It’s not a replacement for a laptop:

• it has no USB ports for peripherals
• no multi-tasking (we think)
• limited opportunity to develop applications for it (developers have to work within the walled garden of the AppStore and users have to sync through iTunes)

But it’s too big to be pocketable so it’s not a replacement for a PDA like an iPod Touch.

If I wanted to actually “do” anything then I’d take a laptop along with me, if I wanted to read a book or a PDF then my gut feel is that I’d rather have an eReader (Engadget has a great comparison with the Kindle), if it’s just for casual internet access then a smartphone will do.

I think a major part of the market for the iPad is going to be iPhone users who are finding it too hard to read all the information that they’ve got access to on the screen of their phone.

Besides products, Apple are also great at making markets. Just because few people can see a need for a product today doesn’t mean that they couldn’t take advantage of it if they had one. Lots of Apple fans will buy them regardless, even if they already carry an iPhone and a MacBook around with them. And once they get the product out there in people’s hands in quantity, applications and use-cases will follow. It’s sure to be another winner.

I think most people considering the iPad will already have a smartphone and probably a laptop as well. I think we can also assume that these people carry their smartphone with them everywhere. So, if we’re assuming that technology purchases are made with the intention of simplifying our lives then will you be taking your iPad with you in situations where you previously took your laptop (which I see as a win)? Or will you now be carrying three devices (which I see as a fail)?

Continuing from that… if you’re already carrying your smartphone around with you everywhere, I see the 3G option as unnecessary for most people. Why not save the $130+$30/month (or Canadian equivalent) for iPad 3G access and tether the iPad to your phone? As far as I can see, there’s no definitive statement as to whether or not the iPad can be tethered. But you can bet that any lock-down that Apple put on it will be broken within a month or two and I’m sure tethering is one of the things that the community will enable.

Whilst thinking about phones, one of the features that interested me was the inclusion of a microphone. Whenever I see a microphone on a wireless device, my first thought is of Skype (even though I’ve barely ever used Skype myself!). The lack of a camera might be an issue for some people but, especially now that Apple have graciously allowed VoIP applications to connect over 3G, you could actually use the iPad to make phone calls. It’s probably a little on the large side to replace your mobile phone and the lack of multi-tasking means that you couldn’t talk to someone whilst you get information for them from an email or a webpage but I think it’s an interesting use-case – especially when tied to an unlimited data plan.

Oh, and we can’t talk about the iPad without talking about the horendous name. Everyone seems to have agreed that it’s dreadful.. but then is it much more dreadful than iPod sounded when we first heard it? Heck, look at all the flack that Nintendo took for the Wii and that didn’t stop it flying off the shelves. I suspect in a few months we’ll have forgotten all the feminine hygiene wisecracks and moved on. Breaking out of the i{thing} naming pattern is long overdue for Apple. But the brand recognition of i{thing} is immense… I can’t see Apple having the guts to do it and, as a result, I think it’s actually becoming an Achilles heel of the brand as much as it’s a strength.

Tweetie on the iPhone

My friend Tyler over at www.tyleringram.com today reviewed Tweetie – a Twitter application for the iPhone. Tweetie looks good – I mean REALLY good. In fact it looks more functional than many of the desktop Twitter applications that I’ve tried.

Unfortunately today was not a good day for the developers behind Tweetie. They released a new version of the software and, as you have to do with iPhone applications, they sent it to Apple for Apple to approve and add to the Apple Application Store so that iPhone owners can access it.

So far so good… except Tweetie provides a live view onto Twitter and Twitter isn’t necessarily a sanitized environment. As luck would have it, at the moment that someone at Apple fired up Tweetie, there was a rude word on the Twitter Trends page. Oh no! You can’t include an application in the App Store if it has rude words in it… and so Tweetie was rejected. Yep, rejected: http://twitter.com/atebits/status/1306229791

Say WHAT? Tweetie doesn’t control that… that’s just Twitter. What’s Tweetie expected to do – filter Twitter for rude words? No other iPhone Twitter application does that. And, if you look at http://cursebird.com/ you’ll see that some people’s tweets would be pretty barren if you took all the rude words out! And what about web browsers? Should they filter their content too or is this only an issue with Twitter clients? Oh wait – that’s web browser singular as Apple won’t allow anybody to install anything on the iPhone that duplicates the functionality they provide out of the box (because theirs is the best, right?). They provide Mobile Safari for web browsing and so you can’t have the choice of another browser. But still – does Mobile Safari filter the internet? No – of course it doesn’t. In Mobile Safari I’m sure you could pull up a page full of rude words, and worse, in a matter of seconds.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m actually quite an Apple fan. We have a MacBook in the house and, at last count, we’ve bought seven iPods (because strangely they all seem to break between the 12 and 18 month points… but that’s a different rant). Apple have done a lot of good in the computer industry. For people who just want something that works and don’t want to have to get their hands dirty with knowing HOW it works or having to fix things, their products are hard to beat. At times you almost feel sorry for other hardware manufacturers… lovingly designing nice hardware (or not – as is often the case) and then having to put Windows Vista on it. And in the cellphone market the iPhone has really kick-started the idea of the mobile internet. Would we be seeing the frenzy of mobile software development or the shiny new products coming out of Palm and RIM if it wasn’t for the iPhone? I strongly doubt it.

But Apple has always been a company of control freaks. And their increasing success and visibility over the last couple of years seems to have only heightened that tendency. Everybody with an iPhone wants to be able to cut and paste between applications, everybody with an iPhone wants an easy-to-type-on landscape keyboard and everybody with an iPhone wants the ability to leave applications running in the background so they can get some sort of pop-up event notification. But Apple knows best and so you don’t get any of those features, even nearly two years after the iPhone first came out.

To be fair, I suspect the Tweetie rejection maybe be just a misunderstanding rather than a new policy decision from Apple. I suspect Apple handed the new version of Tweetie to someone who’d never seen Twitter before and didn’t understand what they were seeing. Whilst that’s a ridiculous decision, it appears it’s then been compounded by not having the rejection confirmed by a second reviewer. But, misunderstanding or not, it’s an indication of the control over your own computing that you have to give up when you buy into the whole Apple ecosystem – either as consumer or as developer.

Update: of course a couple of hours after their rejection, the Tweetie developers resubmitted the same application and Apple quietly approved it. This doesn’t really solve the underlying problem though – the problem of lack of transparency and control for both developers and consumers. How can a developer write an application when the App Store approval process is a black box with no clear rules? How can a consumer get the best from the device they own when someone else is controlling what is and isn’t allowed on it?