Rich Fiscus
1 Apr 2010 14:52
A handful of tech journalists and bloggers have been given iPads to try out and the first reviews have appeared. They are overwhelmingly positive.
Most reviewers praised the iPad's speed. That's understandable considering it has a much faster CPU than any generation of the iPhone or iPod Touch, while most of the apps available for it now were actually designed with those devices in mind.
The user interface also got its share of kudos. The Houston Chronicle's Bob LeVitus calls the on screen keyboard "eminently usable," adding that in landscape mode he can almost touch type on it.
Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times called the iPad "a computer that’s designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations."
But that leaves us to think about what other considerations might be important. Perhaps the biggest is what consumers will expect from a device priced about the same as a budget laptop.
As all the reviewers make clear, the iPad is no substitute for a laptop.
Everyone was quite pleased with its multimedia playback and e-book reader capabilities. But they were equally unanimous about its unsuitability for things like working with word processing or creating spreadsheets.
And then there's the content. If you're looking for e-books there will be plenty available, including not just commercial titles from big publishers, but also a number of public domain books from Project Gutenberg.
One potentially huge problem on the e-book front is the insistence by major publishers on controlling the price so as not to compete with their physical products. We've seen this strategy before with record labels.
In fact it was just this sort of paranoia that made it so difficult for anyone to start an online music store to cater to all the MP3 consumers.
Of course Apple was able to capitalize on MP3's popularity by picking a pricepoint for songs that satisfied the labels. But e-books don't have the built in customer base that MP3 already enjoyed prior to the launch of the iTunes store.
Apple isn't just trying to sell e-books. They're helping to create the market. As good an e-book reader as the iPad apparently is, if people aren't sold on buying books for it that's not going to do much for sales.
Of course it's an iPod as well, which means you can play your audio and video files on it. And according to all the reviews it's an excellent video player. It can also play video from a number of internet sources, most notably YouTube.
On the other hand, if you're looking to catch up on your favorite TV show on Hulu you're out of luck.
The iPad's lack of Flash support has been well documented and exhaustively debated. The good news is there are quite a few content providers moving to HTML5 just to support the iPad.
But there are still many others sticking with Flash, both for video and other content. There's no question your web surfing experience will be more limited with an iPad than a desktop, laptop or even a netbook.
Reviewers' hyperbole aside, the iPad's success will depend heavily on two things.
The first will be how much people are willing to pay for what amounts to a big iPod Touch with an e-book reader built-in. Despite numerous predictions this is something that is simply unknowable right now.
It's easy to say the iPad will succeed because it's a good product, but good products come and go all the time because people don't want or need them. It's equally easy to predict it will fail because people don't care about e-books and want Flash support.
The reality is the market for the iPad is unknown right now, and will be until they've been on sale for a while.
Which brings us to the other X factor. How will Apple respond to consumers?
Despite widespread public perception to the contrary, Apple is capable of adapting their strategy when necessary. The iPhone is a perfect example of this.
Barely more than two months after the original iPhone launched they slashed prices by $200. When the iPhone 3G debuted a year later they copied jailbreakers and opened the App Store.
At that time they also changed their business model for carriers because they were having a hard time getting carriers to agree to revenue sharing deals like they have with AT&T.
Even if sales of the first generation iPad aren't very good, they can still make it a success if they listen to customers.
You can read the reviews for yourself on websites for The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, PC Magazine, Boing Boing and TheRoot.