Tag Archives: ipad

Kindle Fire

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In 2009 I wrote that the Kindle experience was terrible and that they needed something better, in color and awesome.  Now, two years later the Kindle Fire could be just that device.

I was quoted in the Boston Herald yesterday but I think the new pricing announced really underscores the importance of this device.  At $199 this isn’t just a tablet competitor this is a low cost competitor from a company that has the content stack to make it profitable.

Amazon has books, music, videos and apps. There’s only one other company with a similar content stack and it’s not Google, Microsoft or Facebook.

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Visual TrackPad of tomorrow

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What Apple Should have released for a desktop trackpad

Apple released a product that was decidedly un-magical when it released the Magic Trackpad. Despite the use of the word “Magic” the device was really just a big trackpad with nothing to amaze or delight the end-user.  The battery charger that comes with it was more impressive.

The true trackpad of tomorrow would have the following characteristics:

  • Control the computer pointer with touch gestures (duh)
  • Provide application  specific touch interface enhancements
  • Web browser specific controls at your fingertips
  • Formatting tools from your word processor at your fingertips
  • Crop and resize photos with your fingers visually.
  • When typing a number show a calculator keypad
  • Many of the interface enhancments that are taking place on the iPad could be transposed to desktop apps.

A huge efficiency is in minimizing the number of times your hand has to move from the keyboard to the mouse and back. This is why there are so many keyboard shortcuts for things that can be done with a mouse. The mouse/trackpad can evolve to present visual ways to process input in a way that would be more efficient then either the keyboard or a mouse.

There’s an opportunity to create a true visual and magical input device that combines the best aspects of a trackpad the iPad and the mouse.

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9 Things I didn’t know about the iPad

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  1. The keyboard design isn’t as slick as the iPhone keyboard design
     It’s not quite a MacBook keyboard layout and it’s not an iPhone keyboard layout either. Commit actions like, done, go, search aren’t colored like on the iPhone. The dashes, dots, commas are hard to distinguish. On the iPhone a typewriter like key pops out so you can visually confirm that you hit the right key. On the iPad there is no feature to deal with occlusion.
  2. How you hold the device really alters the user experience and how apps should be designed.
     On the iPhone the design is done in such a way to accommodate the way you hold the device.  For example in mobile Safari and in email the command buttons are along the bottom of the screen. This puts many buttons in thumbs reach. On the iPad key buttons in both email and Safari are across the top. This means that if you’re holding the device along the bottom you can’t reach many of the buttons without moving your hands. Since the home button tends to be along the bottom there’s no comfortable rest-state.
  3. About my laptop
    It starts out with just email and some web-browsing but pretty soon you realize that most of the things you do can be done on an iPad. Not all, and this gap is closing. In particular heavy typing tasks (blogging for me) and heavy editing, especially visual and graphics editing is still better with a laptop. That being said I am much happier bringing a light iPad to a meeting then a heavy laptop.
  4. You don’t use this device like a giant iPod.
    I’ve never read a book or a magazine before on either my laptop or iPod.  I’ve never played a four person multi-touch game on either of these devices.  The experience is different and fun. In a new way.  Magazines and books are key here. This is the future of digital content.
  5. Certain people could use this as a replacement computer but I can’t.
    Email and web browsing without compromise. (Well maybe the Flash thing) Other then that you have a pretty nice device for doing the core things my mom uses her computer to do.  For technical users the iPad doesn’t do enough to replace their laptop.
  6. Screen orientation is flipping me out
    When you hold the screen in vertical orientation you get 4 icons across and 5 icons down. When you flip the screen you get 5 across and 4 down. The annoying part is that the icons re-positions so you can’t use spacial memory to find an icon.  Was that icon on the top right? Ohh, sorry now it’s in the middle left.
  7. The web is not ready for the iPad (yet).
    There are still plenty of sites with embedded video/flash and when I hit these sites I am likely to move on. I almost never stop what I’m doing to go grab my laptop.  As the iPad sails past the 1M mark the tech-savvy sites will transition over to H264 video. The issue is primarily video although other flash goodness will still be missing.
    Flash sucks but HTML5 is worse then Flash on many things, more on that in another post.
     Subscribe to this blog to hear more on that.
  8. The battery lasts a freakishly long time
    It’s nothing like a Kindle but compared to other bright-screen electronics. Wow. That’s all I have to say about that.
  9. A different user experience is fundamental to touch computing
    I remember a program manager from Microsoft talking about the Tablet PC back in 2000. He said, in the history of computing there has never been a product category that has failed as often as tablet based computing. From the Alan Kay to the Apple Newton and even Windows for Pen Computing.  The history books are filled with these ‘slate’ computers that have failed. He then went on to explain how the Tablet PC would be different because it focused on the input experience.

    The truth is that the tablet/slate experiences of the past were not that different. It was Windows with a great input editor. It’s too early to tell if the iPad will succeed or fail but the iPad user experience is so different in a fundamental way that it will change how people interact with computers.

    How do I know? My two year old is now reached out and trying to scroll the screen on my laptop. If that’s not the future I don’t know what is.

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    Why the iPad will succeed and fail

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    Why it will succeed

    • The iPad will crush the Kindle market.  It’s cooler, slicker, has a color screen and will have thousands of apps at lau nch. While people can read books and newspapers the bulk of the interesting content is on the web and the web is much better on the iPad then the Kindle.
    • The iPad will crush netbooks.  It’s a more portable experience and it’s touch enabled. The keyboard is close to full size. The apps are designed to be portable unlike a netbook where you’re trying to use full size apps on a 1/2 size screen.  Netbooks are underpowered from a performance standpoint to run typical productivity apps (Office.)
    • The computer has traditionally been in the office or the den. This is a move into the living room. If the phone is a communication device and a laptop is for creating content then the iPad is for consuming it and that hasn’t existed before.

    Why it is doomed to fail

    • The potential owners of the iPad already have an iPhone and a laptop. While some of the scenarios could be better on such a device they are not sufficiently better and the limitations of the platform out-weigh the advantages.
    • If the device is a browsing device then the browser makes a huge difference. Because of the closed nature of the iPad we can’t expect to see Chrome, Firefox or Opera on the iPad.  Last I checked Safari only had a minority browser share. Add the lack of flash to the equation and a lot of sites will have you reaching for a laptop.
    • The iPhone was a success because when the device was released all the existing phones were terrible. The iPhone was a replacement device to something that was flawed. With the iPad it’s not a replacement device. It’s a supplemental device. The problem it’s solving is less of a pain point.
    • Basic multi-tasking is obvious and needed on a larger device (music+browsing) or (homework + calculator.) While a single app makes for a simpler experience there’s no reason that I can’t be productive while other apps are loading data, syncing, downloading or doing other background tasks.

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