Jay Reding.com

So, Steve Jobs has bestowed the iPad upon the world. This is the device that a lot of tech-heads have been predicting for years: the almost-mythical Apple Tablet. This thing’s been predicted before even the iPhone.

What’s In A Name?

The “iPad” moniker was a bad call. Yes, it’s already the butt of jokes. Yes, it falls in line with “iPhone” and “iPod”, but it’s too close to the latter. But then again, a rose with any other name would smell just a sweet, right? Even if the rose sounded vaguely like a feminine hygiene product.

Flash In The Can

I’ve heard plenty of moaning about the lack of Flash. This shouldn’t have been a shock. Apple does not like Flash. It’s proprietary. Flash on OS X performs terribly. For a lengthy take on why the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad will likely never support Flash, see John Gruber’s piece on Apple, Adobe, and Flash.

The other big question is why does the iPad need Flash? To view video — it already does that, and with better performance than Flash. Yes, it doesn’t view all web video, but as Apple’s multitouch devices continue to proliferate, I’m guessing a lot of sites will abandon Flash rather than abandon those devices. (And yes, that includes the porn sites that are probably the reason many want Flash on the iPad…)

To play web games? For one, Apple offers plenty of games through the App Store. Not only that, but many Flash games wouldn’t even work on a multitouch device — especially anything that needs keyboard input. Flash games would suck on multitouch devices.

For ads? The fewer obnoxious ads, the better.

For more interactive web pages? The real solution would be to embrace open web technologies like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Those technologies aren’t controlled by one company, unlike Flash.

Winners And Losers

The biggest losers in all this could very well be Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Sony. They’ve all heavily invested in e-reader devices, and the iPad makes a lot more sense than those devices. E-Ink screens are nice, but if the iPad makes for a good enough reading device, it won’t matter.

The saving grace for them is that they have the opportunity to create their own reader applications for the iPad. (I’m guessing that both the Kindle and Barnes & Noble reader applications for the iPhone will work on the iPad.) I’m guessing that Amazon sells the Kindle hardware at a loss, in the hopes of making up the difference in book sales. Does Amazon care whether they sell books on the Kindle or the iPad? Probably not. The question is whether Apple cares that third-parties are selling books on their platform. I’d wager they don’t care — Apple isn’t in the publishing business, they’re in the hardware business.

The winners are probably publishers. The iPad gives them some great opportunities to have e-books proliferate in the same way that multitouch apps have. That’s a win for an industry that’s facing some very bad times.

Looking Ahead

Apple is heavily invested in multitouch, and the iPad is just another example of that. It’s an opportunity to fundamentally transform computing. These devices abstract away old concepts like file systems and a hierarchy of folders. The old metaphors can finally be swept away: no more folders, no more mouse cursors, no more file managers, not even windowing systems. This is the face of 21st Century computing: and Apple is setting the trend.

The iPad is just another device, one of the first in a long series of devices. It’s likely to be extremely popular, and is very well designed. But ultimately, it reaches beyond that: this is about redefining the way we use computers. Apple has paved the way, and while others are trying to catch up, the iPad proves they’re still running one step ahead.

UPDATE: John Gruber observes a point I missed: Apple now makes their own blazingly-fast mobile processors. Apple’s acquisition of chipmaker P.A. Semi seems to be paying off. Apple is a hardware company at its core, so designing their own chips is a wise move.

I was one of the first suckersearly adopters to get the iPhone. And it truly is the best smartphone out there, bar none. No Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone comes close.

And even though the iPhone 3G is faster and thinner, and has GPS, I’m not sure about the upgrade. It’s not the phone, but the way in which AT&T and Apple are ruining the iPhone experience that’s keeping me away.

The first iPhone could be activated at home. The process of buying a iPhone was easy. No in-store activations meant that even on the first day, there was no problem getting through the line. You brought the phone home and could connect it to AT&T’s cellular network from the kitchen table. It was a great experience, and made the iPhone the easiest phone to buy.

That won’t be the case with the iPhone 3G. Instead, it’s back to the old in-store activations. That means that it will take 10-12 minutes per person to activate the new iPhone. No leisurely unboxing for buyers, but a lot of waiting. The first day will be brutal if people will have to wait for activations.

A 3G iPhone is a long awaited device, but if Apple and AT&T can’t deliver the experience that they did with the first iPhone, they’ll have a harder time capturing the same magic. With the data plan for the iPhone 3G being $10 more per month, a $199 iPhone, while still cheap, isn’t quite the deal it would seem.

The iPhone is moving into the corporate world, but sadly, the prices and the efficiency of getting service is starting to look a bit too much like the other commodity smartphone vendors out there, not like the Apple experience we’ve come to expect.

Wired compares Apple aficionados and Paulnuts, finding that Apple fanboys (and girls) have a long way to go before they reach the annoyance level of the Paul-bearers.

I wasn’t aware it was a competition…

Glenn “Da Blogfaddah” Reynolds is another convert to the world of iWork ‘08 and Pages, Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office and Word.

I’ve been using Pages since it came out, and I love it. It isn’t perfect, but it’s somehow much more natural than using Microsoft Word. For one, it’s a Universal application so it runs much faster than Word on my Intel Macs. It’s also just more intuitive in a way that Apple’s apps tend to be in comparison to Microsoft’s applications. It isn’t something that’s easily quantifiable, but the way the program works just seems to involve less fighting to get what you want in comparison to Word. Using Word always ends up being a battle between what you intuitively want to do and Microsoft’s chosen way of doing things. Pages (and the rest of iWork ‘08) doesn’t have that problem.

I’d guess it has a lot to do with the software engineering styles of Apple compared to Microsoft. I have a feeling that Apple either does more human interaction testing or has software developers with a better instinct for how people use software. My guess is that it’s the latter more than the former. User testing is great, but unless you “get it” in terms of application design, it often gets lost. Apple doesn’t go for the feature bloat that Microsoft embraces—which means that iWork doesn’t have some of the features of Office, but that the features it does have work much more intuitively than they do with Word.

Keynote already makes PowerPoint look like an amateur’s toy. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth presentations were designed with Keynote, and even though the message may be questionable, the presentation is amazing. It looks like the rest of the package is following Keynote’s lead in becoming more than adequate replacements for their Office counterparts.

Pages has gone from a decent page-layout program to a perfectly workable replacement for Word. In fact, I’ve done all my word processing with Pages, converted them to Word, and no one has been at all the wiser. That includes using Pages to work on law review articles with massive amounts of tracked changes.

iWork costs a pittance compared to Office. In fact, Keynote alone would be worth the $79 cost of the package for anyone who does presentations on a regular basis. The fact that it comes bundled with a worthy Word replacement and a decent spreadsheet app makes it even better. It isn’t quite an Office-killer, but since Microsoft is removing Visual Basic support for Office 2008 it may be just the opening that Apple needs.