05.02.10
iPonderings

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It’s hard to believe that it’s still less just a week since the iPad was launched. Steve Jobs says it’s like ‘holding the internet in your hands’. Critics have compared it to Barack Obama, as living up to impossible expectations (or not). Bloggers have (mainly) savaged it, but they of course savaged the iPhone too. Stephen Fry, somewhat breathlessly, thinks Jack Bauer will want to return just to download schematics onto it. The Economist has gone all religious on us, and whilst asserting that ‘some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them’ has declared that ‘even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles’. So there.

Meanwhile, UK advertising’s weekly bible, Campaign, asked johnson banks’ Michael Johnson to review it, from a design perspective. Here’s what he thought.

It’s a little tricky to review the iPad without actually having one in my hands. But, assuming that ringing doorbell is the FedEx man or an Amazon parcel (not a review copy from Jobs and Ive), I’ll try to do it, virtually.

From a product design perspective it’s clearly an extension of recent Apple themes. It shares the black and aluminium aesthetic that runs through their entire product line. It’s very thin – amazingly only 1mm thicker than an iPhone.

Size-wise, it initially disappoints (I’d hoped for something closer to A5), but to get an idea, fold your edition of Campaign in half, hold it upright and imagine that you’d lopped another 30mm off the bottom. (Or, if you’re a designer, fold Design Week in half, hold it upright and add an inch to the width)

The weight of it will be great. I’m writing this on a 15inch laptop, weighing almost 2.5 kg – the iPad will only weigh just over a quarter of that. If you want to cycle and run (or amble) to work, or are always dragging hefty laptops to meetings and airports, it could be a genuine game changer. And it’ll save on those physio sessions for broken shoulders.

If your idea of fun on a long flight is to boot up Photoshop and indulge in a bit of high end retouching then you’ll be disappointed, but you’d imagine that Adobe will be thinking hard about ‘CS 4 lite’ very soon.

Our Californian friends have been mainly re-purposing iPhone software for this new ‘third-way’ type of product (ie not phone, not laptop, but somewhere in-between). Put 6 iPhones together and you’re close to the size of the actual screen - you can see why the world’s suppliers of apps and games are genuinely excited. We’ve all done that irritating up-and-down-sizing of a website on a phone – all of that will be over if it’s as fast and as net-friendly as it seems in all the demos.

The family-friendly apps like photos, calendars and video have been re-designed for the bigger screen, but this isn’t just a home toy – the increasingly ubiquitous Keynote software has been re-jigged and made available at a very low price. You could do that next conference defiantly ‘hand-luggage only’. Forget the extra iPods and hardbacks, just whack the music on this, download some Malcolm Gladwell ebooks and order the room service.

My only reservation? Will I really be able to write on that keyboard? I hope so. But I’ll need a real one in my hands to really test that out, obviously. Purely for research, you understand.

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