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?