First off, I’m glad to see Steve Jobs back doing the keynote. It may just be a matter of ‘optics’ as people say but he is one of the leading technology pioneers in the last 40 years. He seems to be in better health after his surgery and I think his presence breathes life and morale back into the company. Nonetheless, he is human and as expansive as his perspective and that of his team’s may be, it cannot account for millions of users’ feedback. That may be an exaggeration but the challenge with 1.0 products is that your initial testing is just a statistical sampling, even with test users with ideal best-case/worst-case characteristics. That’s why v2.0′s are usually better-refined. The multitude of real-world situations a product is put through can’t all be predicted. This is the nature of design by iteration; best estimates followed by release into the wild then refinement.

Many articles and blogs have already discussed what they think is good or bad about the iPad. I don’t necessarily see all the evidence as black or white and would rather ruminate about their context and present my observations.

It’s a tablet, plain and simple. Or is it so simple? It forgoes a stylus and relies on Apple’s established Cocoa Touch framework for the underlying user interface. Aside from applications with custom voice input, it’s all touch, all the time. This works fine on the iPhone’s smaller form factor where we thumb-type because we can hold on to the device and still manage to reach all the keys. With the larger iPad, this may be possible in portrait mode but doubtful in landscape. To alleviate this situation, Apple has also produced a keyboard onto which the iPad can dock. The iPad is also compatible with Apple’s existing Bluetooth keyboard. These accessories work fine in stable environments such as a table or desk. Can you imagine someone using either product in a conference hall with minimal or no table surface? I see plenty of people in such situations type comfortably on their laptops (fittingly) and netbooks because of the inherent ergonomics of their flat base and inclined screen. Apple does have a case that also doubles as a stand that can sit on one’s lap while using the screen-based keyboard. It remains to be seen how comfortable it is typing with the screen angled the same as the keyboard; I suspect a bit more strain on the eyes or neck. I think Apple’s physical keyboards only work well some of the time, less so in impromptu environments where a steady and more ample surface is not available.

Apple has seen fit to extend their iPhone OS to the iPad. I think this is great because it helps reinforce Apple’s commitment to the more tactile interface and experience that people are growing more accustomed to and it has helped create a more standard expectation of interaction across other similar operating systems such as Android.  The tactic, however, does draw somewhat of a line in the sand; this continues to differentiate between their laptop and touch products. While there are gentle signs of convergence such as keyboard compatibility on the iPad and the multi-touch aspect of the MacBook/MacBook Pro’s trackpad in Snow Leopard, the user experience is clearly different. On Mac OS, the user has clear reign over all the applications and file management with the ability to multi-task, set different window sizes and lay them out as they please, and multi-touch is limited to a small number of applications. On iPhone OS, it’s generally a much more linear experience, having a single application open at a time and typically forced to return to the home state before opening another application while the touch experience and expectations are often consistent in each application. The iPhone OS’s limitations are understandable due to memory and processing constraints with the initial iPhone yet the iPad contains what is possibly a quad-core 1GHz chip. Therein lies the quandry. Apple has been consistently challenged to allow some of those desktop liberties into Cocoa Touch while cognizant they need to remain compatible and still very usable on old hardware. In a matter of years, the processing power operating on Cocoa Touch has seemingly leaped exponentially making recent (well, less than 2 years) hardware feel obsolete. Journalists and other press that have had first-hand experience have been marveling at the iPad’s speed and subsequently comparing it to its lesser brethren. I get the feeling the difference may be in terms of magnitude. This is not something we’re used to seeing on the desktop platform where performance jumps have traditionally been incremental. It will be interesting to see what direction Apple takes with both operating systems, whether to keep them separate or to push more convergence between the two.

The difference between models (aside from storage) is like the connectivity variance between the iPod Touch and iPhone; the strictly Wi-Fi models have only that, while the next step up includes 3G and assisted-GPS. For anyone that has a 3G plan on their phone, it may be difficult to encourage them to pick up a second albeit more affordable plan for the iPad. (For the record, app notifications currently work over Wi-Fi as well as with cell data.) What is odd is its additional inputs or lack thereof. There is no camera in any model of iPad and no ports for memory cards while relegating data transfer solely to the dock connector and the iPad’s new dongles for the same. Although a camera may prove awkward in its form factor, being able to take pictures where quality isn’t a pre-requisite for reference or even for potential video communication or streaming would have been a convenient to say the least. The new form factor, ordinarily a boon for apps such as scrapbooks and photo albums, is handicapped by a lack of the camera. Instead, we will rely on a separate camera or phone to take pictures and an accessory to transfer its images. Three pieces of equipment that could have only necessitated one. It seems like a step backwards for the normally progressive-thinking Apple. I assume omitting the camera and any other non-critical port has likely not only saved space but cost as well on the iPad, allowing Apple to cram battery and storage into it and sell it competitively against netbooks and e-Book readers. I can only hope for this iPad there will be a way to use Bluetooth to transfer images or data and that Apple will consider customer input (no pun intended) very seriously for the next generation.

While the screen dimensions of 1024×768 are pretty conventional (or used to be), many users are becoming accustomed Apple marketing glorious HD video on their wider screen products. I can only speculate that the form factor, resolution and even physical dimensions of the unit are geared primarily at portrait mode usage than landscape mode. With a 1.3 aspect ratio, the width in portrait mode is not too narrow for apps that plan to display multiple columns of content or content with additional controls or areas on interest on the side. The resolution is reasonably big enough to watch video clearly without squinting and any HD video would have to scale down to fit the aspect ratio (or get cropped). While not ideal, video should be more crisp than in an upscaling situation. Applications – mentioned as using pixel-doubling to fill the screen – wouldn’t actually use the edge-to-edge space because they are designed for a 1.5 aspect ratio.  I think Apple had to juggle many variables to make probably one of their most difficult design decisions: least possible size based on engineering efficiencies (accounting for storage and battery objectives), comfortable handling dimensions, inactive area (bezel) for grasping, and comfortable viewing resolution & ppi are ones that I can think of and there are likely others. Different companies have opted for different sizes. There hasn’t been a consensus that I am aware of as to what is ideal. Because the iPad is targeting different content of interest, it’s even more challenging. Too small and more complex layouts such as one found in  NYT’s newspaper become difficult to read; too big and upscaled apps may look over-pixelated, it may affect a comfortable line width for books or it may be unwieldy in general. There’s a lot of criticism about this whole area but I think if you want to use the iPad, this is one thing to accept and get used to. At the very least, feedback based on prolonged use will help the next generation of iPad. I can’t comment on iPhone OS 3.2 (due to NDA) but one can hope that Apple is encouraging developers to build and account for dynamic not static resolutions.

Below is a comparison between a  piece of 8.5 x 11″ paper,  iPad, Kindle DX and their respective screen dimensions. (Comparison was generated at http://www.sizeasy.com.)

Being that the iPhone OS 3.2 release is not far off and 4.0 probably not much further down the road, I will only mention a couple of hopes. What we’ve seen so far in the iPad software is nothing new, just a larger interface but pretty much identical user experience with the difference that some applications have been modified to take advantage of the larger space. The lock screen has not changed, nor has the home screen. I would like Apple to consider a more detailed lock screen (teehan+lax, a user experience firm, has proposed an elegant possibility) and possibly a more efficient way to navigate or group applications on the home screen.

At the end of all this analysis, I will still likely be handing over money to Apple for one of these glossy devices. I am clearly an early adopter, owning the first Sony Reader (I had to buy it in the US since it wouldn’t ship in Canada until their next generation). Colour was less of an issue at the time since I knew what I was getting into with e-Ink. The battery life was excellent and refresh rate for books was acceptable. The major limitation of the Reader for me was its ability to handle PDF files well; resizing to fit the display produced pixelated and difficult-to-read text and images, and jumping to different pages was tedious taking at minimum 5 seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi… The Kindle – although a next generation e-Ink device – to me wasn’t enticing. I had a lot of documents that benefited from colour (photography, diagrams, code colouring, etc) and content was sometimes laid out in ways that would make resizing horrible in e-Ink; PDFs as well as e-books developed equal footing in my list of priorities. Never mind the wireless aspect of the Kindle; half of my reading material was still hampered by slow and monochrome e-Ink. The iPad solves those issues, lets me use my iPhone apps (as applicable), and accesses more content beyond my books and PDFs. Jeff Bezos may still be confident about the Kindle line but with the Kindle App able to read any Kindle-purchased book on the iPad, that’s already a massive disadvantage Amazon faces. Content publishers will also need to step up to take advantage of this larger ecosystem. The New York Times has already shown how neat it is to embed video within the flow of text content. (Adobe’s PDF format has had this support for ages but hasn’t really caught on, possibly since PDFs are often shared via e-mail and not necessarily via dedicated content servers that can better handle the load.) I look forward to getting my hands on an iPad and giving a hands-on impression here. Magazines, newspapers, and comics – oh boy, I’m going to love reading comic books and graphic novels on this device. Video, apps and web surfing will just be icing on the cake.

From a consumer perspective, most of us come from a very narrow software-driven experience, playing our first computer game, learning our first programming language or calculating our first spreadsheet. It has evolved to somewhat of a nebulous existence online using applications without reading manuals, reading books without paper, gazing at millions of pieces of art hung on a sheet of plastic, and more contemporarily without worrying about how much it all costs [I am specifically referring to Open Source software and Creative Commons attribution, not piracy]. This indicates to me how far software has come; in fact the word feels somewhat anachronistic. What we use or do with computers today seems so much more fluid and advanced which makes the possibly baggage-laden term seem archaic and weighty. When we use Facebook or Twitter do we think of it as a software application or as visiting or contributing to a community?

I’m not writing to address the nuances of software, but the nature of the products that the imagination and toil many people have offered up so that we might…socialize. That’s not a new concept but how we do it is novel. Social networks’ intrinsic online and boundary-less qualities go beyond what we might have envisioned for our own inter-personal communications some 47 years ago. I allude to the aspect of software and competitiveness because that is what we are used to seeing from companies used to selling their wares in a box for consumers to take home and pop into their computer. It’s a zealous competition of one purveyor seeking to do outdo another by having as large a consumer base as possible and trying to offer—whatever it might be—some magical snake oil to keep its customers coming back for more that doesn’t fit the mold of how I see social networks co-exist.

I don’t believe these networks should be seen as competitors but as neighbouring social cliques, albeit large ones. When I was young, I had a small circle of friends. These were typically kids with whom I went to school that, for the most part, also lived in my neighbourhood. The only far-ranging friends I had were the sons and daughters of my parents’ friends who lived elsewhere in town. My clique was small and it helped shape some of my childhood and formed a large portion of my memories associated with it. As I grew older, friends entered and left my life by way of school, work, university and social activities like my Tae Kwon Do classes. My life appeared to undergo cell division: every time a life decision was made, part of my life divided with the possibility of adding a group of new acquaintances. I’m certainly not a unique case and we often juggle these different groups of relationships effortlessly without a second thought. When we enter a certain routine like going to the movies, you go with certain people. When you go work out at a gym, there may be a different set of acquaintances. Granted, there can be an awkward moment when two groups of your friends collide yet somehow they find a way to determine their compatibility with one another. You’re simply the catalyst by which they meet. Relatives by marriage is a good example.

With that in mind, how can I not see these social networks as anything but different clusters of people you turn to and interact with depending on your needs and activities? I find that what I see, hear and contribute to these different networks differ as well. I’m not a different person on Facebook than I am on Twitter than I am on YouTube but I experience each community differently because what I get out of each is different. For me, I do not see a need for one social network to be better or bigger or brighter than another. Surely, each one has its own merits and its flaws they can improve on but in no way do I want one group to assimilate another. I certainly don’t want my friends and acquaintances to coalesce into a single Group either. That’s how I see the online social ecosystem. I think there are lessons to be learned about our effectiveness with something once you overload it with “features”. You can make numerous analogies about the retail software landscape and I still probably wouldn’t be able to apply it to social networks. And I would like the Mark Zuckerbergs and Rupert Murdochs of the Internet to see it that way, too.