Mac Corner: The Ipad, redux

By Larry Grinnell, Palm Beach Phoenix Apple Users Group

Yeah, yeah, I know I just spoke about the blasted iPad a few weeks ago, but now that some of the dust has cleared, I figured it was time for me to have my say.

First, it’s slick as all heck, and beautifully designed as pretty much all Apple gear is. The ultra-sharp 1024 x 768 pixel (9.7 inch diagonal) eye-popping color screen is backlit with LEDs, and uses a newer technology called IPS (in-plane switching), which virtually eliminates the annoying fading and darkening of the screen when you view it off-axis.

The display also takes advantage of the multi-touch features of the iPod Touch and iPhone products, but optimized for the much larger screen of the iPad.

In a nutshell, that’s really what the iPad is: it’s an iPod Touch or an iPhone with a much, much bigger display. That’s the first step in getting your mind around it. First, think of an iPod Touch with that big screen. You’ve got a Wi-Fi device with 16GB of memory ($499) and up to 64GB of memory ($699). Use your home network to connect your iPad to the internet and there you go.

Video, eBooks, iTunes, web surfing, and content, content, content. Oh, and you can customize your experience with the amazing App Store, which offers over 140,000 applications, now viewable on a big screen. It comes with a few apps of its own, including iWork ’09 which consists of Pages (a wordprocessor/page layout program), Numbers (a spreadsheet), and Keynote (a presentation program). The web browser, of course, is Safari, Apple’s top-rated product. It also comes with Apple’s Mail software, an easy to use and flexible email client. Photos is a slick photo album program. iBooks is an application that looks suspiciously like the Delicious Library, and uses a bookshelf metaphor to display electronic books (eBooks) for easy selection.

For a few bucks more … well, to be honest, it’s more than just a few bucks … you can order your iPad with 3G cellphone service (still just AT&T, unfortunately) with prices starting at $629 for the 16GB model and maxing out at 64GB for $829. The 3G+Wi-Fi model is the power product — giving you the power to connect anywhere you can make a telephone call over AT&T’s cellular network.

The iPad is portable, yet rugged, with a rock-solid enclosure, measuring roughly 9.5 x 7.5 inches, and only a half-inch thick. Weight? Like it’s hardly there at 1.5 lbs for the Wi-Fi model and just a smidge more at 1.6 lbs for the 3G+Wi-Fi models. Apple estimates battery life at about 10 hours.

I’ve currently got a MacBook, which is my “living room” Mac, which I mostly use for email, web surfing, and controlling my media center. I’m about 95 percent certain that if I were looking for a portable computing device to replace my MacBook, I would probably go with an iPad. Not only is it a great device for casual emailing (with the larger screen, the virtual keyboard is much easier to use, and if you still can’t deal with that, there’s an available docking station with an integrated conventional keyboard), websurfing, and the like, and with one of several neat apps available from the App Store, you can use your iPad as a remote control device for your Mac mini or AppleTV powered media center in an easy and purpose-designed environment.

Apple has entered into a number of agreements with media giants like The New York Times, and others to provide content on a subscription basis, using the iTunes store to manage the process. A convenient device like this that makes it easy to subscribe to electronic editions of product from content providers can only hurt the “dead tree” part of their collective businesses.

Problems? Most have already been publicized in the most negative ways possible by those who seem to have ulterior motives in seeing Apple fail at this or anything else they do. We all know that the bigger a company gets, the more people there are out who want to bring you down.

Considering this is a 1.0 product (discounting the fact that it is based on the several year old functionality of the iPod Touch and iPhone), there aren’t too many problems or issues for the haters to harp about. The biggest complaint at present seems to be the lack of a camera. Personally, I think a camera on a device like this is just too hard to manipulate — it’s just too big.

Next is Apple’s continued partnership with AT&T. Consumers certainly haven’t benefited from this partnership — just ask anyone who lives in the San Francisco or New York City areas.

More important, in my humble opinion, is the continued lack of support for Adobe’s Flash technology. This remains a strategic decision by Apple, and is rationalized by the marketing types that Flash is just too unstable for a telephone platform — that the presence of software like Flash could cause the iPhone or iPod Touch to crash unexpectedly — or at least that’s Apple’s story … and they’re sticking to it. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stated publicly that Flash is old (and proprietary) technology, and that everyone should be developing to the new open HTML 5 standards (the topic of a future column), which will do everything Flash does and more.

All that said, the iPad is going to be the game changer that the Kindle, the Sony eBook Reader, Barnes & Noble’s product (anyone remember its name?), and the rest can never be. The combination of the incredibly successful App Store, the iTunes Store, and the ability to easily subscribe to and access additional content from other sources is going quickly move the iPad to the top of the heap. Mark my words; this is going to be a winner.

Apple fanboy? Maybe, but this is an Apple-centric column after all.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Readers are welcome to comment on this or any Mac Corner columns by visiting the Palm Beach Phoenix blog as well as by writing the editor of Palm Beach Business.com.

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About Larry Grinnell: Larry has been working with Macintosh and Windows PCs for over 25 years and worked as a senior technical writer and IT support professional for a major midwest-based consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment manufacturer here in South Florida. His musings on a wide variety of topics from computers to jazz guitar to strange foreign cars from the 1950s can be viewed at the MyMac.com website. Click here to reach him by email.

Writers of this column are members of the Palm Beach Phoenix Apple User Group, a nonprofit organization for Apple Computing Device Users, recognized by Apple Inc., with the purpose of providing educational training and coaching to its members (students, professionals and seniors alike) in a cordial social environment. The club meets the second Saturday (1-4 p.m.) and fourth Wednesday (6-8 p.m.) of each month at the Fire Station #2, 4301 Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach (just two block south of Southern Boulevard). Click here to visit their website. Click here to reach them by email.