Why the Apple Tablet (and clones) will Change the World
by Bruce Webb
I’m serious. But out of mercy towards those who want to reach for sharp objects every time they see a Mac/PC ad, whether that be to hurt themselves or others, I’ll take this below the fold. Because you don’t HAVE to slow down to see that car crash.
For those living in a cave Apple is expected to release its Tablet tomorrow. The Tablet is expected to be essentially a much larger iPhone with a form factor of maybe 10″ by 8″ by 1/4″ meaning slightly bigger but thinner than a trade paperback. Like an iPhone its surface will be almost entirely a screen, and that screen a multi-touch surface meaning that you move within screens and between screens with finger movements. Text input will be by default a virtual keyboard right on the screen although there is no reason in principal it should not accept external wireless or usb input devices.
The expectation is that the Tablet will provide internet and file access everywhere you go, pull it out, push a button, the screen lights up and there you are and all without separating you from the world in the way a laptop does. Eight people sitting around a table with open lap tops is eight people sitting behind mini-walls. Compare that to eight people sitting around a table with legal pads. That is a meeting. A couple having breakfast at a cafe each with a laptop, it might as well be an advertisement for marriage counseling. That same couple at that cafe each browsing through the Sunday paper on their own 8 x 10 screens flat on the table or held in their hands are free to look at each other and talk and share, it is just a totally different look and feel both between them and from the outside in.
And appearance matters, because frankly if you are sitting at a park bench, or at the beach, or in a museum, or watching football while sitting at the bar in your local tavern you look pretty god damn dorkish with an open laptop, and it is not much better if you are peering at some tiny screen on your cell phone. And while I love my iPhone and spend hours and hours a day surfing the web when I am sitting at a table it is abundantly clear thats what I am doing. On the other hand a Tablet will allow you that same access while maintaining a social presense, the screen is there, you can read or manipulate it without disconnecting from the world.
Unless you have had the experience of using an advanced smartphone it is hard to explain how transforming it is to have the Internet in your pocket, if I have a question about anything it is mostly as close as my left pocket. But like the iPhone the Tablet is a lot more than a combined phone/usable web browser, it is a host for Apps, millions of them. And it is the Apps that are the game changer. Because the possibilities are quite literally endless.
You are travelling and maybe a little lost. Pull out your 8 x 10 Tablet push a button and your location is pinpointed on a street map. You are waiting for a train or bus or trying to make a connection. Push a button you got a schedule and a map. You got ten minutes and want to work on a crossword puzzle, or read your bible, or figure out your next move in your chess game, or check the weather, or catch a litle of the game. Pull out your tablet push a button and select an icon. Or catch up on your e-mail or identify that bird or pay some bills, with a tablet you can have one touch access to easily 100 such applications right from your front screen, with many times more on board or in the cloud.
My brother has a Kindle and likes it a lot. But he gets frustrated when reading military history because the battle maps are just so small and he can’t distinguish the individual unit detail. Well that shouldn’t be a problem with a Tablet you just move your fingers and expand the image.
Obviously there are other tablet and tablet hybrid products out there but none that will have access to tens of thousands of free or inexpensive programs. For example how many kids would kill to be able to just pull an 8 x 10 Tablet from their purse or backpack push a button, hit an icon and have their Facebook Wall right there. Or all your music. Or maybe your textbooks. Or if you are a grand mother maybe an entire gallery of photos.
I think it is a category killer. Because I can’t think of anyone who could not use a portable display that can either lay flat on a surface or up on a frame that will display whatever your standard tool: cookbook, parts catalog, U.S. Code, warehouse inventory but that with the touch of a button can turn into a communication device, all while serving as a clock whatever, and then when taken to the break room seamlessly turns into a Soduku puzzle or a paperback, or a newscast, and then after work into a sports trivia book. People who think this will just be another fancy laptop just have not considered the difference the form factor and the fact that it is a sealed unit makes. You have to be kind of an obsessed nut to take your laptop to the beach, or bikeriding, or camping or really to any tourist attraction. But what if you could just dump all your photos into the tablet and display them immediately, or have all your route or USGS Topo maps preloaded. Particularly since like the iPhone it is likely to come with built-in GPS. Instead of being a geek who brings his office on vacation, you have a way of enhancing that vacation experience (while still being in touch with the office as necessary.)
Last but not least this thing will a blogger’s dream, particularly for the casual blogger. Because it will allow monitoring and updating your blog to be done everywhere without the hassle of trying to deploy a laptop. Now you wouldn’t want to sit down and pound out serious copy on a virtual keyboard the size that a 10″ tablet with accommodate but it is plenty big to pound out a 400 word post or a five thousand character comment. And live-blogging anything becomes a snap.
Best feature of all? Nearly beer-proof. Spill a ball park beer on your laptop and you really will be crying, and not over the beer. Spill it on a tablet and absent some really bad luck you are a wet towel away from being back to a blogging machine.
(No word if it will have a video camera like the iPod Nano but if it does, we got Dick Tracy’s Wrist TV. Only 70 years later!)
I think you are right on in saying the form factor is so important. I’m a physician and use a tablet pc (gateway tablet) for my medical records. Before tablets and wireless a doctor had to sit at a desk with the patient there and ask questions and type into a terminal. With the pen based machine I carry it like a chart and hold it in my lap facing the patient and enter data just like a chart in the old days. I maintain eye contact, no cords, etc. Some of my patients don’t even realise it is a computer at first. I really makes it work seemlessly.
The other point you’re right about are the Iphone like apps. The eye phone changed the way I stayed connected and the only reason I don’t use it for everything is the screen size bugs me. The tablet will change that.
I can also see walking in the house setting it in a cradle on my nightstand and seeing it convert to a clock or setting it on the wall while I’m in the kitchen and having my music start playing through the stereo. If done right this will blow away anything we use now.
and best of all, it’s mostly an OUTPUT device rather than an INPUT device. that means we can go back to what we had before — corporate control of content.
Corporate control over output to the iPhone (and the presumptive tablet) varies with user preferences. The 3d party app I use most on my iPhone is NetNewsWire, which supplies me with little content of “corporate” origin.
Some media content, esp. video, is relatively locked-down, but DRM is easily circumvented if that really bothers you.
Thats what I like about books. Totally output devices !
Apps are cute, but a tablet can run programs, which are the same thing, so I don’t know, doesn’t feel much different than a laptop to m.
But I’ve been wantinig them to slap rotating touch screens on laptops and netbooks for years, and hopefully this will finally motivate the other companies to do so.
FWIW, I’m pretty excited about this too. I was a skeptic until I was laid up for a week last fall with a severe arm injury that made it quite uncomfortable to use the laptop for more than a few minutes at a time; I remained reasonably productive (adjusted for the oxycodone intake) via the iPhone for much of that time. There were few annoyances that four or eight times the screen real estate wouldn’t have fixed.
Bruce’s “marriage counseling” observation does hit a little close to home. I agree that the tablet comes across as less antisocial than a laptop, though I do still sometimes end up responding to my wife with “I could look that up on the iPhone if you’d let me.”
Form factor — I am of a couple of minds on this. On the one hand I want the glossy magazine size for books and newspapers and for computering. On the other hand, the dang thing won’t fit in a purse. You guys aren’t accustomed to purses, I imagine, but the other half of the population will be surreptitiously tilting and angling the tablet to see if there’s any way to get it into even a rather large purse. Nope, not gonna go. My friend on the weekend was showing me her el cheapo Sony Reader (PRS 300 Pocket Edition) and it fits in her purse just fine. For now, that would be my choice.
Then there’s that amazingly badly promoted Plastic Logic “Que”, the size of the rumored iSlate but made entirely of plastic, even the electronic bits. They hammer it with shoe heels in the promotional materials, and it is touchscreen, albeit monochrome at the moment. My guess, Apple might buy them out and fuse the technologies.
Noni
And at 8 x 10 it’s possibly small enough to put in an article of clothing so you can sneak it into the bathroom!
And here I am still thinking: Can I please just get a cell phone! 😀
It wouldn’t fit in most handbags but would easily fit into shoulder bags.
My expectation is that people will evolve quickly to a specialized sling that you could pull from behind your back and then manipulate with the other while remaining in the case or easily slip out for two hand use or use with peripherals. After awhile looking at your tablet might be as automatic as looking at your wrist watch.
Don’t undersell Apps. Doing a simple thing well is important if you do need that done multiple times a day. A handful of well designed mapping functions combined with GPS has almost unlimited possibilitities. Already people have done some unbelievable things adding layers and items to Google Maps, the distance and direction between you and anything in the world would be potentially at your fingertips.
Sure it is mostly an output box. But then there is a lot more universe that I would like to have access to than market demand for my input to that universe.
And many APPs are just a few dollars compared to $50-$100 with excellent/fast UI’s. I edit photos on my iPhone with a great little APP, much less than the cost of photoshop (or some other lite version), and much better workflow than free versions like GIMP.
Now imagine e-books/textbooks, where you can highlight, take notes, and search. As a Geolgy major many moons ago, a tablet would have been incredible compared to lugging around 3 or 4 geolgy textbooks, which were literally as heavy as rocks.
i h am enjoying the frenzy over what is almost certainly a niche product destined to flop. apple’s abuse of its itunes and app store is akin to the microsoft monopoly of the 90s. apples’s reluctance to follow gnu-unix open source licenses as well as their disgusting support of drm and software ip shows their disdain for the idea of an open society. apple users should be ashamed of themselves for supporting one of the worst corporate citizens in history.
posted on a $250 netbook using firefox and linux.
Bruce Webb, you’re showing your age, home skillet! Everybody under the age of 30 already gives the majority of their time and attention and social interactions to the ether.
You are describing a new toy that might allow the old folks to join the youth as neurons computing in the glorious reified virtuality of the neo-jungian nervous system matrix.
So your theme is infantilization. Back to an isolated digital-electronic womb. See you there!
Best feature of all? Nearly beer-proof. Spill a ball park beer on your laptop and you really will be crying, and not over the beer. Spill it on a tablet and absent some really bad luck you are a wet towel away from being back to a blogging machine.
I like this feature since spilling coffee is one of my trademarks. 25 years ago I made the decision to use PCs over MACs because the former dominates the personal computer maket, especially in business. Maybe I’ll take a second look at MACs if this tablet thing can actually do what I want it too.
I see a nice market for field books of all kinds. Imagine you were a biologist working in the wild and had a App that would display every sample in the Natural History museum for field comparison.
You could also get real creative with a language learning and translation program. It is not at all far fetched that you could hand a microphone to a local speaker and have their sentences appear in the original and in translation along with a playback capability for later. I can see myself waking through a foreign city with an 8 x 10 gizmo in my hand along with a wireless mike in a way that would make no sense with some clamshell design notebook/laptop. Form factor again.
Whatever. A Tablet would allow a type of sharing you can’t get with a cell-phone, you could hand it back in forth or even share it. Think about doing a two city pub crawl. With three people in say NYC and two in San Francisco. With an attached web-cam and a stand you could have three people sitting on one side of a table in SF seeing and talking with two people at a bar in NYC. Now you could do that with a couple of PC’s or even laptops now but in order to get a field of view big enough to show two or three people at a time means a lot of footprint on what is generally a limited surface. Whereas it would trivial to design a stand with a base 4″ x 4″ sufficient to hold an 8″ screeen vertically.
Bruce,
Sounds like the Toughbooks (laptop) I tested back in the day for the AF. When they were done with their planned tests they asked me how I would test them.
I responded,”Can they really handle what you briefed us?”
The guy said – “Anything you can think of – go for it.”
So I opened it up. Turned it on. Opened up word and excell. The poured an entire Coke on the keyboard and all over the monitor. Then climbed up to the upper deck of the old BUFF and ‘dropped’ it through the hatch to the tarmack (open and running), bouncing on the crew stairs on the way down.
Ran like a charm. A little sticky but the sales rep poured water all over it to get the coke off.
We bought a few dozen and they never once failed on us during operations in Afghanistan, no matter how much crap we gave them…one guy even dropped one into the laggoon (salt water) and it still worked.
I wonder how tough these guys are….I like your pub crawl idea. 🙂
Islam will change
“Whatever”? I rest my case. Pub crawl with iPads? That is dumb. Pub crawl with iPad = twitter squared. Infantile.