The iPhone Guru - All things iPhone, made clear

Yesterday, Apple released their newest creation, the iPad. Positioned somewhere between a laptop and an iPod touch, the iPad is meant to create a “new category” of devices, and define a new segment of devices for the market. Here’s why I think that it kinda sucks instead.

Read on for my take on the bad stuff, tune in tomorrow for my take on the good stuff….

The Keyboard.

It’s crap. We were all waiting for Apple to do something revolutionary with the iPad’s data entry. We’d seen and have used the iPhone and iPod touch keyboards for three years and we’re used to their strengths and their weaknesses. We were looking for Apple to give us something new. A way to get our data entered into the mythical tablet device that made some sort of wonderful, crazy sense and worked better than before. What did we get? An onscreen keyboard, exactly like the iPhone, only larger and harder to use.

On the iPhone, I can reach all the way across the keyboard with one thumb. On the iPad it’s unlikely any but those with the biggest hands will be able to reach the center keys in the vertical position. In the landscape position, you’re meant to type with either one hand while holding the iPad with the other, or with both hands while the iPad rests on something. Quickly it became evident that typing anything at length on the iPad is going to be the biggest pain in the butt wrist. The angle is poor in almost any “lap holding” position, the back of the device is not flat, which makes it wobble on a table, and the optimal typing position will almost definitely require some sort of dock or stand.

Apple’s answer to the ergonomics problems? A ($70) Keyboard Dock! It’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so heartbreaking. You have a beautiful multitouch display, some of the best voice recognition out there and power to spare, yet we get a freakin keyboard. No intuitive multitouch interface for typing, no voice transcription, not even any haptic feedback! From a company that has majored in creating new UI’s for most of it’s existence, this is disappointing to say the least.

No Multitasking.

Where is it? It’s nowhere to be found in any of the demo videos, as I’m sure it would be if it was to be a feature of the new iPod OS. The iPad is being aggressively placed by Apple as a device to land between an iPod touch and a Macbook in it’s own lineup. Something that you can play on, but, as a large segment of the keynote presentation was dedicated to iWork, also something to be productive on. When was the last time you were truly productive without multitasking? It had to be before 1995, because that’s the last time any major OS was able to get by without it.

Ah but the exception to the rule is right before us! The iPhone doesn’t have multitasking, you might crow exultingly! “I’m productive on that!.”

And you’d be right….sort of.

The iPhone doesn’t have multitasking, what it has is a screen just the right size for one task, whatever that might be. If you’re making a call, if you’re writing a note, if you’re playing a game…it can actually be argued that these things are even made better by the increased focus that the single interface provides.

But the iPad, with it’s comparatively generous 9.7″ screen could be capable of so much more. Multiple applications could easily be run on it’s beefier processor, set up in a fast-switch mode that Apple perfected with the Expose feature in OS X. Imagine running Dragon Naturally Speaking over the top of iWork to take down some dictation, then flipping over to paste the resulting text in, then back to speak some additional text, perhaps even pausing a Pandora station that you were listening to while you dictate, then resuming play when finished. Now imagine that you’re running the same applications, but you must close each one before you open another, being careful to save your progress each time so that you don’t lose valuable work. That’s 10 discreet “open/close” actions, just to use two apps at once. So poorly thought out, especially when the rest of the UI shows some true moments of brilliance.

No Cameras Please.

They shoved a VIDEO CAMERA INTO THE NANO. Where the heck is the iPad’s camera? Once again… Video. Camera. Nano. Ridiculous.

All I’m asking for is one little camera. One out the front to capture a snapshot of your world for inspiration for your latest Brushes masterpiece, or to email using the “best ever in the worlds history” interface for email that they’re bragging about. Or perhaps to take a photo to use with the “most bestest way to look at photos ever invented app”. Just one.

I mean, in a perfect world, the iPad would have a front and rear facing camera, to use with a well designed, easy to use iChat app that could be easily run by the iPad. But I would settle for at least the one! But we don’t even get that.

It’s Not Innovative.

Every product doesn’t have to be the best thing ever. But if theres one thing I’d like to see in any technology product, it’s a way in which that product genuinely improves upon or enhances the user experience through innovation.

It can be something simple, like the way the first slider phones hid the keyboard behind the face of the phone, or the smaller design of the original Xbox Type S controller that made it an instant favorite over the first design. You could also point to the iPhone and how it’s multitouch interface totally changed the way we think about interacting with our phones, mp3 players and frankly anything else we keep in our pockets. But what you can’t do is point out any features of the iPad that seem dramatically innovative. It’s just not that interesting.

I’m not trying to be unfair here, it’s Apple’s own business strategy that has poised them to be the company that we all look to for devices that exceed our design imaginations and our interface expectations. They just haven’t managed to do that with the iPad. If you think about all of the possible technologies that Apple could have integrated into the iPad, like hybrid displays, voice control, piezoelectric haptic layers, wireless HDMI or USB, inductive charging, it will almost make you sick to think that the iPad includes none of that. This tablet is one you could easily see a manufacturer like Asus produce within the year, just in an admittedly nicer milled aluminum case. *

Pretty much all of the technology that’s in the iPad, we’ve seen before. Not only that, but we’ve seen it implemented in exactly the same way in the iPhone. Aside from tweaks to the OS, this is the same device, minus the cool phone bit.

It’s A Crappy Book Reading Device.

I don’t care how sweet the software in the iPad is for reading, purchasing and displaying ebooks. It’s never going to be a comfortable primary device for reading for the majority of the population. This is the result of a very simple hardware issue. The screen is transmissive. In effect, it is made up of a giant flashlight, shining through an array of colored squares, directly into your retinas.

You know how your eyes hurt after looking at your monitor all day? That phenomenon is caused by the strain that your eyes are put under when they have a giant light shone into them for hours. Now you might say that your day-to-day computer usage doesn’t bother your eyes all that much, but are you reading type left to right in straight lines? Or are you browsing webpages, watching video, editing images, giving your eyes time to flex and rest when they’re on areas of darker color or staring at the wall of your cubicle, or glancing around the office on your way to the coffee pot?

When you’re reading, your eyes don’t get those breaks. In addition, a lot of reading tends to happen in poor light. In bed, or curled up with your favorite book in the corner, where a lot of your computer work is done in a room with at least some ambient light to balance out the contrast of the display agains the backdrop. This also eases eyestrain. With an ebook reader in bed, 70% of your field of view is darkened, and you have this tiny square of bright light shining into your eyes. Not a recipe for comfort. Just to vet my experience with this, I have read hundreds of books on my iPhone and similar amounts on my Sony eReader. The eReader, a several-year-old device, easily beats the iPhone for reading.

This is why dedicated reader devices like the Nook or Kindle use e-paper displays that use no backlight to display their information. Not only are they incredibly power efficient, but they’re also just as easy to read as any book or printed page.

There are some things you can do to make it easier to read on a transmissive screen. Changing the background to black and the text to white helps, as does dimming the display as much as possible. But the iPad will never be a truly great e-reader until it fixes the way it displays your text. All of this doesn’t even take into account that the screen is a 9.7″ glossy mirror. Anti-glare glass anyone?

So, in conclusion, It’s not that the iPad is bad, terrible or hurtful, it’s just not great and for a company like Apple, that’s sometimes the worst thing you could say, it’s almost worse than “It kinda sucks.”

*Thanks Oliver

P.S. I would complain about flash support too, but I’m convinced Apple is taking the stance that sites just need to switch to HTML5, which supports any video format that Flash will, and does it better. HTML5 is currently fully supported by both Safari and Mobile Safari.