Posted by LBi India February 28th, 2011
Apple claims its iPad, launched yesterday, is a “third category of device.” Is its confidence justified?
I’d say it is. Particularly at home, there has been a jostling for position for the Third Device to connect you to the Internet — the device that isn’t a laptop (big, complicated, often shared) or a phone (private, intimate, tiny). Games consoles, networked music and video players, digital photo frames, and even purpose-designed devices like the Chumby and Joggler all let you connect. Up to now, none has been inspiring enough to create widespread desire.
Apple has form here: there were MP3 players before the iPod, but the iPod is what people remember because of the design, the marketing and the ecosystem of services around it. Likewise, there were many phones that could access the Internet, but the iPhone raised public expectations: first to access the “real” Internet on a phone (although sites that work best from an iPhone are optimised for it); and then, a bit later, introducing the idea of apps.
Nokia has clearly decided that lack of multi-tasking is the iPhone’s weak spot.
It worked because of the shrewd combination of beauty, fun and constraints. Fans of other mobile phone operating systems point to the iPhone’s lack of multitasking (now available if you really want it). Yet the single-tasking approach — click an icon to start something, use it, then press the one physical button to get back home — is a major contributor to the success of the iPhone. It reduces demands on you, so you feel more at ease, and you don’t begrudge the time you might save with multitasking because it’s so attractive and fun to use.
The iPad looks set to do the same again, fixing in the public’s mind its expectations for this Third Device and creating a lust for one. And other manufacturers will pile in behind it. There is already hardware in the market that, while not as nice, is comparable. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t is a netbook (or “netvertible”) with a capacitive touch screen that can be flipped over into tablet mode, but which also sports things missing from the iPad like a camera, big storage and USB ports. Something more like the iPad is entirely within the grasp of Lenovo, HTC, Sony, Samsung, LG and many others.
Moreover, the combination of price point and Apple’s choice of capabilities pitches the iPad in such a way that it competes for attention largely in areas that are not yet “proper” digital channels. The video support (which really is like having “an HDTV inches from your face”) means that even in a room with a TV in it you might plausibly curl up on the sofa and watch TV on your iPad, particularly when there are interactive benefits to doing so. And the iBook reader, with its eye-candy animations, is both a poke in the eye for the current generation of e-ink readers like the Kindle with their slow, mono displays (although this won’t be true for long) and a way of making reading on a device instead of paper even more widely accepted. So, the iPad is pitched to turn attention that you now give to television or to physical reading (particularly newspapers and magazines) into a digital channel.
For now, marketers need to consider:
- Production issues. The iPad (and, soon, its clones) creates another format for using the Web. Although the size of its screen means Web sites will generally work fine, learn from the iPhone experience and make sure that your site doesn’t have anything obviously confusing or limiting on the iPad (in particular, be very careful to deal with the lack of Flash support).
- New contexts of use. Because the iPad and its ilk will be used in different places (a crude example: many more iPad-type devices will be taken into toilets than are laptops today) users will be in different frames of mind. This presents many opportunities to engage people in different ways.
- Opportunities for apps. The iPhone has the lion’s share of the app market, and if people are going to develop just for one platform it’s probably going to be the iPhone. The iPad market will be tougher, not least because other iPad devices will certainly run Windows and Linux — which makes Adobe Air (absent from the iPad, of course) a highly credible alternative platform for competing apps.
Goodbye to windows (with a small “w”)
Taking a longer view, the iPad is a step on a (welcome) path that will finally change — over the next five or ten years — what we think of as a “computer”.
The way we use our laptops today — with windows, a mouse or similar pointing device, files and folders — was first popularised by Apple with the original Macintosh in 1984 and invented in the 1970s. That it has survived largely unchanged ever since is testament both to its flexibility and to its success: the world-wide explosion of computer use in the late 1990s means that when the average person in the world thinks of a “computer” she’s thinking of a PC running Windows 95 or 98. The latest incarnations of Windows 7 and MacOS Snow Leopard are still just tinkering with this basic model. It’s stuck because it’s familiar.
The iPhone was really a new kind of computer disguised as an iPod (for those who like iPods) and as a phone (for those who use phones). At launch (without the App Store, remember) it was easily a killer in both categories — and although it’s still not brilliant as just a phone, the combination of its capabilities makes it powerful, fun and an object of desire.
The App Store was introduced with the idea of you adding features to your phone or iPod touch. Early apps were simple, but there are now some amazingly powerful apps that work very well in spite of the limited power and tiny screen. And they all fit into this really simple framework: buy from App Store; one icon to launch; one physical button to quit. No files, installers, uninstallers or other nasties.
The App Store wasn’t possible without the iPhone, itself built on the success of the iPod and the popularity of mobile phones in general. The iPad would not have been viable without the iPhone and the App Store. To me, the single biggest signpost is the availability of iWork — Keynote, Pages and Words — on the iPad. What, now, is left for which you need your “traditional” laptop?
The progression seems straightforward. Just as people have become used to apps on their iPhones they will become used to more and more powerful apps on their iPads — and then iPads will become a bit bigger and a bit faster. And then they’ll be much bigger (ie, TVs). And they might come with a keyboard accessory (already a feature of the iPad Keyboard Dock) or in a clamshell form with two displays, one of which is frequently a keyboard.
In any case, the paradigm of the iPhone OS — the way apps are delivered, single tasking (or, at least, single task attention), the lack of users needing to do window management and the lack of a “separate” file system — may finally be what replaces the 40-year-old system we use today.
What a welcome change that will be. And, in case you needed one, another good reason to pay serious attention to these devices now.
Tags: Adobe, Gaming, iPad, iPhone, Multi-tasking, Nokia, Windows
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