random thoughts

ok i have had my ipad now for a couple of weeks, but the key test came last week. i had to go on a three day business trip to phoenix where i had to give a presentation and meet with some clients to walk them through some research. in the past i would either schlepp with me my work laptop, or my personal laptop or in some cases both. in addition would i take with me my kindle as well as my ipod. for this trip i packed my ipad and my ipod. that was it. i had bought the ipad with the thought that it could be a great secondary computer, something that would be great for those moments when you don’t need a full computer but access to computing functionality.

so i took the plunge and even left my bluetooth keyboard at home. so from the get go the weight difference was amazing. no more laptop(s) plus their powerplugs, no more kindle. no more having to get the laptops out at airport security. all of this was great. while waiting for the airport i used the boingo app to connect to their wifi and it was easy. one hour of blog reading at the airport. then the flight. baltimore to phoenix was about a five hour flight. i sat down got out the ipad went through the presentation deck twice, then watched two episodes of 24, read a book, read some of the economist (via zinio), then played with one of the crossword apps. all in all the flight went by in a breeze, i didn’t turn off the ipad for a second so taking out take off and landing probably used the ipad for a full 4 hours in the flight … plus the one hour before at the airport … when i turned off the ipad i still had 55% battery power left … my dell laptop from work would have died on me with that kind of usage probably after two hours. so using the ipad during a flight is amazing, you just don’t have to worry about battery life at all.

ok then the day to day usage on the road. what i have to do on the road most is check emails.even with the wifi version this was no problem the aloft hotel i stayed in had wifi throughout the hotel. in addition to email i have to present research material … and that went better than i thought it would go. all the content is in PDF, all in landscape format and it looks great on the ipad screen. i have nearly all material in goodreader and so during one client conversation i wanted to show a study that i would not have packed if i would have taken paper copies with me, but with the ipad no problem. just pull up the other report and boom, ready to go. there was also no hassle with the paper pages or if the content is shown on a laptop you have to stand strangely around the screen. with the ipad you put the device just between yourself and the client and both of you can see the screen and you can toggle back and forth.

in addition to that i need to access saleforce.com a bit, and even though their app for the ipad is not ready (yet) their web site is very functional on the ipad.

on top of this business usage … it is also really great not to have to carry around with you all the other devices that you carry around for post-work … like the kindle. so once i was done in the evening i could choose between one of the movies i had on the ipad or one of the books. or just play a game.

so while in the future i might take the bluetooth keyboard along, especially if it is a multi day trip and i want to get a headstart on meeting notes, i will no longer take my laptop with me. there is just no need for it. i can do anything i need to do on the ipad and on top of it reduce weight by quite a bit and during flights there is no need to worry about battery life. overall way more successful than i thought it would be. will there be people that won’t have a similar experience, i bet. people that need to work on documents more than i, people that need to rework their presentation decks, people that need computing power on the road (photographers, video people) but all others (and i think that is a large amount) will be able to leave their laptops at home and speed a little faster through airport security.

everyone out there seems to ask the question if the ipad will replace laptops or not. that question is not completely the right question to ask. there are two types of laptop users.

1. laptop is the secondary computer for the road
2. laptop is the main computer, more or less a desktop replacement

for those users in group one that have a desktop at home (i don’t know, an iMac, a Mac Pro or some sort of windows tower) or at work as their primary computer and that use a laptop on the road, for those the ipad in my view is a clear laptop replacement. you can do all the processor intensive, all the heavy lifting work at home … but you have a device with you on the road that is capable to do very likely everything that you need to do, and especially everything you will need to do when on the road (ok, now that might differ if you are a professional TV guy, or photographer where you want to have full editing capabilities on the road).

for those in the second group, ok there the ipad won’t replace the laptop. there the ipad might be a good secondary computer for the road (similar to the first example).

so the question really shouldn’t be is the ipad a laptop replacement, but is the ipad a usable secondary computer? and for that question, i would say: yes, definitely. i was in the market for a new computer as apple announced the ipad, and initially i was planning to replace my told macbook with a new macbook pro … the machine would have probably cost me somewhere in the range of $2500. but instead i thought, why not get an ipad and an iMac as a primary computer. in the end the combination of the ”27 iMac plus the ipad is just a tiny bit more expensive than the macbook pro, but now i have a huge screen at home (when i really need to work, or want to work on some phtotos) the iMac is more powerful than the macbook pro i would have gotten, and the ipad does everything i need to do on the road … really well … access to email (check), access to my presentations and reading material (check), access to calendar (check) … it does it all, and in case i need to type a bit more on the road, i just take the tiny bluetooth keyboard from the iMac along with me.

so yes, the ipad can most certainly replace a laptop, it just can’t replace a primary computer. and think lots of us have secondary computer which we all wish would be smaller and lighter.

i don’t know if it is just an attempt to jump on the ipad bandwagon or if forrester research actually tries to compete with the likes of nyt tech writer pogue or the fine folks over at gizmodo. but to my big surprise i today saw a forrester bannered piece on paidcontent.org, written by a sarah rotman epps and she told us about how the ipad is a great device, but targeted a the wrong consumer. now, first off, i have no idea how someone can target the wrong consumer … consumer is consumer, money is money. i assume she means audience. but well let’s ignore that. what is more interesting is that she doesn’t seem to remember the iphone. ok, so main argument is that the ipad is a great device which ultimately has too little to offer to technophiles and is too ahead of the actual audience of the more luddite sort … after all would they move their info into the cloud?

The bottom line: To sell this device to more than just Apple acolytes, Apple will need to teach consumers not just a new way of using this particular device, but an entirely new way of computing. Apple will need to teach consumers to be less dependent on peripherals and more dependent on the cloud. To crave experiences that are less open-ended and more curated. At the same time, Apple will teach consumers to expect more from computing—more visual pleasure, more touch.

the problem with this view completely ignores apple’s and general consumer’s adoption history.

• the cloud arguments sounds just like the complaint the tech press had when apple got rid of the floppy drive back in the ’90s. in the end consumers didn’t care
• people didn’t think the ipod would attract any mainstream consumers … well it did
• and i can’t even think of all the complaints the tech press had of the iphone … from the lack of a real keyboard to no multi-tasking … in the end it didn’t matter

on top of all of this apple now has millions of iphone and ipod touch users for whom the touch interface is nothing new anymore. and who are used to move data from the iphone cloud to other devices they use. i assume too that forrester has adoption data of the iphone and will likely find that a lot of those iphone adopters these days are no longer applings but rather very mainstream consumers and judging from the jd powers surveys they love their iphones … if they had a problem on how to use the device they would have voiced their thoughts by now … but all we can hear is silence.

rotman epps is right in that this is a consumer device as well as an apple fan boy device. but one group she misses are corporate travel bees. all of us who are on the road a lot and don’t want to carry around a ton of devices for (laptop, mp3 player, ereader …) the ipad will be great. you can use it from reading and listening to music to finalizing your presentation decks and actually presenting it …

the guardian has a story Information is beautiful: war games which includes some great visualizations on how militarized different countries are. obviously the US is leading the globe in total amounts, but some of the smaller countries, especially those in constant conflict zones like the Koreas and Israel, top the lists when looked at it on a per 100,000 people basis.

overall though, what becomes clear looking at these pictures is that as a whole humanity (and this sounds a bit like an odd word to use here) spends a shitload of money and resources and ultimately just fighting each other.

ok, so if there was one graph that made the rounds the last couple of days, it must have been this one:

admob’s US mobile OS traffic shares. the graph was posted in an arstechnica story looking at the mobile OS market space. internationally there were no surprises but for the US the admob numbers seem to have offered a surprise.

and the surprise is visualized by the ascent of the green line which represents the android line. according the ars story this is how the admob data is being collected:

AdMob uses ad requests for ads from its network as its primary metric. Since these requests come from both mobile websites as well as apps that use AdMob ads, it’s important to consider what AdMob data shows. Unlike traditional market share measured in units sold, AdMob’s data could best be characterized as usage data; that is, AdMob’s statistics show that platforms like iPhone OS or Android are used more often than others online, far more often than their relative market share by sales might suggest.

so i admit that i am a longtime apple fan (although i am not using an iphone), but i also admit that overall this doesn’t come as a surprise (afterall, google, like microsoft, goes for mass markets and in order to get there they open up the OS and the platforms). what comes as a surprise is the speed. the droid most certainly is a success (for both verizon and motorola … although i still have my doubts it will be the live saver for motorola that they are hoping for) and htc has flooded the market with android phones, each new one slightly different from the others. ultimately what all these phones have done is to spread touchscreen phones with good browsers and bigger screens beyond the att domain.

back to those lines on the graphs. here is why i am a bit skeptical about those numbers:

• the story says that admob also hosts in app ads, but i have to admit that i have rarely seen any. facebook app for example, has none. which leads me to my point that i think that most of the traffic admob is seeing is browser based, and iphone users have moved beyond the browser. when i had my iphone i can’t recall using the browser a lot. i pretty much used targeted apps for finding flight info (tripit … don’t recall ads on that) to using the bofa app rather than going to their site.
• the spike in the middle of last year shows that once you have new users there is a spike in traffic … people want to justify the cost for the phone, and play around with it all the time. the android market is still new so people are still discovering the phones and spending a larger amount of time on the network … once those users get used to their phones their usage will mellow out.

overall though i think those numbers show that apple’s iphone app market is the main difference and iphone users are more likely to abandon the browser based web in favor of a faster, more targeted mobile internet experience that is apps based. as the google app market is growing it will be interesting to see how those numbers develop.