I didn’t pay much attention when rumors began circulating about a year ago about an Apple tablet computer. As an early adopter of most gadgets I have been disappointed to see the lackluster adoption of the Windows Tablet PC. When Microsoft introduced the Windows Tablet PC operating system in 2002, Bill Gates estimated that 50% of all PCs would be tablets by 2005. As of 2010 Windows Tablets are still very much a niche market that has never truly gone mainstream. I am currently on my third Tablet PC since 2005. While my current choice, a Lenovo Thinkpad X200, is no doubt the best laptop I have ever owned, I probably use it in Tablet mode less than 5% of the time. I occasionally use Microsoft One Note to take meeting notes and I sometimes throw it into tablet mode when reading or watching movies in crammed spaces such as on an airplane.
With much bravado, Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPad on January 27th this year. Once I saw the iPad I knew it would be another hit for Apple. I also guessed that it would fulfill a need that my Kindle reading tablet had failed to realize; to go completely paperless. While the Kindle has been great for reading books, it fell short on reading newspapers or magazines. Reading the Kindle version of the Wall Street Journal or Fortune magazine just fell way short of the experience reading the genuine article. One of the first demos I saw of the iPad was a demo of the Wall Street Journal app. It looked very impressive. For the cost of the print subscription of WSJ I actually figured that switching to the online version only I could pay for the entry level iPad in two years from the savings.
I had planned to wait for the first price drop, something Apple often do about 6 months after a new product launch. However, after "accidentally" walking into an Apple store last month I realized two things. Upon getting the iPad in my hands I realized I couldn't wait. After learning that almost every store was sold out I also realized that as long as demand appears to wildly exceed supply, why would Apple offer a price drop anytime soon? In the absence of finding an iPad in a retail outlet I went online to the Apple store and placed an order. The iPad drop shipped directly from the factory in China about a week later. It arrived just in time for my planned family summer vacation, a 3000 mile road trip across southwestern United States.
In short, with one major exception which I will get back to, the iPad not only exceeds my expectations, but could potentially be a laptop substitute on short business trips and weekend outings. As a matter of fact, I am typing this blog on my iPad using the Apple Pages word processor for the iPad, and I am out at our ranch for the weekend with my laptop uncharacteristically absent.
The last thing I did before we hit the road was to sign up for a wireless subscription plan. I bought the 3G version of the iPad which supports both Wi-Fi and cellular data networks. I knew that many of the places we would be heading would not have Wi-Fi, and some probably not even cellular data service. One of the great things about the iPad cellular data plan (which like the iPhone, AT&T has an exclusive deal with Apple) is that you don’t have to commit to a subscription. Instead you just purchase month to month. Their monthly pricing is a little odd though. You can pay $15.00 for 250 MB or $25.00 for 2 GB (8 times more for only a 40% price increase). FYI, after about 2 weeks of casual internet use I have only used about 400 MB. The iPAD automatically senses when you are on a Wi-Fi network and will use Wi-Fi whenever possible. Also, in the areas I have been (which are outside the main AT&T service areas) I find that their bandwidth is too slow to use bandwidth intensive apps like YouTube and Netflix anyway.
On the road, I quickly realized the great value of the built-in iPad location service. At first I had assumed the iPad used cell towers to approximate location but after noticing the iPad Map application had pinpointed my drive way I realized it had to be using GPS. Indeed, the 3G radio can interpret GPS data as long as it is within sight of a GPS satellite. Otherwise it uses Wi-Fi and cell towers to approximate the location. Very cool! With that knowledge, the iPad became our trusted map companion, always keeping us up to date with location and distance to our destination.
The App store offers a wide variety of both paid and free applications. On my first day I probably installed a dozen or more apps from the free Wall Street Journal reader to games that would keep the kids entertained in the backseat. One App in particular that came in handy on the road was the iWiki HD app, a specially designed iPad app that ties back into the wealth of information stored in Wikipedia, probably the greatest online encyclopedia. Sure I can use the Safari browser to get this content as well, but Wikipedia really shines in iWiki. It saves several steps and is so easy to search that I have to admit I actually entered a few searches while driving down the road (though, I will deny this, if you tell anybody). We frequently looked up little towns along the way and my wife Anne would read out loud the history of the given community or tourist attraction to all of us. Also, for this trip we had purposely only scheduled a few high-demand area hotels (i.e. Las Vegas and Disneyland) with the rest of the vacation being flexible. As such we would look at the map and say, “gee it looks like we may be in Grand Canyon Monday night” and then go online to recreation.gov and book a campsite. It was actually on this very web site that I ran into the one major exception referenced earlier that I strongly dislike about the iPad: The lack of support for Rich Internet Application (RIA) plugins such as Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight (the latter being the primary client platform for RiteTrack 4). In this case I had hit a web site that uses Flash technology. As has been widely publicized, Apple has decided not to support Flash on the iPad version of their Safari browser (although it is supported on Macs). The “official” version for this decision is to provide users a “safer” browsing opportunity, but everyone knows the real reason. By blocking RIA on the iPAD, developers won’t have a way to circumvent Apple’s App store, something that would be bad for Apple’s revenue model. There are some workarounds (such as using one of several Remote Desktop Apps) but it just isn't a good user experience.
Overall though, I love the iPAD. While it is not yet a replacement for my laptop it meets my basic needs for non-business trips for casual e-mail reading, surfing the web (except those sites that use Flash or Silverlight), watching movies, reading books and magazines, taking notes, and playing games. For me, the reading apps alone is worth the price of the device. With the Zenio magazine reader I can subscribe to magazines at roughly the same price as I pay for a paper subscription. The Amazon Kindle book reader app is as good or better than on its native Kindle platforms (and it instantly makes available all the books I have bought on Amazon's Kindle store), and as previously mentioned, the Wall Street Journal experience is superior in many ways to the real thing. In short, not having to carry a stack of magazines, a book or two, and the latest newspaper when traveling is not just good for my back and my sanity but is also very good for our environment. I am sure we are not too far away from the day when a future generation will look back at our culture and question why our generation consumed so much paper. I believe the iPAD is a good step moving mankind in that direction