Teething problems with bugs and apps can't overshadow the beauty of the iPad. Some day soon we'll even work out what it's for, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
LIKE THOUSANDS of others in the US last week, I found myself stumbling into my local Apple Store, these temples to one man’s vision of chic, sleek and somewhat overpriced consumer technology.
There I joined the crowds as they tapped and jiggled the silver and black tablets, delivered like Moses by Saint Steve Jobs.
The iPad, as the sacred mini-teatray is called, has been billed as the computing device, finally, for “the rest of us”: a sealed, portable super book that is as easy to use as an iPhone but with the high-res screen and power of a full computer.
An elderly couple next to me toyed with a demo model at the store, deciding, as I was, whether to take the plunge. The grandad was trying to take the almost A4-sized satellite map of San Francisco that glowed from the iPad screen and view it sideways. He turned the iPad on its side. The iPad, ever helpful, reoriented its screen to keep the map facing up. “It is very beautiful,” said his spouse as, confused, he rotated it faster and faster, until he looked like a rally driver spinning his wheel around a hairpin. “But really, what would we do with it?”
That, of course, is the question. With Apple’s other stylish hits – its laptops, its iPods, its iPhones – you pretty much knew what they were from the moment you picked them up. Word-processing and spreadsheets; listening to your music collection; calling your friends. Once you’d justified the Apple price tag with that eminently practical excuse, you could kick back and enjoy more decadent, bonus fripperies: playing games and watching movies, downloading farting apps for a euro, flicking at satellite Google maps.
But what, exactly, is an iPad for? What’s the excuse for paying $500 (€370) for this latest invention? It looks, and works, like an iPhone blown up to four times the width and thrice the height – but it doesn’t make calls (as a four-year-old chided me when I proudly waved my new iPad in front of her, “Why do you have a giant phone that doesn’t even fit in your pocket?”).
It has a big screen, a fast browser and a mail program. You can download a $10 version of Apple’s Macintosh spreadsheet and word-processing apps to use on it, just like a laptop – but it doesn’t have a proper keyboard or a hard drive or USB ports to plug in a printer. It will play music like an iPod – but to carry it around while jogging, you’d need a sporran.
I still walked out of the store with one. This is what first-adopters, as we’re called, do. We adopt these little tech waifs, and have them hang around our houses until we find them jobs. I blew my pay cheque, readers, so you don’t have to.
The last week has been a roller coaster of first-time crush and buyer’s remorse.
I have explored the new interface, which eschews windows, menu bars, mice and mouse pointers. The iPad world is a brave new world, based on the iPhone, of a single task taking up the whole screen, with commands being pecked out by touch (or occasionally multi-touch, like pinching with two fingers to zoom in on a webpage). As the old man at the store showed, it’s not as intuitive as one might dream, but the limited set of moves possible means that you mostly work out how to use it, even if you have to poke and shake and spin and tap to find your way around.
I downloaded the new apps to read and toy with, created by companies such as the New York Timesand the Wall Street Journal, which badly want the iPad to be a ticket out of the everything-for-free internet. I've played the multi-touch games, carried it around as an MP3 player, huddled around it with my partner watching movies in bed, and test run its comic viewing program with a 10-year-old. I downloaded books from Amazon and smeared its screen with fingerprints while surfing the web (delivered via iPad's built-in Wi-Fi; other models will have a 3G link too).
How is it? It’s lovely. I use it to read and write e-mail. I used it, hunting and pecking on its almost life-sized screen keyboard, to write this review. Today I even left my laptop at home and used it as my work machine.
Did I do that because it felt natural? No, I did it because, when I did so, I felt as though I was from the future. The iPad weighs about 1½ pounds (0.7kg), like a magazine made of some hefty metal. It’s a marvel to have that much power in this sleek little package.
You can take it out on a train and not feel like too much of an idiot. That pretend screen keyboard works well enough, and you can always attach a proper Bluetooth keyboard, albeit at the risk of looking like a mild idiot for apparently building your own miniature laptop out of parts. Its battery lasts for 10 hours at full use, which is damn near forever.
But we’re not quite at the future yet. The Wi-Fi is buggy, and there really aren’t that many quality apps to choose from in its store (most are old iPhone apps, blown up to fit on the larger screen). For serious use, it badly needs the operating system upgrade promised by Apple for the autumn, which will let you run and flick between more than one app at a time. And potential iPad buyers will still need that “killer app” – the one thing that isn’t just a nice thing to have, but which they absolutely need an iPad to run.
The first version of any revolutionary device is going to have its teething problems. And while Apple, as it often does, has leapt past its competitors and seized the market for itself, the next few months will show us if companies such as Google and Microsoft will rise to the challenge. Maybe they will produce more flexible, cheaper versions of this new iPad model. Maybe the possessive Apple will attempt to sue them into the ground for even thinking about it.
Citing the huge demand by suckers like me, Apple has delayed the launch of the iPad outside the US until May. If you’re disappointed, think of it this way: Ireland will get a cooling-off period from all this hype, and a chance to see the flaws as well as the future promise of the iPad. It’s going to be a wild ride.
