iPad: Stud or Dud?

Without a doubt the latest media frenzy is the unveiling of the Apple iPad. Apple had already proved that they can turn ideas into great products with mass appeal. With the first revamp and resurgent of the Mac series computer to MacBook, iPod and eventually iPhone, Apple has gone from strength to strength. But could iPad break into a new market or create a new market? Let us take a closer look at the device.

There is no doubt that iPad is sleeky designed product to fit the bill of image conscious consumers. It looks like an upsize iPad but with the high portability offered by its distant cousin the MacBook Air in terms of its feather weight. The light weight means mobility without testing your body’s endurance, as compared to a lot of other netbooks and notebooks. The glossy touch surface and 9.7 inch screen offers a great visual touch interface that helped made iPhone a household name. Every aspect of its design seems to be flawless.

Software-wise, iPad can run all applications from the Apple Apps store as long as they are designed for iPhone. So now you can play iPhone games on a bigger screen and hopefully with more clarity with the polygons displayed on screen. It adopts the same accelerator and gameplay mechanism like iPhone, so you will be at home with it. The new introduction though is the iBook function. It is very obvious that Apple is keen to compete in the eBook market, which is growing quite steadily in recent years. Amazon’s Kindle is the current market leader with other companies like Sony also providing similar devices. The major difference of iBook from Kindle is that it provides a more beautiful screen on a simulation interface i.e. you flip the virtual pages (finished with a virtual page turning tone). 5 major publishers are already on board and Apple is keen to become the market leader as Steve Jobs said, “we are riding on the shoulders of Amazon’s success”. However, as enticing as it looks, iBook store is only available to the States at this point, so it will be less of a credible function to early adopters in other regions. iPad also supports the latest version of iWork from Apple. iWork is basically Apple’s struggling answer to MS Office. So it seems obvious that Apple is betting on iPad to popularise its own office applications. iWork itself is a nice bundle of software but for people who are actually using MS Office on Mac there seems to be little reason to shift over as there are still a number of compatibility issues of file formats between the two. Another major drawback is that despite you can browse the Internet with iPad, it doesn’t support Adobe Flash. That’s something really beyond comprehension as why would Apple not support something that is regarded as standard in the field? Boil down to this then it seems that iPad is just a bigger version of iPod Touch without a lot of new stuff to offer.

On the hardware side of things, iPad really didn’t offer much. It didn’t have a camera as iPhone does, it lacks USB ports that you can transfer files over (unless iPad can automatically synchronise with your Mac wirelessly), it doesn’t have a DVD drive so you can only watch things from your iTune collection (if you have one). I heard that you can dock the device on a separate keyboard instead of using the touch onscreen keyboard, but then to do that Apple will charge you separately. All these in fact will limit the appeal of the device as file transfer and synchronisation is no longer user friendly. Just imagine that you find something interesting, you have to use the iPhone (if you have one) to take the picture and then transfer it over to the iPad wirelessly in order to look at it on a big screen. Would majority of consumers do that? Previous Apple devices thrived on their easy to use interfaces. But now with such a clumsy set up, could iPad still appeal to their customers?

Function wise, Jobs said it is better than notebooks and netbooks. However, iPad actually has a lot less function than those devices as you cannot install software onto the iPad as you do with your netbooks and notebooks. That makes it a lot less versatile in terms of functionality. Maybe Apple didn’t want to create something that competes with its MacBook series, but then Job’s statement will be just comparing apples with oranges, which is quite misleading for the audience. If iPad is just an upsized iPod Touch with an eBook reader, its fate really depends on whether eBook is going to take off for Apple. For people who already have a Kindle and an iPhone, the appeal of iPad quickly diminishes unless they just want everything Apple. However, even so, the incompatibility of both eBook formats mean that people will need to spend a fortune of re-establishing their eBook collection on iPad, provided the iBook store actually holds those titles. Further, I am really sceptical about whether consumers who already have an iPhone would want to carry an additional device around with similar if not less functionality.

At this point iPad hasn’t really shown that it is a real winner yet. With all the issues that Apple may need to address eventually, iPad’s uptake could still be just restricted to hardcore Apple fans. It could become an alternative to netbooks or notebooks only if it can sync with Apple’s MacBooks, making it a must have on-the-go partner for both work and leisure. But even that it will mean consumers will have to be locked in to Apple products and no more. So it comes back to the question of apart from Apple fanboys, where is the market? The current fanfare and fireworks for iPad in the media are really merely fanfare and fireworks. The main issue here is: would iPad be a sustainable product after the initial thunder? Or it will just quietly go back to the back seat like MacBook Air?

Australian Ads - are they really value adding?

Was walking along the main street earlier today. A bus stopped by at the lights. I looked over. On the side of the bus it wrote: “It can take 400 tons of food in one day. That’s a busload of kids!” The ad was then signed off by The Australian Wild Life Park in the city.

Now no offence, but when did kids became food equivalent for Jurassic leftovers and also, when did people start thinking that “Let’s attract kids to come and see it because it can eat busloads of them!” I find it absurd that an ad that is supposed to attract kids to go to the Wild Life Park actually uses wordings against the same target group. Or maybe the current generation of kids has now evolved into a state that they find things that will potentially cost their lives a lot more intriguing and just telling them what they are?

Been talking about how badly designed a lot of Australian ads are for many years and we still haven’t seen any improvements in the ads that ambush us everyday asking for our attention. I liked the program “The Gruen Transfer” on ABC, but then the focus of that program is more about the fun side of advertising. What I am more interested is “Why the hell would the creators think that certain certain ads will actually sell the products?”

One of the most commonly used themes in Australian ads is SEX. I have to put that word on caps lock because those ads scream sex in such a loud way that you sometimes forgot what they were trying to sell. I mean from ads about that particular “Nasal Delivery Technology” to NSW Government’s no-speeding public announcement, sex is everything and everywhere. The funny thing about that no-speeding public announcement was that they focus on guys who speed, so “Nobody thinks big of you”, of course referring to their sacred temple of genitalia. Now may I remind our constantly shuffling NSW Government that not only guys speed. If they have actually done their homework, they would know that there are quite a proportion of female drivers who speed. I do know a girl who lost her license in the first year after she got it just because of speeding alone. I don’t know whether females think that a big vagina is a good thing or not, but if they actually prefer a smaller and more delicate genitalia, then maybe this is an encouragement for female drivers to speed so they can keep down there “small” and tight – as that’s the way the man eater Samantha Jones preferred.

Also, if you are lucky to be home between 4.30pm and 6.30pm in Australia, I will recommend you to turn down the volume of your TV or surround sound system. This is the time when all the yelling ads are shown. I lost my memories of these ads completely until I live in Sydney. I was stunned by the frequency of these “COME BUY BUY BUY WE ARE 30% CHEAPER THAN HELL!” on the Australian TV. Yeah certainly when Sydney is less densely populated and the suburb is quieter, this will work or maybe these ads did sound like music in the air. But in modern Sydney where more people are packed up like sardines in apartment blocks, certainly we can give this format of advertising a miss right? What good to the world will these yelling do? They completely turn me off going to those shops and at the same time adds to the carbon footprint of my TV because it has to use more electricity to deliver these thunderous messages.

Adding to these are some of those “What the” ads. Ads that even after they are finished, you still don’t really know what they are trying to sell. Or the revelation came in a way that they prompt you to go back to the universities to obtain a PhD and still couldn’t understand the relationship between the ads and the products. One of the classic ones I remember was and ad about a young couple making out in a wheat field (yes SSSSEEEEEEXXXXX!) and during the process the girl took a jar of honey and put the honey on the guy, first bit by bit and then more and more and eventually pouring the whole jar on him. At the end of the ad, it said something like “no taste is enough” with an ending scene of Honey Soy Chicken chips. I remember when I first saw the ad in the cinema, I turned around to my friend and said “What the?” and then around me were people laughing and saying “That’s such a stupid ad!” Yes! We are all surrounded by these ads day in day out. Sometimes watching these ads are so exhausting that you just want to turn the TV off or leave the cinema until the real feature is on.

The other much talked about ad was the Commonwealth Bank ones. Now I never like that bank but then I won’t mind them putting some decent ads on to entice people like me who left them because of their bad services. Anyway, there was a series of ads that at the beginning they put on a mock up big budget “Raiders of the Lost Ark” kind of main feature (there are several versions of that too) and at the end, it cut to the boardroom showing an advertising company trying to sell the idea to the Bank for a campaign. One of the Board Members said, “Why don’t we just tell them?” Now as “ingenious” as it looks, my reaction was exactly: “why don’t you actually tell me what services you are selling instead of an empty ad like that?” Yeah we sure remember the ad, but did it add kudos point to the Bank? No.

It seems like I have lots of complaints about Australian ads. To be fair, not all ads are bad. I quite like the skim yogurt ad about taking in calories because of careless eating and you don’t have a choice of where it goes. The actors surely did a great job because every time I saw that ad, it still puts a smile on my face.

However, is the once in a blue moon kind of good ad enough to salvage this raging sea of bad advertising? Sure there are some really creative and talented people out there, so what were they doing that eventually flooded the market with corpses of bad advertising? Even worse is that some recycled ads from overseas that were made (and I saw) years ago are still better than a lot of new ads we have now on TV and in cinemas. Maybe the advertising bosses think that it doesn’t matter but how are they going to explain themselves when a campaign failed flat? Or maybe it is just a way to keep the Australian economy less rely on consumer market thus helping Australia to cruise through the Global Financial Crisis with less scratches.