The New Sleekness

So like a good little fanboy, I spent my early Saturday morning exactly where the people who know me best expected me to be (going by the number of emails and txt messages I’ve received): standing in line at the Apple store in SoHo, waiting to get my hands on an iPad.

So I’ve got it, I’ve been playing with it, and by all accounts, it’s amazing. All that and a bag o chips, if you will. And I most certainly will, thanks very much. It’s a fantastic media consumption device, and ebooks are no exception. But before we get to ebooks, I want to share some overall thoughts about the device in general, since the iPad isn’t really an ebook reading device as much as it is a general purpose appliance that happens to also be an ebook reader, much like a laptop is a general purpose device that happens to also be an ebook readar. Only with the iPad, its form makes it ideal for that particular application. More on this later, but first, the general impressions.

The first thing that I reacted to was the device’s heft. At 1.5 pounds, it’s by no means heavy, but it’s certainly not as comfortable to hold in one hand as I expected it to be. I can certainly see small children and the elderly having trouble handling it. And since small children and the elderly fall into what I like to call the “your mom” category of users, which the iPad is ideally suited for, I suspect that the weight will be an issue for some. By all means, if you’re a small child or an elderly person, go try one out at your friendly neighborhood Apple store before you commit. The rest of us will probably develop highly muscular forearms over time. As my colleague Ryan Chapman says: “Having an iPad is like walking around with a newborn: it’s heavier than it looks, everyone wants to touch it, and you feel conspicuous on the subway.” I know I did today.

The initial setup was kind of a drag, as well. You need to connect the iPad to iTunes before you can even start using it, and the initial sync is long and painful. Friendly Apple store staffers are on hand to set it up for you after your initial purchase at the store, and I suspect that this will come in handy for the aforementioned “your mom” demographic. As a self-respecting geek, however, I wouldn’t dream of having any help in setting up a piece of tech (yeah, and instruction manuals are for the weak, too. Nyah.), so I had to sit through the process on my own.

There are some other minor downsides, which others have covered in more detail than I can or should get into here. The Internet is hardly lacking in iPad reviews, after all. Most of the gripes (no multitasking! no USB ports! no camera! not open enough!) I couldn’t care less about—that’s not what this device is about. The iPad is about simplicity, and a humanistic approach to computer-human interaction (Jeff Raskin would be proud, I think). It will change the way we compute, eventually. And, with 300K unit sales in its first day, “eventually” may come sooner than we think.

Initial birthing pains aside, once the iPad is up and running, it flies. I mean this thing is a rocket. Every app springs to life almost instantly. The response of the gorgeous, bright, touchable display is instantaneous, and animations and transitions are fluid and seamless. If there was any doubt before (which there wasn’t), Apple makes the best touch screens in the world, and the iPad is its flagship product in that space. It’s no mere advertising hyperbole when Apple says you can touch the Internet: the iPad has indeed become my favourite web surfing device, and it’s become my primary email, calendaring, and note-taking device (yes, I dig the soft keyboard. I find it quite easy to use).

The battery life, as has been mentioned elsewhere ad nauseam, is impressive. As an example, I left my house yesterday at 8:00 a.m., and my iPad has saw heavy use—from reading on the subway, to taking notes at a meeting, to constant email, to the inevitable show-and-tells to co-workers and passers-by—and it didn’t run out of juice till around 1:30 a.m.

And the apps. By Zeus’ angry beard, the apps. To a New Yorker who misses stargazing, Star Walk is a revelation. The Elements is what your child’s chemistry textbook will look like. The WSJ and NYT apps are my new morning papers (well, the NYT, anyway, since I already am a subscriber. There’s no way I’m giving Murdoch any more of my money. Go stick your overpriced paywall up your ass, Rupes). Comic readers like ComicZeal, the IDW app, and the Marvel app will make me relapse into my long-dormant weekly comic buying habit (hey DC, where the hell are ya?). And Instapaper is bloody brilliant, just indispensable. But more on Instapaper later.

The iPad is also my favorite reading device in general, as you may suspect. Heft issue aside, every other aspect of the iPad is tailor made for consumption: a spacious, bright screen, an industrial design that melts out of your way, and a slim and compact form factor. However, as I mentioned before, the iPad is a completely different animal from uni-tasking ereaders like the Kindle 2, the Sony reader, or the Nook.

The most glaring difference is, of course, its display: instead of a dull eink display, the iPad sports a full colour LCD screen. I’ve never been a big fan of eink (as a colleague of mine says, reading on eink is akin to reading from a wet newspaper), and I read off an LCD display at work, at home and on the go day in and day out, so I have no problem with reading long form works off of a bright, backlit screen. I realize that not everyone is comfortable with this, so your milage may vary. However, I do think it’s unfair to compare a multi-purpose device like the iPad to single purpose ereaders—both from a hardware and software perspective (since refresh rates on eink devices limit what can be done with user interfaces).

Suffice it to say that, heavy, heavy readers aside, if a consumer is looking for a tablet-style device that can read ebooks, the iPad is best-in-class, and I suspect it will stay that way, if the track record of its smaller sibling, the iPhone, in relation to all the other touchscreen smartphones that have come after it is any indication. Dedicated ereading devices will have a niche for the forseeable future, particularly among hard-core readers, people who can’t read on backlit devices, professionals who just need document readers, and other specialty groups. But make no mistake, the Nook, the Sony, and the Kindle (as they exist today) just got got—your average soccer mom is gonna go for the ereader which also surfs the internet (no, the Kindle’s janky browser doesn’t count), plays music, video and podcasts, does contacts, calendars, recipes, notes, maps, rss feeds, games, comics, and whatever else there’s an app for. Game over, done and done.

Within the iPad ecosystem, however, there are a few alternatives for reading books and documents. Here’s where I think some good compare-and-contrast can be useful. Right now, there are three major book reading apps available for the iPad: Apple’s own iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad, and the Kobo app, from the outfit formerly known as Shortcovers. Each one of these apps has a store associated with it, where you can buy books that you can only read on that app (hooray for DRM!). In addition to these three, there’s Instapaper, which, while not actually designed for reading books, holds a lot of great lessons for app developers on how to create a pleasurable reading experience.

Over the next few days, I’ll write a bit about each of these apps. I was gonna do it all in one post, but this one kinda got away from me. So first up: stay tuned for tomorrow’s Sleekness Spotlight on iBooks.

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