A different kind of thing?

I've had an iPad for a while now and am beginning to get the hang of it. By which I mean  that I think I know pretty much what it is capable of in its current incarnation, and can see the potential as more and more interesting apps come online.

What it isn't

It is definitely not a replacement for a generic PC. In fact, it's not possible to even use the thing if you don't at least have access to a copy of iTunes (Linux be damned ). It's a totally useless brick without another machine, preferably a Mac (though, once it has been activated, that quickly becomes far less of a necessity). That is part of the genius behind it: good enough to handle 90% of what we do, superb at about half of it, almost totally useless for the remaining but very important 10%.  Actaully, for me, that figure is a fair bit higher, but that's because I'm a geek that likes to run servers and write the occasional program.

Nor is it just a scaled-up iPad Touch, though the resemblance is striking. This has a very different set of needs in mind - it won't replace the Touch and it definitely won't replace the iPhone, though it borrows almost everything from each and only adds a little of its own. There are subtle differences here and there that remind you of this but really it's down to size. The way that apps designed for the iPad work feels notably different to the way they work on the smaller devices: they use the size, with a different approach to menus for instance (you can often see the selected item, not just its name) and use of the display in general. The compromises that went into iPhone apps largely disappear and things that were just about usable are suddenly wonderful. It's not a lot of fun making a phone call, and it really feels like overkill when you run Shazam or other minimal interface apps,  but for most purposes it just feels right. This may not be a standalone computer, but it is very definitely a general purpose machine on which serious work and play can be done, with relatively little compromise.

What it is

The iPad is a new kind of device, or maybe a very old one in new clothes. This is mighty close to the Dynabook as originally envisaged by Alan Kay and implemented in broken ways from the Apple Newton onwards (with some unfortunate detours via Windows CE and some curious hybrids like Psion and PSP). It is maybe the first general-purpose computer I have ever owned that actually works, pretty much all the time, and is so intuitive that a manual is unnecessary. Maybe the iPhone was the first, but that hid in cellphone clothing so was less obviously a computer, and really couldn't do much in the way of standard computing tasks even though it is great for many things.

Why it is different

• Just being there and just working - this is the real selling point and currently fairly unique. It makes the Mac look like a lunky, complex antique and Windows feel like somthing from the stone age. A networked computer that is pretty good for most things that comes on virtually instantly, can be around you most of the time, has a battery that lasts most of the day and just works is a really remarkable shift. It is now a genuine appliance, not something you have to fight with. Almost anyone can use this thing, just by switching it on, and yet it offers power that is comparable (for most common tasks) to a desktop PC. Even on those incredibly rare occasions it needs to reboot, it takes seconds, not minutes, to come on. This is not just a slightly better experience than the best of notebooks recovering from sleep - it's a different ball game.
• Adding functionality very quickly in a controlled way - the App Store, for all its irritating foibles and being Apple's latest and maybe greatest money machine, is jam packed with wonderful goodies, many for free, most of which take a minute or less to install. If it doesn't do it already, there's probably an app for that (there's even one or two for finding apps for that), and those thousands upon thousands of iPhone apps are being ported to the iPad in huge numbers every day - they nearly all work as it is but the ones that take advantage of the big screen are much nicer. Most are very fairly priced, another first in computing. It's not far off what Linux users have had for years in things like Synaptic and now everyone is doing it, but Apple's tight (despotic even) control over it makes it quite different. It can be irritating, it's certainly (sometimes) an abuse of power, but mostly it just ensures that things just work - see my first point. And they do. And, for almost the first time, I've actually paid for apps because they are actually really really useful. It's not that the ones on the iPhone are not - I'd be lost without many of them, quite literally. It's just that they are small, things you work with for a couple of minutes, not a couple of hours, and so it seems slightly silly to be paying huge sums for them. I can read, create documents, present things, watch movies and loads more on the iPhone that constitute real work and serious play.
  
• Multiple inputs - apart from the maddening lack of a webcam (Apple are mean and nasty in a way that makes Microsoft seem sweet), the accelerometer sensors, orientation sensors. microphone, touch screen, compass, GPS, and all the other neat input mechanisms put this in a class of its own when compared with other devices. Others might have a subset (or very occasionally all) but they don't have the apps that can do wonderful things with them.
• No save option - for most apps, it just does it. Obviously. Combined with multiple levels of undo, this is such an obvious thing it is weird we have gone so long accepting this relic from a long-lost technical decision guided by hardware constraints, not common sense.

It also has some nice application experiences such as...

• Wonderful web browsing - OK, it has limitation in screen size and support for things like Flash and Java, but it is so nice to be able to easily browse the Web anywhere - sitting on an armchair, in bed, in the park, on the sun-deck, and the screen is delightfully easy to read even in bright sunshine and the experience is smooth and easy.
• Book/article reading - it's brilliant. There are dozens of apps of various varieties for this. I really like GoodReader (a whopping 99 cents) for PDFs, Word docs, etc. There are decent free equivalents, but it has a slight edge over all I've tried so far. Best of all for books is Stanza (free), mainly because of the wonderful range of libraries it offers, with good search facilities. A fabulous source of junk pre 1960s sci-fi, classic literature, and weird and wonderful stuff, as well as things to buy if you want, neatly separated into sections so you don't get expensive surprises when expecting free stuff. I love it on the iPhone and adore it on the iPad.
• Page creation - notably for presentational things, via KeyNote and Pages - I'd not like to type a book or even a long paper on this though, with the keyboard dock, it would not be a terrible chore. However, the ability to just drag stuff around the screen, twiddle it around with your fingers and place it how and where you want just can't be beat. It's miles ahead of other tablets I've used in the past. It just works, exactly like you'd expect, with few concessions to technical/programmer limitations. And some things are terrific: I splashed out quite a lot of money on Omnigraffle, for instance, because (compared with its Mac and PC equivalents) it really works amazingly well. The delight of sketching a rough picture with your finger and, in a few strokes and touches, to have it turn into a professional looking diagram is mighty cool.
  
• Annotation - it's a really nice way to mark student work to be able to highlight, comment (including with voice) and browse work with none of the unpleasant ergonomic issues associated with laptops etc and less environmental impact than paper (especially in my environment, where paper tends to get lost in dusty piles). Not necessarily better than an old-style tablet PC, but the app store gives you loads of different apps to try quickly and find the one that suits.
• Maps and images - Google Maps is way cool on the iPad, much more fun and interesting than the almost identical app on the iPhone, especially with the compass. Pictures look lovely. It is just so easy to pinch and unpinch to zoom in and out. And as for Google Earth, with the full tilt thing turned on - wow.
  
• Terrific multimedia - ignoring limited support for some proprietary and even some open standards, videos and music just work. Sure, there may be better and less lossy technologies, but actually I don't care - the end-user experience is just lovely and easier to use than almost any dedicated device.

What I'd like it to do 

• Front-facing (or indeed any) camera: duh. Apple is an evil company that knows full well it will sell a whole load more by avoiding spending the $3 (give or take) needed to put in a webcam this time around.
• A little Java or Flash for web conferencing: a couple of web conference vendors (Webex and one or two others) have made iOS apps but they are sadly the ones I don't use and don't like. The loss of Java and Flash is mainly a minor inconvenience for most things I need, but not being able to do Web conferencing seriously limits the device's usefulness for me and means that, for now, it's not the perfect machine for road trips. Yes, there are workarounds, but AU uses Elluminate and most free alternatives use Flash.
• A little multi-tasking: yes, something vaguely but not exactly like it's coming in a month or so in a constrained way, but it is still pretty clunky moving between some apps. For most things I don't care and love the speed and slickness that results from using one and only one app. It would be mistaken to think of it as a single-tasking computer because Apple actually run many daemons in the background, but it's not too far off in end-user application terms. This can be a serious irritation at times (e.g. when you want to run an alarm clock in the background or maintain a Skype call while looking at something else) but it makes it blindingly and wonderfully fast for pretty much everything. It runs multiple rings round my high-end Macs and PCs in responsiveness, speed of startup and general usability as a result, so it would be sad to lose that. Just a little more flexibility would be good though. Maybe double-tasking?
  
• Document management -every app is a law unto itself and maintains its own private directories even if it is the relatively rare category that does allow file exchange (via the clunky and quirky iTunes interface). There are ways around it for the most part - using web services like Google Docs (for reading, not writing), Dropbox (especially) or Mobile Me, or some of the free and paid-for file sharing apps are OK as far as they go, enabling sharing both to and from a real machine in a somewhat clunky way, but I find I really miss consolidated document management. In my experiments with PDF readers and annotators I have probably wound up copying the same file ten times or more, which is just plain wasteful. Trouble is, with small, focused apps, a single application is not good enough. GoodReader is a good reader, Pages is a good word processor, Noterize is not bad for annotations, none seem to do all I want even though they might produce or read the same files. Yes, online services are OK for this, but it's irritating and not so hot when you are on a plane, say, and about the only consistent integration is with email, which is not the best place to store documents for me. I hate to imagine how things will be in a few months, with different versions of documents strewn around the device and me puzzling about which one I edited last.
  
• Scholarly reference management: I love Pages, but wish inserting references didn't mean a trip to the web browser to use Zotero or whatever to manually copy/paste. And, of course, Google Docs doesn't work (properly).
  
• Proper drag n drop support in the browser - JavaScript sites using JQuery are pretty hopeless if you want to drag and drop something on a web page - as far as I can tell, there's no way to do it in many cases (though the double-fingered drag trick works for some sites).
• Screen output - only a few apps can make use of a second screen. These include Keynote, videos, pictures, Goodreader, Noterize, Omnigraffle and an increasing range of others, including several web browsers so it's not a disaster, but it would sometimes be handy to be able to use a bigger screen for everything (jailbroken devices can, of course, do this).
• Development tools - OK, I'm a geek and there is no real reason for this, but I like that fact that my EEE-PC can be a web server, run PHP, MySQL, even compile the odd application, albeit slowly. In fact, even my old Windoze 'smart' phone could do that. Again, it can be done server-side but I miss such things. It can be done by jailbreaking the iPad, as can most things, but then you lose the wonderful ease and stability of the machine.
• email tagging and flagging - it's a perfectly decent simple mail app that handles all my accounts but Hotmail, reads attachments seamlessly and just works as it should, but there are absolutely no bells and whistles at all.
• proper Google calendat integration - it syncs fine, but you can't update appointments online: only locally. Of course, the web calendar works very well indeed and goes really fast on this device, but I rather like maintaining multiple calendars for different reasons from different places and aggregating them all in one place. 
  
• Something to hold onto - mostly, I like the slim, sleek design but, given that it is not incredibly light, it can be quite hard to hold onto if you don't have it in a case and you're prone on a sofa. Something like a camera tripod adapter in the back to which a grip could be screwed when needed would help here. I anticipate a lot of third party solutions to this: there are already several desk stands available and aforementioned cases really help a lot, but nothing is perfect for just holding the thing yet.
• Weather/water/shock proofing - this device is designed to commit suicide in multiple ways. Anecdotal reports suggest it is fairly hardy, but the way it encourages you to take it with you wherever you go is just crying out for trouble. So far (we're talking days, not months here) the worst that has happened is that it shut down complaining it was too hot when I had been working with it in the sunshine for an hour or two.
  

What I don't miss

• DVDs and CDs
• USB devices (though some can be used surprisingly well via the camera dongle)
• a mouse
• crashes
• slow startups and crawling applications
• doing things the way the machine requires, rather than the way that feels natural
• taking laptops out of bags at airports
• being stuck in one position to work (the iPad is rather nice on the roofdeck)
• the baggage of decades of legacy support and ingrained mindsets from the mainframe era

This is the first generation of a new kind of thing. The novelty is not in any specific thing, but in the scale and style with which it is all glued together. As it matures and Apple find yet more ways to extort money from us, it will only get better. I am fairly confident most (and, in one way or another, all) of my quibbles with the current version will go away over the coming months and the next release or two of hardware and software. I'd love it if Android on generic hardware were better and seriously competed on this ground: I'm philosophically far better disposed to the Google way than the Apple way. I'd love it if the OLPC really grew into something beyond innovative and neat, or the new generation of gaming devices went far beyond gaming into similar territory but, for now, Apple (and it's hard not to hate them for this as much as I love their machines) is the only game in town.