By Andrew Lih
Journalism Professor
Saturday was the day that thousands of users obsessively checking UPS.com for their package status finally got their gleaming white box of iPad.
Specs
With an entry price of $499, Wifi networking, a fast custom A4 processor made by Apple, and 16 Gbytes of storage, the iPad promises to be a compelling media consumption device. I say consumption, because it doesn’t come with a camera at this time nor does it come with any removable storage for expansion.
So does the iPad meet the hype? In the first 12 hours of use, I’d say yes it does. And it has great implications for traditional print publishers.
First the very basic physical aspects: it’s a 9.7″ 1024×768 pixel screen, or about the same screen size as a respectable laptop of a few years ago. The difference is, this is thin, portable and held vertically. It’s a classic lean-back instead of lean-forward experience. With no physical keyboard, you naturally hold it in portrait mode, about a foot from your face. That gives the pixels much higher impact on the eyes as it fills your visual senses.
When it comes to operation, one cannot underestimate the value of the intuitive direct manipulation interface — scroll by swiping, zoom by pinching, enable by tapping. There really is no manual for this thing, because you can learn everything you need to know in about a minute of experimentation.
Apple boasts the device can go 10 hours on a full charge. Most testers have found Apple was modest, and have exceeded that in real world tasks. One caveat: because the battery is so capacious, one really does need to use the included 10 watt adapter to charge the iPad in a reasonable amount of time. Plugging the tablet device into a computer’s USB port will charge it much less slowly, taking up to four times as long and not being able to charge overnight.
The screen is plenty bright in daylight, as that’s something Apple perfected some years ago. However, since we’re used to screens that stand almost vertical, putting this down on a table, even at an angle, will bring up lots of glare, especially outdoors. The keyboard is usable, but not for touch typing. For brief bursts it’s fine, and more pleasant than using the miniscule iPhone or iPod touch virtual keyboards.
Content
In some ways the iPad is a retro concept. With a fixed well-known screen size for content developers, and apps that need to be installed before one can experience rich content, the iPad model is reminiscent of the golden era of CD-ROMs. That was a time where every pixel on the screen could be manipulated, and any mode of interaction was possible with rapid-fire crisp response because everything was local to the computer. This resulted in great tools and content, including Voyager CD-ROM books, Apple’s Hypercard and multimedia encyclopedic content from Encarta and Britannica. Strangely enough, iPad may bring us back to recapture that cutting-edge 1995-era multimedia technology.
Contrast that with web pages viewed on a general purpose computer, which has been the focus of “interactive content” since 1995. While basing the dot-com revolution around Web browsers and Internet-hosted content certainly allowed for great advances in connected applications and collaboration, it was lacking for rich media experiences. Macromedia (now a part of Adobe) pushed the envelope by giving us Flash, but even then most sites amble along awkwardly with a mishmash of dynamic HTML, and give us a but a small window of interactive Flash.
The situation changes quite a bit with iPad.
Right now, the two choices for content creators is to go the “app-ian way” or to innovate with web content. Remember: the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch don’t support Adobe Flash.
Apple doesn’t mind closed solutions but only if *it* is the purveryor of the proprietary product. Therefore, Apple didn’t want to give entire swaths of its prized iPad real estate to another company. The other solution that has developed is the HTML5 spec, which has been trumpeted as the way to replicate Flash’s video and advanced multimedia capabilities in a standard way, and is supported by the Apple’s Safari browser.
The apps released so far for iPad have been impressive, which has invigorated the art of visual news design, now that designers (unshackled from HTML and CSS) have the entire screen the play with. The content from NPR, Match (France), Yahoo! Entertainment and even the usually bland Associated Press all show promise that go far beyond what you see from their respective web sites.
In the coming months, look for news outlets to experiment heavily with both approaches.
So far the range of iPad apps exhinits a curious mix of charging for the app, charging for the content, or making money from advertising.
Consider what we have right now on launch day, you can find an array of models from various news organizations including:
- Pay for app, pay for issues (Time)
- Pay for app, free content (CNN, ESPN ScoreCenter XL)
- Free app, pay for content (Wall Street Journal)
- Free app, selected free content, ads (NY Times, subscription forthcoming)
- Free app, free content, ad support (IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment)
- Free app, free content (NPR, BBC)
Tablet style computers have been around for years now. So what makes Apple’s move interesting? The allure for publishers is that Apple has tackled the problem no one in media has been able to solve — micropayments. Apple’s iTunes Store system has suddenly made even $0.99 transactions possible and profitable, since people are already signed up, credit card in hand, and comfortable with pulling the trigger to pay for ephemeral content. That’s a major cultural shift traditional media organizations are eager to join.
