Pages, Numbers and Keynote - with all the major and previously ‘advanced’ features of the desktop version shows that this device has ambition. The advanced techniques like picture masking shown in the demo are quite hard to do on a desktop equipped with PowerPoint. Schiller also showed build capabilities and transitions including magic moves which are pretty advanced Keynote functionality.

Briefly we saw that iPad has a number of different soft keyboards. There was a Numeric keyboard, Time and Date Keyboard, Text Keyboard and I suppose there may be others.

iWork is a signpost for other application developers to tell them ‘come over here and make great applications for iPad’. The other part of the signpost was a hint or price point reminder that business applications should be $9.99.

Communication

All models have WiFi. 3G Cellular Wireless Data access is an extra cost option and then you can have a 250MB data plan for $14.99, or unlimited for $29.99. No Contract. Pre Pay. iPad 3G models are unlocked. Use new GSM micro SIMs which will ‘just work’. The iPad does not seem to have a phone call capability, or at least one was not demonstrated, but why not, and indeed if not Apple just opened up VOIP applications to use the 3G network rather than just be WiFi so Skype et all should be pleased. Skype on an iPhone abroad at a conference has already saved me thousands of dollars in call fees.

iPad UK Pricing

No UK pricing yet but US is $499 16GB, $599 32GB, $699 64GB, +$130 for 3G

iPad Accessories

Apple showed the most wonderful accessories. Minimalist. Beautifully designed. The Dock also doubles as a Picture Frame running iPhoto slideshows while charging. That is genius. It is not that it is the worlds most expensive picture frame, but that function follows form - the dock is charging it, it does something not just useful but beautiful.

The keyboard dock, charges and lets you work with the applications. I liked it. Instinctively it felt like the design was almost perfect. Cant wait to try it.

Even the case was minimalist. It serves the purpose of being a case of course but it is also a work stand and a watching movies stand. Brilliant, simple and pretty. Look at the cases from other manufacturers and you see utilitarian low cost afterthoughts.

Different category?

That is the difference between Apple and the rest. Do Apple have what it takes to establish a third category of products - an awesome product that fits between a smartphone and a laptop computer? You bet they do. I would buy one now if I had to drive 100 miles to get it. I will probably buy a wifi one on day 1 because I won’t be able to wait 30 days for a 3G one so I will end up with 2. I wonder if that is part of the marketing plan.