The Price (of the Hardware)

A major selling price of the Apple TV is the price.  In the US it retails at $99 (plus applicable sales tax).  In the UK it retails for £99 (including VAT).  Compare this to the UK rate on Apple’s other offerings and you’ll see it’s a milestone 1:1 exchange.

Personally, £99 seems like a perfectly reasonable price point but it jars knowing that our friends across the pond can pick it up substantially cheaper.  For the record, if you did a currency exchange, the market rate is ~£65GBP to $99USD (excluding fees).

No TV Rentals

At the moment, it would appear that Apple are not offering TV show rentals in the UK.  This is a big mis-step and severely hampers the attractiveness of the Apple TV.  In fact, the new Apple TV is all about renting.  There’s no point in owning content on a device that can’t store it.  Without rentals, there’s no point in picking up an Apple TV.

You can rent movies, at the same quality and price as the current Apple TV.  But here’s the rub, I watch TV shows every day whilst I only watch movies occasionally.  This is the difference between the Apple TV being an every day device and an occasional device.

Aside:  This is a problem that’s been spoken about in regards to the social network LinkedIn.  They were attempting to become an “every day” social network, like FaceBook, rather than a social network that’s only used occasionally.

Content Availability

This is a big issue for me and everyone else in the UK.  The content we want is not available in the iTunes store when we want it.  In fact, the content we want is not available anywhere (legally) when we want it.

It’s still the exception rather than the rule when TV content airs in the UK within a week of airing in the US.  There are only a handful of shows that this is true for (Lost and 24 being two).  Many shows never air over here and therefore never make it to the iTunes store.  And to be clear, we’re talking about some great, Emmy winning shows like Breaking Bad.

It still astonishes me that I can go on the internet and get a high quality, high definition copy of a TV show just an hour after it airs in the US, but not legally.  The revenue that is being lost in the UK (and other non-US regions) because of archaic distribution methods is staggering.

File Formats

Unfortunately, the Apple TV doesn’t help out those of us who may choose to download content that isn’t available over here because of fairly lacklustre video format support.  This isn’t a surprise, and format support doesn’t appear to have changed from the current Apple TV.  That doesn’t stop it being a disappointment.

Streaming Services

I’ll preface this by saying I wish we had a service of the quality of Netflix in the UK.  We do have a DVD-by-post rental service in LoveFilm, and it’s very good at DVDs-by-post.  It also has an online streaming service to go with it.  Unfortunately the selection is nothing short of woeful and doesn’t appear to be improving particularly quickly.  They also don’t have the slick iOS apps that Netflix have.

Netflix streaming to the Apple TV is a major feature for Netflix subscribers.  This is something that we can’t do in the UK.

Unfortunately, there’s no sweetener for British customers in the shape of BBC iPlayer support, which is appearing on multiple devices in the UK (e.g. the PS3).  All we get is YouTube.

Apps, or Lack Thereof

The lacklustre file support and lack of UK centric streaming services wouldn’t be an issue if Apple had used iOS for the Apple TV operating system and therefore allowed developers to build apps for it.  if they did, developers would have stepped in to fill the gaps.

A brilliant example of this is the iOS app Air Video.  Air Video is a fantastic app on iPhone and iPad that allows you to stream video from your PC or Mac, regardless of the format it’s in.  The server app, which sits on your computer, transcodes the video on the fly.  It’s faultless as far as I’m concerned.  And the icing on the cake is that, given a fast enough internet connection, it will work over 3g as well.

Controls

It may sound as if I’ve been a bit negative about the Apple TV so far, and that has been the case, but there are some real positives as well.  One such feature is the ability to control the Apple TV with your iPhone or iPod Touch (iPad conspicuous by its absence by the way).  This isn’t the Remote app we all know but rather something different.  It would appear to be an implementation of a multi-touch trackpad on your iPhone that controls the Apple TV.  It looks like a subset of the functionality found in Mobile Air Mouse.  It will also support using the iPhone keyboard for text entry.

Apple has created the greatest remote control in the world.

One of the benefits of using an iOS device to control the Apple TV is that it won’t require line of sight to operate, meaning you can hide the Apple TV in a cabinet, out of sight.

Hardware

Should the hardware live up to its billing as being “silent” and “cool” Apple would have created something that people actually want in their living rooms.  We’ve heard claims of near silent from media centre PC manufacturers for years, but none have been close.  If Apple have nailed this, and there’s no reason to doubt their claims – the Apple TV runs on the same A4 architecture as the iPad, and that’s silent – it will become a desirable device.  Far more so than the HDD based alternatives out there.

This will also allow the Apple TV to blend into the background, only appearing as an interface on your TV and iPhone.  It’s truly commodity entertainment.

Will I Buy One?

I’m sitting here wondering whether I’ll buy an Apple TV or not.  For me, the viability of the Apple TV will hinge on whether I can stream my existing media to the device.  Much of it is in a format that is no supported by Apple.  However, my DLNA compliant media server transcodes on the fly, so as long as the Apple TV supports DLNA server, it will work fine and by a valuable addition to my living room.

Unfortunately, it looks like the streaming Apple talks of is from iTunes only, and not other file shares, even over a DLNA compliant connection.  That’s not to say it’s a lost cause.  The USB port on the back of the Apple TV gives me hope that it will very quickly be opened up to allow homebrew software to run on the device.  And where there’s homebrew software, there’s bound to be a DLNA compliant client.  And when that happens, I’ll be there, cash in hand.

And one of the aspects of the iPad that makes it such a great content consumption device is the app store, and the thousands of apps therein. And because of the app store, anyone who wants to read their feeds on their iPad has some options.

I’ve picked up a number of feed readers since buying an iPad, so I bought I’d run through three of my favourites, all of which take fundamentally different approaches to reading your feeds.  I’m looking at News Rack, Reeder and Pulse.

News Rack (iTunes £2.99)

You could be forgiven for thinking you're using Mail

News Rack is the RSS reading app I’ve used the most over the last few weeks. Like all the apps I’m looking at it offers Google Reader integration, including folders, starred items and when your read an item in News Rack it gets read in the web version of Google Reader as well.

The drawback of this integration is that News Rack can take an age to sync. In fact, the syncing seems a bit unreliable. On a number of occasions I’ve marked an item as read in News Rack only to find back from the dead in the web version, like an unpleasant zombie news item.  It also seems inexplicable that there’s no “Open in Safari” option, which makes sharing items a painful process for people who use custom link shorteners (like me).

But apart from those slight annoyances, the app works pretty smoothly.

Like most good apps, News Rack exposes additional functionality to expert users.  For example, it may not be immediately obvious that when viewing your list of folders, touching the folder name will take you to a list of feeds whilst touching the blue unread count will take you to the list of unread items across all the feeds in that folder.

Of the apps I’m looking at here, this app is the most iPad like. If you’ve used the iPad mail app, you’ll know exactly how to use this. Sone people will see this as a positive, others a negative. It wouldn’t be far to call the interface utilitarian, on any other platform it would be considered good looking, but on the iPad, it does nothing special to make you want to use it.  The impression you get is that the News Rack developer wanted to deliver a familiar, competent experience, and in many ways they succeed.  As a user, you just have to ask yourself whether that’s the experience you want on your iPad.

Reeder (iTunes £2.99)

From Reeder’s homepage, which shows a list of folders from your Google Reeder account, you can tap a stack to view all unread items or……you can reverse pinch the stack to see a list of feeds within.

Reeder is the newest of the three I’m looking at, but shouldn’t be unfamiliar to those who have come to rely on the excellent iPhone app.  In terms of functionality, Reeder is very similar indeed to News Rack.  It syncs with Google Reader in all the usual ways, lets you view the content enclosed in the feed or the page it links to in an integrated browser.

Where the two differ hugely though is in aesthetics.  News Rack is functional, if not beautiful.  Reeder manages to be beautiful and functional.  If you were using two words describe its looks, they would be stark and minimalist.

There’s a very strong, consistent aesthetic theme to Reeder.  From the icon through to the reading experience it’s like reading a book.  There’s no untextured background anywhere in this app, and the attention to detail is phenomenal.  When launching the app, providing you’ve signed in to Google Reader, you’re presented with various piles of paper.  Each of these represent your Google Reader folders.  From here, you have options.  You can either tap  stack to get a list of unread items in that folder.  Alternatively you can use two fingers in a reverse pinch manoeuvre (isn’t that a submission hold in MMA?) to explode the stack into the constituent feeds, the same interaction that the iPad’s Photos app utilises.  And underlining Reeder’s attention to detail, if there’s a high quality favicon available, it will use it in the list of feeds (as you can see from some of the screenshots, not all sites have these yet).

One of my favourite aspects of Reeder is the underlying design philosophy.  The developers put some serious thought into what the reading experience should be like on an iPhone, and then extended that onto the iPad.  Apart from the first tap, you could navigate through all your unread items whilst holding your iPad in one hand and using the same hand to navigate with the thumb.  They pull this off by utilising the swipe move.  Swiping up or down navigates through your items.  Swiping right takes you back to your list of items.  It’s elegant simplicity and means you can churn through a vast number of feeds very very quickly.

After a while it becomes second nature, and all the tapping back and forth in apps like News Rack becomes very tedious.  I think the difference between the two apps is that one was built having seen Apple’s Mail in action, whilst the other was built after being not satisfied with Apple’s Mail.  When people talk about the second generation of iPad apps, Reeder is what they have in mind. Reeder takes what works from existing apps and builds upon them.  Standing on the shoulders of giants, if you will.  Of course, one of the apps that Reeder for iPad is built on top of is Reeder for iPhone, my favourite iPhone RSS Reader.  This really shows in that none of the problems evident with News Rack are problems for Reeder.  It syncs very quickly and I’ve not had any zombie news items yet.

There are comprehensive sharing options available

Coming back to this idea of consistency and attention to detail, I’d like to use the image to the right to demonstrate.  I’m viewing an item and I have the share menu extended.  The 12 icons in this menu all follow the same aesthetic as the rest of the application, but that’s not all that’s going on.  In the bottom left hand corner you can see a refresh button.  Around this button is a semi-circle which acts as a progress bar, growing as Reeder refreshes (and crucially, downloads images) in the background.  Everything fits into the common and consistent minimalist aesthetic.

You might be getting the impression that Reeder is the perfect solution, but it’s not.  One particularly frustrating interface mechanism it uses is swiping side to side in order to star or mark items as read/unread when viewing a list of items.  This isn’t a bad idea in itself, but the implementation makes it frustrating.  It’s just too sensitive, which makes it difficult to scroll up and down lists of items without a certain degree of concentration.  It seems that a user would be far more likely to be scrolling up and down a list than side to side, so maybe they could require more “weight” to move each item sideways than it takes to move it up and down.  Conversely, when reading an individual item it takes probably a little too much effort to move up and down to the next or previous item.  Also worth pointing out is that I’ve caused it to crash a number of times, particularly when switching between landscape and portrait orientation or when viewing a video in the integrated browser.

Some people have also criticised the application for being drab and colourless.  I don’t agree.  It’s minimalist and the splashes of colour come from the feeds you’re reading, not from the app itself.  When I’m trying to read a large number of feeds, I don’t want to be distracted by the app I’m using.  For me, Reeder strikes the balance perfectly.  However, it will come down to personal preference.

Pulse (iTunes £2.39)

The main view in Pulse

So we’ve seen one app that follows Apple’s UI conventions, almost to a flaw, and one that completely breaks away to deliver a stark, minimalist interface.  Pulse, our third application, takes a completely different approach.

It’s so different that even calling it an RSS reader is perhaps a bit misleading.  Rather, it’s an app that uses RSS to pull content.  Pulse offers Google Reader integration, but that integration takes a more restricted form than the other apps we’ve looked at.  All Pulse allows you to do (currently) is select feeds you’ve subscribed to in Google Reader to use here.  Reading items in Pulse does not mark them as read in Google Reader (and vice versa) and there’s no support for starring items nor folders.

To call this lack of integration a flaw would be disingenuous.  Pulse just takes a completely different approach.  Pulse is not about working your way through 100s of feeds, but rather about enjoying a select number of feeds in a particular way.  Pulse, as if to hammer home this philosophy, limits you to a maximum of 20 feeds at any one time.

Pulse’s strength is the way it presents feeds to the reader.  Instead of a list of post titles you get a grid filled with images.  it appears that Pulse goes through the feeds and extracts the first image it comes across, it then adds that image to the grid.  The result is pretty stunning, and it feels like your holding the future of news consumption in your hand.

Text View in Pulse

Tapping an item makes the content behind it slide in from the right, which also pushes the area you touched to the left so that it’s still visible.  From here you have the option to view the text or web version of the article, or share it.  There are a couple of things to note here.  When Pulse says “Text” view, it really means it.  The image you saw on the main grid is presented to the left of the text but all other images are stripped out.  Also stripped out is any formatting you may have added (including headers) and links.  It also seems to struggle somewhat with certain characters – as you can see from the screenshot to the right, apostrophes seem to cause it issues in the body text.  For an app that appears to pride itself on its looks, these seem like strange oversights.  Fortunately the typography is very legible and attractive.

Web View in Pulse

Fortunately you can quickly and easily switch to “Web” view, which shows you the linked article in an embedded web browser.  The image to the right shows the same story as the one shown above but this time in “Web” view rather than text view.  This in itself has some problems.  The area dedicated to viewing the content when in this view is slightly too small for some sites, making it difficult to read comfortably.  This leaves you with a strange choice, you can have an unformatted, readable slab of text which will be missing many of the aspects the content producer wanted you to see – or – an article formatted the way it was meant to be but very possibly too small to read comfortably.

Unfortunately, there are other issues with Pulse.  One that keeps coming up again and again for me is an issue loading the images from feeds.

Pulse does have problems pulling in images

First time I launch Pulse the first couple of rows populate but the rest do not (see image to the left, which is the exact same view as the first image in this section).  Quitting the app and relaunching it seems to pull in the other images.  Be aware that while Pulse is pulling in the images it can become unresponsive to the point where you might think it’s crashed.  The omission of any sort of progress indicator doesn’t help.  You might also find that even once the images have all loaded scrolling through the list still causes stutters.

It all adds to the impression that the app perhaps needed a little more work to perfect.

At this point I feel like I’ve been unduly harsh on Pulse – I actually really enjoy using it.  There are two adaptations I’ve made to my habits in order for me to enjoy it.  Firstly, I made sure that the feeds I loaded into it are image-heavy.  There’s no point loading in a bunch of feeds that don’t include images.  Secondly, I launch the app, wait a few seconds and then close it.  I then launch it again.  This seems to almost guarantee the images load.

Pulse may surprise you in the way it navigates.  Don’t think of it as a table of images on a sheet of paper that you can move around, it doesn’t work like that.  Instead you move each row horizontally independently.  This surprised me, and it may surprise you.

Conclusion

There are only two apps that can be fairly compared head to head, News Rack and Reeder.  Pulse, whilst sounding similar actually occupies a different space and is used for a different purpose.  You aren’t going to use Pulse to trawl through 100s of feeds, reading many of them.  That is the purpose for which News Rack and Reeder were designed.  Out of the two, for that purpose, Reeder wins hands down.  It’s more elegant, it’s easier to use and it feels like it was designed for a tablet.  Since picking up Reeder I’ve stopped using News Rack.  It’s odd that the touches that make News Rack an attractive iPhone app are completely missing whereas Reeder carries through the iPhone app’s look and feel and intuitive functionality.

If Reeder is the app I use to catch up on my feeds, Pulse is the app I use when I’m bored.  It’s a relaxing, enjoyable way to browse through content that suits discovery and inspiration more than heavy reading.

All three apps are competent, similarly priced and the one you pick up will inevitably depend on what you want to do, and how you want to do it.

O2's Tariff means you'll struggle to take advantage of the new iPhone

The Plans

I thought it would be interesting to compare the current plan I’m on to an equivalent plan with O2 at the rates they announced today.  You can see the full list of tariffs here.

Whilst O2 has given unlimited SMS messages, they’ve removed the unlimited data bundle, removed MMS messages from the SMS bundle and halved the number of inclusive minutes.  No matter which way you spin it, it’s a massive step backwards for O2 who have traditionally had very competitive tariffs.

The Justification

O2 clearly understood that this would not be a popular move and have been on the defensive since the announcement.  The official O2 twitter account followed the announcement with links to a blog post by O2 CEO Ronan Dunne and a press release detailing the changes as well as increasingly defensive replies to angry customers.

I want to look at the Ronan Dunne post in a little bit of detail, because it provides some insights into O2′s reasoning, flawed reasoning, behind these changes.  In that post, they roll out a few numbers in an attempt to justify the change to data allowances.  They claim that the amount of data passing through their network is doubling every four months (“At O2, we’re seeing a doubling of data traffic on our networks every four months”).  That 97% of their users use less than the 500MB lowest inclusive allowance (“The vast majority of our users will be completely unaffected by the changes – 97% of our smartphone customers currently use less than 500MB of data every month”) and that 0.1% of their users are the ones who are using significantly more (“Nearly a third of our data traffic is accounted for by just 0.1% of our customer base, for example”).

So to be clear, 0.1% of their users are the ones abusing the unlimited data, yet based on current usage, 3% of users will have to pay more for data.  But that’s not the whole story.  In the comments on the blog post an O2 representative makes the following statement:

the average customer uses 200MB per month – by applying these limits across everyone they are fair and transparent.

Now we have some figures to play around with, we can attempt to work out how many people will actually be disadvantaged by these changes.

O2 say that data usage is doubling every four months.  Whilst it’s difficult to get hold of current and past subscriber numbers for O2, I think it’s safe to say that their user base isn’t doubling every four months.  That means the average data use per subscriber is increasing.  Now I doubt that the average data use is doubling every four months (a figure which would be in line with the networks overall data usage increase rate), so let’s say that the average data consumption per user doubles every  6 months, 50% slower than the overall network usage growth.  This means that your average user, who is currently using 200MB will be using 400MB in six months, 800MB in 12 months.  Within 12 months they will be comfortably over O2′s new data cap, and this is an average customer who would be only part way through either an 18 or 24 month contract.  This could leave many users in a difficult situation, having to either curtail their usage or pay more.

This speculation is fairly arbitrary.  The unknown variable is whether mobile data usage will continue to grow at the same pace.  If I were a betting man, which I am, I would bet the house on it growing faster as more capable handsets such as the iPhone 4 and HTC HDs come to the UK market.

What Doesn’t Add Up?

There’s a telling sentence in Ronan Dunne’s blog post:

So while data consumption is growing at enormous rates, our revenues are largely flat – a far from ideal situation for any business, least of all one growing as fast as ours.

So is the real problem O2 being unable to monetise mobile data use?  That’s surely part of the problem, especially with Apple’s iPhone which gives mobile operators far less control than the average handset (many other phones have custom software, custom settings, default homepages etc loaded on them, the iPhone does not), but there’s another problem.  O2, and they aren’t unique in this regard, failed to predict just how popular mobile data would be.  Again from Ronan Dunne:

When the mobile industry first heard the word “smartphone”, few of us realised how smart these devices would eventually turn out to be. Today, though, their extraordinary power is visible to anyone. They have literally changed our world, in ways that the first smartphone creators could barely have imagined; they entertain, help us navigate around unfamiliar cities or countries and keep us in touch with each other in myriad ways. For tens of millions of people around the world, it’s hard to imagine life without one.

To make all this happen, of course, we need data. And that in turn means that we are becoming increasingly reliant on data networks that were originally conceived with far dumber devices in mind. Thanks largely to smartphones, those networks are under greater pressure every day – one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once.

Emphasis mine.

They designed their mobile data networks for the phones that existed at the time, rather than the phones that were just around the corner.  Because of this massive oversight, the customer is having to pay, and pay big.

In the table earlier in this post I put the years in which these tariffs were offered to add a bit of context.  Context that shows haw far backwards O2 have gone in three years.

The changes to the tariff, specifically the data changes represent one of two things.  Either it’s a cash grab on O2′s part or it’s a stop gap.  The problem with the first is that they will lose subscribers, the problem with the second is that this issue is only going to get worse.  Data usage will increase, average consumers will consume more and demand more, whilst expecting to pay less.

And The Rest?

As I mentioned at the top of this post, O2 have been firefighting the negative comments all day.  Yet they have completely dodged the questions that ask why the voice allowance has been halved.  All the talk of fairness and transparency is completely lost when they also pull a stunt like this.  It also undermines their claims that this is a data issue caused by Smart Phones.

We’ve also managed to pick up a few more little bits of information regarding the changes, which I’ve listed below:

• When you go over your allowance, you won’t be cut off.  Instead your speed will be capped, gradually decreasing.  No specifics have been given.
• O2 will text you when you are approaching your limit, no doubt trying to sell you a bolt-on for more data.  I don’t want my phone provider texting me trying to sell me something they should (and used to) provide in the first place thankyouverymuch.  This is borderline spam in my book.
• MMS no longer counting as 3 SMS messages from your SMS allowance has apparently been in place for some time.  I’m sure that 600 messages was plenty for most people, and they would have rather kept their MMS deal.  I know I would.
• If you don’t use your entire data allowance in one month, the amount you didn’t use won’t roll over to the next.

Public Perception

The biggest problem O2 now have is one of public perception.  Looking at the tariff comparison it looks as if O2 are going backwards.  They don’t look like a network that’s progressing and improving, despite claims of million pound daily investments.  They look like a network that’s struggling to keep up with demand.  A network that got their future usage predictions completely and horribly wrong.

Me? Well I’ve used 955MB this months and I’ll probably be going on to Three, who have far better 3G coverage than any other network according to Ofcom (PDF).  I can no longer call myself a loyal and long term O2 customer.  This was my reaction when I first saw the new tariffs:

Great. Apple introduce multi-tasking so you can stream music and @o2 counters it with data plans from the 1990s.

Note that the new O2 tariffs are for all Smart Phones, not just the iPhone 4.  However, they come into force the day the new iPhone launches, so I’ll let you put two and two together.

Some of these concerns stem from the way early adopters, and Apple’s marketing team, have described the iPad. There’s been a dearth of tangible benefits in the reviews, which is worrying. Rather, we’ve had words like “magical” used in the marketing materials and many reviewers talking of holding the Internet in their hands and other equally intangible, subjective descriptions.

However, after spending nearly two days with the iPad, and barely putting it down, I can see where they’re coming from.

We can, and probably will, debate the technical merits of this device over the coming months, but that doesn’t go any way to touching on the level of enjoyment you get from this device. It really is like nothing else out there. If you’ve picked up a Windows or Archos tablet over the years, and you think the iPad is cut from the same mould, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is the antithesis to a Windows tablet, and it’s the sort of device the Archos engineers dream of in their sleep.

Social

Something that you may not fully grasp about the iPad is that it’s the most social computing experience you could ever wish to have. When I’m using my MacBook, I’m usually lazing on the sofa next to my partner who’s watching something on TV – it’s quite an anti-social experience. The MacBook’s screen forms a wall between us, and the humming of the fans can be distracting (it’s far more than a distraction if I dare watch a movie in Flash, it’s downright disturbing) to the other person. It’s also a bit of an ordeal to show another person what’s on the screen, usually involving some sort of balancing and/or juggling.

The iPad is different. It’s silent. Completely and utterly silent. Even swiping, tapping, typing produces nothing but a faint muffled sound which wouldn’t disturb a sleeping dormouse. Many computers claim to be silent, or quiet, but this is the only one I’ve come across that actually achieves true silence. And it’s golden.

Another way in which the iPad differs from a laptop is in the mechanics of physically interacting with it. If you’re using a laptop, the form factor dictates a relatively flat surface on which to rest the hardware. No such restriction exists with the iPad, it’s more akin to reading a book or magazine. The wall has been demolished, and sharing content with another person is about as simple as it can get. Flip the iPad over and the screen automatically rotates to the appropriate orientation for them. The IPS screen does a wonderful job of allowing wide viewing angles, making the entire process much easier and less haphazard.

This is social computing not in the FaceBook or Twitter sense, but rather in the more tangible person with you in the room sense.

Simplicity

Apple’s iPad

I said above that the iPad is the antithesis to a Windows tablet, and it is, at least in terms of execution. The iPad is once again a closed system. You have to buy apps from the app store and you have to activate it through iTunes. This approach doesn’t seem to bother people with Blu Ray players or games consoles, but it really seems to bother people when it comes to Apple devices. It doesn’t bother me, and I attribute the stability of my iPhone at least in part to this approach.

Either way, people should know by now what they are getting in to. The more of the eco system you buy in to, the greater the benefit.

When it comes to functionality, Apple have taken a very deliberate iterative approach to their mobile products. Each version does a little more than the last, but they make sure that everything it does do, it does well. Contrast this to a Windows Tablet that will do anything you want, badly. I remember the good old days of Windows Tablets where a massive memory leak ensured that you couldn’t use the tablet for any length of time without is crashing. This bug persisted for years. The applications on Windows tablets are also just normal Windows Applications. There’s very little incentive to adapt applications to work with a touch screen, making them awkward to use.

The iPad is fundamentally different. Every app is optimised for at the minimum a touch screen, and many are optimised for the very screen your using. The iPad doesn’t do everything, in fact there’s a lot that it doesn’t do. But rest assured, everything it does do, it does well.

Metaphors

It’s clear that Apple are rolling with the book metaphor with the iPad. The marketing videos show people enjoying the iPad in positions you might usually find them enjoying a book, The case opens like a book, and stands like a book. The iBooks App is heavy with book metaphors, like the book case and the page turn effect.

But the book metaphor doesn’t stop there. Looking through some of the core apps it’s clear that Apple were using a consistent design language throughout the apps. The address book, for the first time, actually looks like a physical address book. Likewise the notes app. And the calendar app looks like a beautiful planner. It’s all there, and in other devices it may come across as tacky, but the consistency really allows Apple to pull it off.

Content Creation Vs Content Consumption

An interesting debate was raging around the time of the US iPad launch as to whether it’s a capable content creation device or whether it’s purely for consuming content.

Well first, it has to be said that the iPad is a spectacular content consumption device. Possibly the best I’ve ever used. Browsing the internet is a step above any other internet browsing device I’ve tried, even with the gaping hole that Flash leaves. It’s so fast and so responsive that the simple action of scrolling around pages and following links is enjoyable. The iPad also scores highly when it comes to rendering content, typography is crisp and sharp and readable, images vibrant and if video is encoded correctly it can look great.

But what about as a content creation device? Well sorry to be a little coy, but it depends on the type of content being created. Apps like Brushes allow a great freedom to create artwork that would require specialist equipment with a regular computer (namely a tablet). It’s fluid, and easy to use and fairly comprehensive. For text creation, it can be hit and miss. If you’ve got the optional wireless keyboard, or the keyboard dock, it’s a joy. You do have to change your habits somewhat so that you aren’t constantly reaching for a mouse, but you get over that quickly. Without a hardware keyboard, it’s more difficult. The soft keyboard is one of the best, but has the same problems as any soft keyboard. A particular problem I had was accidental key presses.

There are types of content you simply can’t create on an iPad. Video editors for example are left mostly out in the dark, although I’m sure there are video editing apps on the way. Likewise if you’re a developer of any kind, there are no usable iPad IDEs, although that’s no surprise. Music editors and creators are fairly well catered for though.

Multi Media

The big surprise for me was not the quality of the video but rather the quality of the audio. It’s very very good for integrated audio on a device this size. It feels as if Apple are using the case to reverberate the audio internally to give it a bit of depth.

Video is very nice, although the strange ratio of the screen does take something away. Widescreen is to too wide, and if you zoom in it’s a bit too close, leaving you with an unmistakeable feeling that you’re missing something just out of screen.

The iPad app is also a little strange, for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it feels like a missed opportunity. There’s enough screen space to do something spectacular, but the current interface feels a little workmanlike. The iPod Touch’s Videos / iPod split is back, which will be a new experience for iPhone users.

Industrial Design

The WiFi only and 3G + WiFi versions

I want to get down a few thoughts on the hardware itself. The iPad itself is heavier than you might expect, but not uncomfortably so (YMMV). It also feels incredibly well put together. All the seems and joins are tight, there’s no flex at all, which is unusual given the huge screen and back, and all the physical buttons, all four of them, move in a satisfying way.

In my two days of ownership the iPad has never become warmer than the room it’s in and battery life has been nigh on unbelievable. I’m writing this on the iPad, using a bluetooth keyboard, so bluetooth is on. WiFi and 3G are also both on and the screen brightness is on auto. I’ve been using the iPad pretty much constantly since 10AM this morning (it’s now gone midnight) for web browsing, video watching app using and even using Google Maps over 3G while out an about. The battery is currently sitting at 34%. There are some things you can do to drain the battery faster though. For example, I played the scrabble app last night using two iPhones as the tile racks. This caused a bit of a hit on battery life, but even so (and bear in mind it meant establishing a constant bluetooth connection with 2 devices and running a game) you shouldn’t worry about getting through a game.

Going back to the screen ration briefly. Whilst it not perfect for video, it’s not far off perfect for reading books and websites. It’s also pretty close for photos. The size of the device also feels right for the sort of tasks you’ll be using it for.

The Proof of the Pudding…

The best summary I can give, and the best endorsement is this. Since the iPad came out I’ve spoken to two people who were absolutely adamant before the launch that they wouldn’t buy one. One of these people is actually fairly anti-Apple. After trying the iPad, they’ve both gone out and bought one, and theta both love it. It’s that sort of device. Apple has been using emotional language to describe it because it’s an emotional device. There are few logical and technical reasons to buy an iPad; you’ll buy one because when you try one you’ll feel an attraction to it.

So have you picked one up yet? Have you tried one? What did you think?

Note: I’ve been using a 32GB 3G iPad and this post, in its entirety was written on it using the free WordPress app.

It all feels a little, well, sleazy.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else we can do at the moment.  Apple are yet to announce either pricing or a release date for the iPad in the UK.  For the record, Apple says “late April” for a release date (rumours peg it at April 24th) and “unbelievable” as the price point (I did a statistical analysis of pricing previously).

This has left me, personally, in a strange position.  I’m almost equal parts excited and nervous for the UK’s iPad launch.  The source of the excitement is obvious.  The reviews are overwhelmingly positive, save for the limitations that we all knew about already (no Flash, no third party multi-tasking, locked down eco-system).  And as I tweeted earlier, “I think complaining about the iPad’s lack of Flash is like complaining that the first plane didn’t have a steering wheel. It’s a new way“.  I don’t think that point is being conveyed enough in the reviews that are out so far.  You can’t compare this to extant computing experiences, it’s completely new, completely different.  Comparing an iPad to a netbook is as pointless as comparing a Boeing 747 to a Model-T Ford.  Yes, they accomplish some of the same tasks, but they take a completely different approach, are aimed at different usage scenarios and should be celebrated for that.  I equally wouldn’t want to compare a netbook to an iPad, or a Digital Camera to a grapefruit.

I’m particularly excited by some of the apps that we’re already seeing.  VNC clients like Desktop Connect offer a window into ay computer in the world, whilst iDisplay expands the window of your desktop.  The iWork suite seems to offer a whole new way to create documents.  And those are fairly work-like apps.  The real heavy usage from me will come from iPad versions of apps like the brilliant Air Video, which currently allows me to stream video from my iMac to my iPhone over Wi-Fi and 3G with on-the-fly encoding.  The iPad version of Scrabble blows my mind (use the iPad as the board and separate iPhone apps to hold each player’s tiles).

And that’s without even mentioning the gaming potential.  Plants Vs Zombies in HD is enough to win me over, despite the fact that’ll be the third platform I’ve bought it for.

So my excitement is palpable, and, in my opinion, well founded.  So why the nervousness?  As usual, it stems from being in the UK.  Let’s start with the price.  When I calculated the price based on previous releases i came out with a figure of between £400 and £650.  Given the current exchange rates, and international markets, I can see this being markedly higher.  I’d love Apple to prove me wrong on this one, but it seems unlikely.

I also foresee some issues with the 3G version, otherwise known as the version I want to buy.  Apple scored a major win with AT&T in the states.  The $30 a month, unlimited, without commitment, cancel-at-any-time bundle they’re offering is groundbreaking, and game changing.  Will they be able to score a similar deal in the UK?  I don’t know.  One of the factors that will work against Apple here is the way mobile operators heavily subsidise phone handsets.  Subsidies are far heavier here than in the states.  In fact, some of the rumours that have been doing the rounds have speculated that Apple have delayed any UK announcement because the mobile operators are trying to work out ways to tie in consumers.

The other elephant in the room is the iBooks app and ecosystem.  Whilst not on the same scale as Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, Apple have managed to get together a decent choice of books for the US launch.  However, take a look at the US iPad and iBooks pages and it makes it clear that iBooks is “US only”.  This isn’t a surprise.  Books rights are notoriously more complicated and entrenched in the UK when compared to the US.  Anyone who’s tried buying an audio book on Audible will know that the selection in the UK is a fraction of that found in the US store.  It remains to be seen whether or not Apple will even bother to offer the iBooks app in the UK so we can take advantage of the ePub support they baked in.

The same issue, availability, crops up with some of the most interesting looking iPad apps that have shown up so far.  The Marvel Comics app, for example, will be horribly crippled in this country due to a complete lack of availability of digital comics in this country.  Anyone who’s looked at the existing iPhone apps for viewing comics will know all about this issue.  Similarly the Netflix app, which looks really cool, won’t be available here and the UK equivalent, LoveFilm, offer an app but there’s no indication that their pathetically limited watch on demand service will be coming to the iPad.

So as you can tell, I’m torn.  On the one hand there’s a device that I believe is going to be truly revolutionary.  On the other, many of its best aspects are going to be crippled in good ‘ol Blighty, not to mention the always evasive release schedule and price.

Regardless, I’ll see you in the queues the morning of release.

Since then, it’s grown significantly in usefulness.  I don’t know when the two features I’m about to describe were implemented (I suspect that one of them, at least, has been there since the beginning), but they’ve only become obvious to me recently.

Image Manipulation

When I redesigned this blog I created several areas around the layout for the insertion of images.  For these areas to work well, they require images of specific sizes (pixel sizes, rather than file size).  After a couple of posts it became a real pain to do this resizing and cropping in the image editing applications I usually use, Photoshop and Pixelmator.  Even with the relative svelteness of Pixelmator (relative to Photoshop), it can take a frustratingly long time just to crop an image.

So it was with a slight air of frustration that I went seeking for a lightweight image re-sizer and cropper.

I looked at a couple of products but none really fitted the bill.  It was at that point I saw various people mentioning this functionality in Preview and, lo and behold, it’s there.  Now this may not be hidden, in the true sense of the word, but it’s hidden in that I didn’t even think to look in preview for it.

Image Adjustments

Preview includes some fairly powerful image adjustment tools

Preview comes bundles with what are some fairly advanced image adjustment tools.  In the same style as iPhone, these aren’t pixel adjustments, but rather whole image adjustments.  These tools include changing the Sharpness, Exposure and Contrast as well as colour adjustments like saturation, white balance, temperature and tint.  You can also have a manual play with the levels.

It’s pretty much the same tool as the one seen in iPhoto, so anyone who’s used to that will be right at home here.  To bring up the Adjustments dialogue head to the slightly conservative “Adjust Color” item in Tools, or press OPTION+COMMAND+C.

Cropping

Crop is in the tools menu

Cropping is predictably easy.  Simply pick a Select tool (there are the usual rectangle, elliptical and polygonal varieties) and draw the area you want to crop.  Then choose “Crop” from the tools menu, or press COMMAND + K.  And there you have it, the image is cropped.  Save it in the usual manner, and you’re done.

Resizing

Choose “Adjust Size” in the Tools menu to get a dialogue that allows for the image to be resized.  There are the usual options present, allowing you to choose absolute sizes based on pixels or real-world measurements (e.g. inches), some presets and the option to lock the aspect ratio.

PDF Slimming

OSX, unlike Windows, provides native PDF support.  You can save pretty much anything as a PDF in OSX and Preview takes care of opening them once created.  However, it doesn’t end there.  OSX’s PDF engine is actually far more sophisticated than many commercial PDF creation tools.

One feature of OSXs PDF engine that comes in particularly useful is its efficiency.  You can take a PDF file and vastly reduce its size.  To demonstrate this I took a random PDF file from my downloads folder (I’ve no idea where it came from, although I think it was linked from the brilliant Photoshop Disasters) and reduced its size.

It's possible to vastly reduce the size of a PDF file in Preview

What the image above demonstrates is the original file’s details on the left and the reduced versions on the right.

There are two levels of file reduction possible, one is lossless (i.e. there is no perceivable loss in quality post reduction) whereas the other is not.

In order to achieve the first level of file size reduction, all you have to do is save the PDF in Preview.  That’s it.  So to reduce the 1.5MB PDF file seen here to 844 KB all you have to do is save it in Preview.  That’s an almost 50% saving.

To achieve the next level of reduction requires some work.  Not a lot, just a couple of clicks in fact.  To make the reduction, fire up the Save As dialogue.  In this dialogue you’ll see a Quartz Filter drop down.  This allows you to apply various effects to the document, one of which is “Reduce File Size”.

Using this option when saving produces a dramatic reduction in file size.  As you can see in my example, the PDF file’s size has now dropped to just under 300 KB.  That’s one fifth of its original size and about one third of its already reduced size.

A word of warning though.  Using the “Reduce File Size” option can have some strange effects.  Some of the images in the PDF lost their colours.  All the text remained the same as before.  So be careful and, as always, your mileage may vary.

Are there any hidden Preview gems I’ve missed out on?  This is a little powerhouse app.

I’m not one to let a little thing like a complete lack of facts hold me back though!  Here I’ve taken the entire Apple line up, from the iPod Shuffle through to the MacPro and plotted the US and UK prices on a graph.  From that graph we can extract some interesting information, and use that information to predict the price of the iPad.

Comparing Apple's US prices against its UK prices. The trend shows it ahead of the exchange rate.

A couple of things to note about the graph.  The second line you see is a control data set.  This is the current (as of 29th January 2010) exchange rate between the USD and GBP.  It also needs to be pointed out that the UK prices include VAT (Value Added Tax) at 15% whereas the US prices do not include any state sales taxes that may be applied.  In the UK we pay tax, so I think it’s fair to include it here.  I’ve omitted the iPhone from the data because it’s subsidised price would potentially have skewed the data in one direction or another.

So what can we do with this data?  Well, the first thing we want to do is use it to figure out the price of the iPad.  To do this we need to take the Average Apple Exchange Rate.  This rate is, rounded to two decimal places, 1.26.  So, on average, to get the US price from the UK price you multiply the UK price by 1.26.  Or in the reverse, divide the US price by 1.26 in order to get the UK price.  So what do we end up with as far as iPad prices go?

Predicted UK prices for the iPad

I think all those prices look realistic.  What remains to be seen is whether Apple rounds up or down the prices.  They do this in the US, and they occasionally do it in the UK, but not consistently.

So for a WiFi only, 16GB version of the iPad, expect to be paying in the region of £395.  £475 for a WiFi only 32GB version and £554 for a WiFi only 64GB version.  If you want 3G then add approximately £103.

However, digging a little deeper into the figures we can see that whilst the average exchange is approximately 1.26, there is quite a wide spread.  The Apple TV, for example, has an almost 1 to 1 exchange rate (x1.02) whilst the MacBook Pro runs at a healthier x1.32 (although still nowhere near the official currency exchange rate of x1.62).  I’ve added these ranges to the table below, along with the control data (price if you did a direct exchange conversion).

Potential Price Ranges for the iPad

As you can see, when you get to the top end there’s a difference of almost £200, which is not insubstantial.

The elephant in the room is whether the iPad will be subsidised in the UK by mobile operators.  It’s common here, as it is in the US, for mobile carriers to subsidise mobile phones.  However, it’s also common here for mobile providers to subsidise the cost of laptops and especially netbooks.  The only reason I can see for Apple keeping the price secret is that they’re waiting to get a deal sorted with a mobile carrier so they can release a subsidised version.

The Data used for these calculations

This image shows the data I used to reach these figures.  It’s actually a fascinating little data set that warrants further investigation.  I certainly have some statistical questions I’d like to pose it.  For example, which group of products generally fares the best when coming across the pond.  I’d also like to expand it to include software and upgrades at some point in the future.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your expensive/cheap (delete as appropriate) iPad.

If you enjoyed this post about Apple, you’ll probably also enjoy 2 Preview Hidden Gems, which helps you get the most out of OSX’s built in Preview.app.

It appears that many tech commenting sites and blogs have pitched their tents on one side of the fence already.  ”It’s the future, it’ll revolutionise the way we use the internet and consume media” one side cries. “It’s over-priced and under-featured” rallies the other.

I’m rather more cautious in proclaiming the beginning of a brave new world, or the end of an old one.  Rather, I’d like to run through a few questions that sprang to mind when I saw Apple’s iPad for the first time.

Hello Former Colony, Where’s The Love?

Apple’s iPad

We’ve been told that it’s an international release of the WiFi version, but there’s no comment on when the 3G version will release internationally.  Looking at the descriptions available, it sounds as if the 3G version of the iPad either comes pre-fitted with an AT&T SIM that can be removed and swapped for another carrier, or it uses AT&T by default unless there’s another SIM card inserted.  Either way, this hampers international releases until Apple can sort out carrier partners.

However, the even more egregious omission at the moment is a price.  We simply don’t know how much the iPad is going to cost in the UK.  If you go to the Apple UK site, there’s no mention of it.  At all.  And if you go to www.apple.com/uk/ipad, you get a 404 (adding a “/uk” to the URL is a sure-fire way to get to the UK version of an Apple page usually).

Another flaring omission for us UKers is iBooks.  The small print on the iPad page clearly states that iBooks is “US only”.  Launching without a BookStore would greatly hamper the iPad’s success I feel, with the caveat that the ability to import books would negate this issue partly.

Is Apple Trying to Make Flash Irrelevant?

If the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all we know at the moment is that the demo versions don’t, it’s a clear statement from Apple that they have kept Flash off their mobile devices for non-technical reasons.

Given the blazing performance of this device, it’s clear that from a technical standpoint it has the horsepower to run Flash.    It’s omission draws a line in the sand.  if you’re a website owner, producer or developer, then using Flash will lock out anyone who uses not only the most popular smart phone on the planet, but also one of the most popular music players and what will inevitably become the most popular tablet.  Are you willing to take that risk?

For the record, if Apple are trying to kill off Flash I hope they succeed.  If you’re looking at providing video over the web, for example, HTML 5 is more than sufficient for 99% of the use cases.  Flash is a relic of “old web thinking”.  It’s closed, and propriety, and badly written.  It also seems to be the source of a number of stability and security issues.

Has Apple Made Ebook Readers Irrelevant?

The starting price of the Apple iPad is only $10 more than that of the Amazon Kindle DX

The Amazon Kindle DX displays a limited selection of mostly text-based content, like books and newspapers.  The iPad does the same, as well as providing a full web browser, a multimedia player, a platform for a myriad of apps and a whole bunch of other things.  The Amazon Kindle DX costs $489.  The iPad starts at $499.  The Amazon Kindle DX just became irrelevant as a value proposition.

I’m sure certain ebook readers will continue to fill in niche gaps in the market for a very limited client base, but overall, I suspect Apple has just destroyed that market.

How Does it Hook Up to External Displays?

In line with my prediction that the iPad would be used for content creation as well as consumption, Apple announced iWork for the iPad.  iWork looks pretty spectacular by all accounts.  But hidden away amongst the details was mention of projector support.  How will this work?  How will the iPad connect to the projector and will it only work with Keynote?  Could you, for example, output a movie in HD through the same means?  If not, why not and how long until someone finds a workaround?

How Does it Deal With Storage and Documents?

When I saw that Apple were releasing iWork for the iPad my immediate thought was, is there an accessible file system?  Just how will Apple let you move these documents you create on the iPad back and forth between machines?  Is this where iWork.com comes in?  Hopefully not.  Will documents sync through iTunes?  That also seems unlikely (and basically excludes it from corporate networks in any usable way).  So how will they do it?

How Long Can Apple Hide The Ugly 3G Version?

I present to you these two photos, taken from apple.com.

The 3g version of the iPad has an ugly black plastic cover on the case

Does it Come With a Free Chair?

You can only use an iPad if you're "this" relaxed

When discussing the usability issues of the iPad, I questioned how one might type on it.  Would you hold it like an iPhone and type with your thumbs?  Would you rest it on a table and type on it like a laptop?  Turns out I was wrong.  What you actually have to do is find a reclining chair, rest the iPad on your thighs, and then type away.

I tweeted shortly after the presentation that:

If I didn’t know better, some of the pictures of today’s Apple event make it look like Steve Jobs did it at home, on his sofa.

I said this rather flippantly, but looking through much of the media currently available on the iPad, the core usage scenario seems to be “relaxing somewhere with my feet up”.

It is the interaction mechanics that worry the most about this device, and many of my issues have been glossed over.  Having said that, sitting with my feet up is how I use my laptop 90% of the time, so I can really see myself using this device in place of my MacBook.

Update!

A post went up at MacRumors which states there is external display support as well as some sort of mountable file system, so consider those questions at least partially answered, for now.

16th October 2003

The year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger

This is the earliest Apple Special invite I could find.  Very clearly aimed at the music market, and carrying heavy iPod branding this event was rumoured to be an unveiling of iTunes for Windows, and that’s exactly what it was.

It’s easy to understate the importance of this event but in Apple’s recent history, it’s one of the biggest.  Porting iTunes to Windows allowed iPods to work with Windows, the biggest operating system on the planet.  It was at this point the iPod leapt from a niche product to a mainstream darling.  Image Source.

7th September 2005

1000 Songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again.

With hindsight, you could chose to read quite a lot into this invite.  Like the previous invite, this is clearly aimed at the iTunes / iPod ecosystem.  Looking at the image used in the invitation you might like to assume that the iPod at the time would have fitted into the pocket in the jeans.  You might also like to assume that the iPod Nano would fit into the smaller pocket also present in the picture.  It was the iPod Nano that was the announced at this event.

This event was also noteworthy for the release of  the original iPhone.  Well, the Motorola ROKR E1, the ill fated first phone to integrate with iTunes.  This collaboration really didn’t deliver what users wanted from an Apple Phone, or even a phone that was capable of linking to iTunes.  Image Source.

12th October 2005

One more thing...

If you had to choose one word to describe the theme of this invite, it would probably be some variation of “show”.  The “One more thing…” tagline, a staple of Apple events that sets its announcements apart from other companies because of it’s showmanship, and the theatre curtains, both point to a show or a performance.

It is therefore a tad surprising that the rumours circulating around the time of this event were so mundane.  An updated G5 tower and G4 PowerBooks, whilst important to the core Apple user base, aren’t terribly exciting.  What’s less surprising is that all the announcements were related, at least tenuously, with performances, visual performances.  We had the first iMac to come with an iSight camera built in, the first video iPod and iTunes version 6.  Image Source.

28th February 2006

Come see some fun new products from Apple.

As far back as I can remember, this was the strangest and most disappointing Apple event of recent times.  In sharp contrast to the previous event (12t October 2005), the rumours were far more exciting than the actual reveals. People were expecting what we now know is the iPod Touch and some of the first Intel powered iBooks, but instead they got the Apple Hi-Fi and a Mac Mini Core Duo.  If the last event could be summed up with “Show” I think this one could be summed up with “Meh”.  Image Source.

12th September 2006

It's Showtime

In a similar vein to the “One more thing…” invitation, this was clearly aimed at the iTunes ecosystem (with a general theme of entertainment) and it notable for having one of the few reveals that truly came out of left field, the Apple TV (or iTV as it was originally named at this event).  We also saw iTunes 7 and second generations of the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle.  Image Source.

25th September 2006

Start photokina a little early this year.

This invite was sent out very shortly after the previous invite (“It’s Showtime”, above) and the event was only a week or so later.  There was no mystery at all to this particular event, held at the photokina photography event, and clearly referencing Aperture, everyone knew what was coming.  This was the announcement, and almost immediate release, of Aperture version 1.5.  Probably more important than the even itself was the ability to download a trial of Aperture 1.5 a week later, and a very quick turnaround on a patch barely a week later again.  Image Source.

15th April 2007

Lights Camera Apple

Much like the Photokina event above, this invite was related to the NAB event in 2007.

Many in the industry hailed some of the Apple products announced at this special event as revolutionary.  The headliners were Final Cut Studio 4 and Final Cut Server.  Final Cut Server especially was an insightful move by Apple, given the direction media creators were heading in, namely to distributed computer systems with share libraries and resources.  We also saw the introduction of some very specific stand-alone technologies and products, like Apple ProRes, Motion 3 and Color.

A very specific, focus presentation to a very specific audience.  The invitation clearly pointed towards the content contained within.  Image Source.

5th September 2007

The beat goes on.

The rumours prior to this event were pretty accurate.  Many people were eagerly expecting a phone-less iPhone, and we got the iPod Touch.  I’ll also remember this event for the release of the rather oddly shaped iPod Nano, the square one.  We also got the iPod Classic, with its huge storage capacity, and to accompany the iPod Touch, the WiFi iTunes store.

As seems to be the way, this iPod focused event got an iPod focused invitation.  Apple left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to what the topic of conversation was going to be.  Image Source.

WWDC, 9th June 2008

A landmark event. In more ways than one.

Whilst not really a special event, this invite was sent out for the keynote that kicked off WWDC 2008.  I wanted to include it because I thought the imagery used matched the keynote itself.

The images used in the invite has the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco duplicated and heading to two different locations.  The keynote was similarly split into two.  The first half was concentrated almost entirely around the iPhone SDK and even included a demonstration on stage of a basic application being built.  The second half of the keynote was far more consumer orientated and included the revealing of Mobile Me and the iPhone 3G.

I don’t think too much can be read into the invitation here as it was certainly more about the entire WWDC event rather than just the keynote.  I just liked the way the imagery used mirrored the keynote, whether it was intentional or not.  Image Source.

9th September 2009

Let's Rock

Well, that certainly looks like an iPod interface, doesn’t it?  The timing of this event combined with this invitation once again left no doubt as to the topic of the event, iPods.  At this one we got the second generation iPod Touch, the fourth generation iPod Nano as well as a new version of iTunes (v8) complete with HD movies.  Image Source.

14th October 2008

The spotlight turns to notebooks.

Looking through this list, it sort of feels like Apple’s lost a bit of the adventure some of the early events had.  Through the years it appears as if the invitations are getting less and less vague.  Apple is setting more realistic expectations.  No doubt this has something to do with their greater size and exposure to the stock market, which hangs on every event, watching, judging.

The rumours preceding this event were mostly centered around new sized notebooks.  In fact, people were so keen to get the details down you’ll find images online where people have attempted to extrapolate the size of the notebook in the invitation from the relative size of the Apple logo.

The products were, however, rather more mundane.  We simply got updated versions of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, MacBook and the new 24″ Cinema Display that’s designed for notebooks.  Image Source.

9th September 2009

It's only rock and roll, but we like it.

It seems that Apple events around the September 10th (7th in 2005, 12th in 2006, 5th in 2007, 9th in 2008 and 9th again in 2009) always focus on their iPod holiday line-up.  It makes sense from a business perspective and we all know what to expect.  Hence Apple doesn’t even attempt to add any mystery to these events at all.  Even as these events go, this was a fairly low key affair.  We got some new colours for the iPod Shuffle, iTunes 9 and updated iPod Touches and Nanos.  Quite unspectacular.  Image Source.

27th January 2010

Come see our latest creation.

And here we are, up to date.  We don’t know what Apple will reveal on the 27th, but everyone is suspecting it to be a tablet computer or device of some sort.  You can read an article I wrote covering some usability issues Apple will have to overcome here.  Image Source.

Searching for Trends

Now we’ve collected some of the invites sent, can we extract any trends from the data?  Well yes and no.  There are certain events for which Apple seems comfortable to divulge the topic of conversation before hand.  The iPod events are an example of this, they very rarely deviate from the iPod branding leaving no doubt that it’s an iPod event you’re going to.

We’ve also seen some examples of Apple being very explicit with other events.  The MacBook event for one.  It’s fun to speculate why they do this, but I suspect the reason is that they need to set realistic expectations before hand.  Since the launch, and subsequent success of, the iPod, Apple has been thrust into the spotlight.  As I touched on earlier, they’re a mainstream electronics company now, not a niche computer manufacturer.  The difference may sound minor (pedantic, even), but it’s not.  Apple showed with the iPhone that they can, in one move, change an industry. They’ve done it three times.  Analysts and Market Watchers expect them to do this every time.

Let’s take an example, the MacBook event on 14th October 2008.  Even back as far as then there were rampant rumours of a touchscreen device, a tablet.  If Apple had phrased the invite “We’re changing mobile computing forever”, or something with an equal amount of pomp an drama (and ambiguity), this speculation would have grown.  And when speculation grows, so does expectation.  If speculation had grown to the point it’s currently at, and Apple had just released a fairly minor MacBook refresh, the disappointment would have been crushing and no doubt their stock market price would have taken a beating.  But instead, Apple told everyone exactly what they were going to be talking about, and then delivered in line with those expectations.

Looking back over these invites, and the events they represent, I can only really remember one where Apple failed to meet expectations (February 28th 2006).  That’s quite an accomplishment.

The Tablet Event?

Come see our latest creation.

That brings us on to the tablet event, so let’s look at it in a little more detail, taking into account the things we’ve learned from past events.

The Wording

“Come see our latest creation.” is a vague and inviting tagline.  There’s a relaxed feel to the copy that isn’t unheard of for Apple events.  You’ll also notice that “creation” is used in the singular, rather than the plural.  Not since the original iPod event can I remember an Apple special event that focused solely on a single product.  You’ll note that the biggest announcement of recent times, the original iPhone at MacWorld 2007, followed a fairly lengthy section on the Apple TV.

As far as we know, there’s little play on words that Apple has been fond of in the past.  The MacBook Air release (MacWorld 2008) was accompanied by banners stating “There’s something in the air”, which lead people to suspect some sort of cloud based service, possibly for media.  However, it was altogether more blatant than that.

There is also a distinct lack of hyperbole from this invitation.  This may be down to managing expectations, as I’ve discussed previously, or it may be to allow for some vagueness and ambiguity.  To add some hyperbole you also need to add some specifics.  Like the iPod invitation of 7th September 2005, they are clearly hinting that it’s mobile music consumption that’s changing.  This doesn’t prevent Steve Jobs from throwing in some hyperbole during the event though, much like his “Today we’re going to make history together” statement before unveiling the iPhone.

The wording does compliment the overall theme of the invite though.

The Theme

I don’t think it’s difficult to pick a theme for this invite.  If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be “creativity”.  We have the use of the word “creation”, rather than product or device (neither of which sound particularly Apple, but have been used in the past) which conjures certain images and feelings.  It’s not something that’s been engineered, or manufactured, but rather something that’s been created lovingly.

Then we’ve got the paint splatters that appear to be breaking out of some sort of boundary (thin, grey lines around the outside of the invite).  If you think of an audience that this is aimed at, one would be hard pressed to disagree that it’s the creative community.  The arty splatters, the breaking out of boundaries, the colour and the words.  The paint splatters breaking out of the boundary could also be seen as Apple signalling that they’re about to do something other manufacturers in the industry aren’t doing.  They are breaking the mould.

Predictions

Based purely on the invitation, I think it’ll be fun to speculate on what we’ll see in the event.  Rather than specific products,  I want to think about the words that will be used and the themes.

Based purely on the boundary part of the invite’s design, I would expect to see Apple talking about creating a new market segment.  They’ll push whatever it is they’re hawking as something that’s never been done before.  Incomparable to existing products.  I think there’ll also be an element of selling it to creatives.  Apple has a long standing reputation as being the computer of choice for creative professionals (artists, photographers, graphic designers etc.), and I think they’ll play heavily on this.  I would imagine that they’ve thought through some use cases to demonstrate (this is a favourite of Steve Jobs, he likes to run through scenarios on stage – remember the call to Starbucks during the MacWorld 2007 iPhone keynote?), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they included some form of content creation, rather than just consumption.

And here’s the key concept I think will run through the event.  There are many tablets out there but the use cases are limited.  They are mostly used for content consumption because the inputs aren’t up to scratch (crippled keyboard, stylii etc.).  Apple will create a device that can be used as much for content creation as consumption.

Of course, that’s reading a lot into an invite.  Probably too much. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was 100% wrong on everything.  But isn’t speculation fun?

If you know of any invites I’ve missed out, please let me know and I’ll add them to this Apple Special Event Invitation Gallery.  Thanks.

So what do you think?  Can we read anything into the invite?  Does it follow a clear trend, or not?  Let us know in the comments.

I have a particular interest in the tablet’s user interface.  Interfaces are something that Apple generally excels at.  I went back and watched the keynote from the iPhone announcement recently, and it brought back memories of seeing that interface in action for the first time.  It was absolutely revolutionary, but also obvious and somehow familiar.  And even now, after three hardware revisions and three major software revisions, the interface remains largely unchanged, and largely unmatched by other manufacturers.  So how can Apple match this feat with the tablet, and what challenges does it face?

Size and Interface Paradigms

I’ve seen mention from multiple outlets of a scaled up iPhone interface for the Apple tablet, but it’s not quite that simple.  The iPhone’s interface is defined, at least in part, by its size.

The iPhone’s screen, 89mm diagonally, is not that size by accident nor coincidence.  It’s that size because someone with average sized hands can hold the phone and access virtually any part of the screen with their thumbs.  This is regardless of whether they are holding the phone in portrait or landscape orientation.  Try it.  I can comfortably reach two thirds of the way across the screen with my thumb in landscape mode.  This means I can access the middle of the screen with either thumb, and the edges with a thumb.  In portrait orientation I can hold the phone in my right hand and use the thumb of that hand to access any part of the screen.

The diagram below shows the relative positions my thumbs can reach on a 256mm screen when held like an iPhone.  256mm, in case you’re wondering, is approximately 10.1 inches, the most widely rumoured size of the tablet.

A diagram showing the areas of an iPhone my thumbs can comfortably hit and the same areas shown on a tablet.

A couple of things to note about this comparison.  We don’t know the exact dimensions of the tablet.  If we assume that the screen is 10.1 inches (256mm), then all we know is that the device has to be at least that big.  I’ve drawn the “hit areas” I’d be capable of hitting accurately in red on the diagram.  For the iPhone these include the screen areas in addition to the bezel of the device.  This is a realistic test (I actually used my iPhone to try it out).  For the proposed tablet I’ve drawn them so they don’t include the bezel of the device because this is unknown.  Therefore, if held in the same way as an iPhone these hit areas represent an almost unachievable best case scenario.  The other thing to note is that to get the tablet size I’ve simply scaled it up based on the proposed screen size.  In other words, I’ve assumed that the ratio of screen to bezel will remain identical to the iPhone’s.  This will almost certainly not be the case, so in many ways the device size (not the screen size) represents the worst case scenario.

This exercise demonstrates that the current means of holding and interacting with the iPhone will not carry over effectively to a device of this size.  Clearly a rethink is in order.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

Key to the diagram above is the way in which you hold the device.  I’ve assumed that it will be held in a similar way to an iPhone.  This may not be the case.  There are multiple ways one might choose to interact with a device like a tablet.  You may want to hold it like an iPhone (either portrait or landscape) with two hands or with one hand.  You way want to rest it on one arm and use the other to use it, like a clipboard.  You may want to lay it on a table, or prop it up on a desk.  You may want to mount it on the wall in a dock.

The problem for Apple is that each of these ways of physically holding or resting or mounting the device requires a slightly different interface in order to be efficient and comfortable to use.  With the iPhone, there were only really two options, portrait or landscape.

Input

Text entry is one of the outstanding questions that’s really got me stumped.  The realisation that people will be physically holding this device in drastically different ways leads you to the inevitable conclusion that text entry is going to be very difficult.

Out of the physical ways of holding the device I touched on above, let’s take two examples and expand on them to explore some of the difficulties involved.

Holding it Like an iPhone

If a user wanted to hold the device like an iPhone, they will encounter a problem reaching certain parts of the screen, as indicated by the diagram earlier in the article.  If Apple were to lay out a virtual keyboard, in the same way they lay out the virtual keyboard on the iPhone, it would be unusable.  You would not be able to reach all the letter buttons whilst retaining your grip on the device with both hands.  You could hold it with one hand and type with the other but this would be so utterly tiresome as to be useless.

Some UMPC devices had soft keyboards that were located in the lower corners of the screen. These were difficult and uncomfortable to use.  Image from Gizmodo.

An alternative is to group the buttons around the area that’s easily accessible by the user’s thumbs.  Sound familiar?  It should do.  Microsoft tried this with their ill-fated UMPC devices a couple of years ago.  Whilst sounding good on paper, these devices never took off.  And anyone who had the misfortune of using the keyboard can tell you that it was far from ideal.  The odd shape meant you were constantly rotating and stretching your thumb to reach the keys which caused some strain.  You also had to re-learn how to type because a key’s position relative to other keys had changed.  It’s a testament to the iPhone’s keyboard that it can be so much more effective on a smaller screen, although you could argue that the smaller form factor is actually an advantage in this case.

Lying on a Table

Now consider the device laid on a table.  This is where you’d welcome a keyboard configuration similar to that of an iPhone, with the soft keys stretching across the entire width of the screen.  In this scenario, you could quite comfortably type on it as a normal keyboard.  It would be comparable in size to many netbooks.

Two different methods of usage and two vastly different keyboard requirements.

The Software (& the apps)

When contemplating a device such as this the manufacturer needs to think about the key use cases and optimise the device for those interactions.  This is something Apple is truly great at.  Apple’s trick is to understand the context of the operation being undertaking (the context) and then adapt the interface such that it’s optimised for that operation.  This must have been one of the key drivers of the iPhone’s modal interface (it was specifically mentioned by Steve Jobs at the iPhone unveil).  It’s something Microsoft has been notoriously bad at, just look at Windows Mobile for an interface that does many things badly, but simultaneously.

This begs the question of whether the interface will be restricted to one app at a time or not (it’s important to distinguish between multi-tasking and having an interface that can cope with more than one app running and make them available to the user).

The Navigon iPhone app fills the screen with four main buttons, but doesn't look out of place.

The iPhone’s screen size is such that it is well suited to being filled with content and interface devices.  It’s not unusual, for example, to open an app and be presented with just four buttons which take up the entire screen.  On a device of the iPhone’s size, it makes sense.  The hit areas for buttons need to be large enough to ensure accuracy.  It’s a similar story with text.  The Notes app, for example, comes bundled with every iPhone and fills the entire screen with text when reading.   In a single column configuration, with the chosen text size and the iPhone’s screen it works well.   It’s readable, and allows a decent amount of content to be displayed.

Now consider what these apps might look like on a device with a screen 2.5 times the size of the iPhones (and probably with a higher number of pixels per inch).  They won’t port directly over and remain as effective.  The notes app is perhaps a bad example as it may end up resembling an A4 sized notepad, but I’m sure you get the general idea.

The above gesticulations assume that the operating system will be similar to the iPhones, but it may be closer to OSX.  I’ve written previously about certain elements of OSX become more “touch friendly”.  I’d love to see a tablet running a full version of OSX (all be it optimised for touch input) but I don’t think Apple will do it.

This boils down to whether Apple considers the tablet to be a computer or a consumer device.

Computer or Consumer Device

The reason I think Apple will pitch this tablet as a consumer device, rather than a computer running OSX, is that they’ve tapped in to a previously non-existent market and found it to be incredibly lucrative.  The App Store.

Apple maintains tight control over which apps can be installed on the iPhone

For the App Store to be successful it has to be the sole point for users to obtain apps.  This, by definition (and design), requires the OS to be closed off and tightly controlled.  OSX is neither of those things.

There are other ways Apple distinguishes between Consumer Devices and Computers.  If you look at its line up, consumer devices tend to use Dock Connectors.  Consumer Devices also tend to require a computer with an iTunes account in order to sync with.  They will not work without a computer.  I suspect that both these will be true of the tablet.

Multi-Multi Touch

The iPhone pioneered (it may not have been the first, but it was certainly the best) multi-touch gestures.  There were audible gasps in the audience when Steve Jobs demonstrated pinch to zoom for the first time.  The iPhone, generally, is used with a single hand interfacing with the device (bar from typing).  As a result, the interface is designed to deal with the sort of interface mechanisms that are capable with a single hand.  Pinching to zoom is an example of this.  It’s easy to do with one hand whilst holding the phone in the other.

The tablet however is much larger and requires a different interface mechanic.  It will be held differently, as discussed previously.  This does present an opportunity, however.  It seems that much of the discussion around multi-touch for the tablet has happened under the restrictions of the iPhone. Restrictions such as having to work with only one hand.  Restrictions that may not be applicable to the tablet.

Rather than thinking of the tablet in terms of the iPhone, it may be more appropriate to think of it in terms of Microsoft’s Surface.  When laid on a table, that’s essentially what it becomes.  It might allow interactions with multiple fingers on both hands simultaneously.  Want to copy some text? Then why not select it with one hand and “tear” it off with the other?  It is interactions like these that aren’t really practical on a device like the iPhone, but will be practical on a bigger device.

And Connectivity

As someone who wants to pick up a tablet, providing it’s as good as I imagine it’s going to be, I’m worried about the rumours of it relying on the mobile networks.  I already pay through the nose for my iPhone 3GS contract (on top of buying the actual phone) and whilst I wouldn’t have a problem paying up front for the device, I do have a problem with signing up to a recurring fee for it.

It’s possible, although highly unlikely, that Apple can strike a deal along the lines of Amazon’s for the Kindle.  Where Apple pays a flat, up front fee to the networks in order to use their data meaning that us consumers don’t have to individually sign up.  The data Apple users tend to push around seems to make this highly unlikely.

Another possibility is that Apple bakes in incredibly simple tethering support, so you can tether it to your iPhone.  if you’re watching the keynote and one of the announcements is for AT&T turning tethering on in the US, I suspect this is the direction in which they’re heading.

If they were to throw a 3G chip in there, the benefit of convenience would be outweighed by the inconvenience of having to sign up for another contract (and I am always connected through my iPhone anyway).

So, over to you? What do you want, what do you expect? What will make you buy one (or not)? Let everyone know in the comments.