Posts tagged iPad

I have had a Kindle Fire now for a few days. I am an Apple guy and an iPad owner but that doesn’t stop me from liking this little device. Lets first start of with some of the things I like about it.

• Size. It is so easy to hold in the hand and carry around. Typing on it is in many ways easier than iPad if you don’t have it on your lap. You can type with two thumbs which isn’t possible with iPad.
• Integration with Amazon. Lets face it, while iBooks has a great interface, it simply does not have the same selection as Amazon and you can’t read the books on as many devices. I can read my kindle books on iPad, Kindle, iPhone, my Mac etc. On the Kindle Fire I can buy books conveniently through a special application. No need to browse the Amazon web interface like on iPad.
• The Android back button. I love this concept. On iOS you can only browse back and forth within an app. On Android back means back to whatever was you previous screen, even if that was another application. A nice use for this is when you click links to web pages in your email application. You look at the linked web page but then you want to go back to the email and click another link. Easy, just click the back button. On iPad this would require either double click home and select email application among running apps or single click home and select email among all the apps.
• Price. It is a really good price for what you get and this makes tablets accessible to a lot of other people.

Now for the things I didn’t like so much. The carousel thing was mainly annoying. I found it quite messy to have applications, books, movies and everything all in one. It is also about as useless as the Windows 7 exposé copy. It doesn’t give any quick overview over what you have. There was no obvious way to see what applications were running and quitting them. There was a sort of process manager but that was not very accessible and felt more like a geek tool.

But the most annoying thing was probably that there was no physical buttons for frequent operations like going to the home screen or going back. I found it really awkward and slow to have to tap my screen once to get the toolbar at the bottom with the home button each time I wanted to click the home button. A button used that often should be super quick and easy to click.

Apart from that as a user of Apple products I am used to a lot of polish on the products. These are things which are hard to explain but comes down to getting very minute details right. On Kindle I feel there are a lot of these small details which are not done properly as on an iPad. When you move an icon on the home screen of iOS you see the other icons move to the side. On Kindle Fire moving icons on the favorites shelf looks more like they get teleported from one place to the other. This is confusing because you don’t get the same feedback and feel for where things are moving from and too. If you scroll to far in a list there is just some sort of flash to indicate that you went to far. In iOS you actually continue to move past the list but the list snaps back as soon as you let go. I think it is a much clearer feedback. This is common issue I have with Android. You just don’t get the same quality feedback on everything you do. I often click, scroll etc and don’t know if the system registered my action or not.

There is also a lot of indirect manipulation instead of direct manipulation. E.g. I expected to be able to move an item from the carousel down into the favorites. You can’t. Instead you have to press and hold. This will get you a menu where you can chose to add to favorites, which exists visually right below you. This feels unnatural. A lot of things are like that on the Kindle Fire.

It is all these little details which add up to create the smooth experience on iOS, but which makes Android not feel quite right. But more importantly I prefer iPad overall because it is much more versatile. The bigger screen opens up the possibilities for more kinds of applications. While I loved the back button and think iOS should steal that idea there are simply too many other areas where iOS interaction works better. Application switching, management and organization is done more elegant IMHO.

Details like physical placement of buttons is done much better.  E.g there are no volume control buttons on it. Volume is something you usually have to change very quickly. So it should be very quick to access. It is infuriating using e.g. phones where you suddenly realize you got too low volume while speaking to someone and you have to put them on hold while you try to navigate the system settings to find volume control.

There has been a lot of musing about why Tablet PC’s failed and why it might be different for iPad. A lot of the comments are in my opinion almost metaphysical or full of vapor. We get suggestions like the Apple advertisement machine or Steve Jobs reality distortion field etc will make it all different now.

I think iPad will succeed where Tablet PC failed and the reasons for the success should be fairly obvious once one starts looking at the facts. There are a number of early implementations which failed: The Apple Newton. The original PDA. It failed because it tried to be too much and was hence too expensive. Palm succeeded where Apple had failed because they created a drastically cheaper PDA, by making it a lot simpler and making it depend on working in tandem with a PC. Palm’s was focused on doing very few things very well. It was not a replacement for the PC. That was a key insight and it made all the difference. 

iPad will succeed against Tablet PC’s for exactly the same reasons. Like Newton, the Table PC’s were too expensive, and the user interface too complicated. By too complicated I mean it was a regular desktop OS with added support for a stylus. You don’t need to be a Steve Jobs kind of visionary to see this. At the time iPad was just a rumor and nobody knew how large it would be, if it even existed in the labs or what OS it would run, I was thinking about whether Apple could pull off a tablet Computer. I have been convinced ever since Apple released iPhone that if they did a tablet computer, that basing it on the regular desktop version of OS X would be a certain failure. It would be a failure for the same reasons as Tablet PC’s was a failure. Desktop OS X was never designed for a touch interface.

I really hoped that they would base it on iPhone OS but with a twist. And they did, and that is why I think it will succeed. It is what I have believed is the success receipt long before iPad was unveiled. 

I believe the lesson Apple learned from Palm, is that the reason iPad will beat a Tablet PC or Netbook is because it is running a simpler OS, with simpler apps, it can run those apps with the same responsiveness and performance on lesser hardware. Because like a Palm it works in tandem with your desktop computer you can cut out a lot of extra connection points and features and make the unit cheaper.