Tell them, my song.

I just clicked my way through the Apple Online Store: I’m returning my iPad. Why? It’s hard to find an answer to the question which space an iPad can usefully occupy when you already have an iMac, an iPhone and a notebook. Especially at the price of an iPad, you better come up with that answer quickly or you only bought yourself an expensive but rather useless toy.

You see, an iPhone makes sense: It combines a bunch of gadgets in one device. For me, it’s the music player in my car, a navigational system (thanks to the TomTom cradle and Navigon software), it’s a mobile gaming console and Internet gadget and you can even make phone calls with it. An iPhone makes sense.

A notebook also makes sense: It’s a real mobile computer, not just some restricted mobile device with a touch screen interface.

Anyway. It didn’t take full 24 hours before I had my first feeling of buyer’s remorse. 500 bucks is a lot of money in my world. It’s what I paid for my two dogs when I got them, for example. It’s what a -real- PC notebook costs. It’s almost a month’s rent. It’s a lot of food for my family. It’s a lot of oil for the winter. If you spend that money, you better get something for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I like spending money for toys. But somehow, the iPad just didn’t feel right. How shall I describe it? It felt a big like buying an executive class notebook just because you want to feel like upper management, but in reality you’re only the person who cleans the boss’s office in the evening. Or think of buying a huge, high-end TV that you put in a living room with moth-infested furniture. You know, that sort of not feeling right. Buying something shiny and expensive that has no place or justification or even remotely a purpose in your life. That’s how the iPad felt. And that’s the main reason why it’s going back to Apple while I’m still in the 14-days grace period to return it (which in Germany, by the way, is governed by law and not just a good will thing from Apple).

Here’s a couple of things that were fun with the iPad (and which are also fun with the iPhone): Playing Shredder chess and Plants vs Zombies. Safari was a much better experience with the iPad than it is with the iPhone. In all honesty, using a web browser on a mobile phone is a cynical joke, but nothing you want to do every day. With the iPad, it’s more or less okay, but I -DID- miss Flash, simply because most websites that have embedded video clips rely on Flash. It’s a simple fact of life, no matter how much Steve Jobs wants to justify the lack of support for Flash on his iGadgets. This will change over the next couple of years, sure, but it doesn’t really help you today.

Typing on the iPad is a nightmare for me. The on screen keyboard sucks when you’re used to typing (fast) with ten fingers, as I am. It just doesn’t work for me. Which leaves me with the fact that apps like Pages are practically useless when you don’t use an external keyboard. And when you are going to use an external keyboard, you’re already better off with a real notebook. This is not what the iPad was made for. Or was it?

Anyway. Your individual mileage will vary, and maybe you have a niche for the iPad in your life. Except for owning another shiny electronic toy with an Apple logo on it, I didn’t.

Update: I’m also trying to return the software purchases for the iPad. Apple isn’t making it easy; I have to “report a problem” for each individual app purchase. Well, let’s see how that one will turn out.

Update 2: The folks at Apple are fast. They agreed to refund me for two apps, but they declined the remaining dozen or so requests. Anybody reminded of the Mapple store episode from The Simpsons? “…while our true policy is: No refunds!” Well, I am.

Plants vs Zombies convinced me that there are apps and games that are much more fun to be used via a touch interface, and the small screen real estate of my iPhone 3G convinced me that the iPad, although it is basically just a large iPod Touch, might have a place in my digital life.
Enter an iPad 16 GB WiFi.
Why did I “only” purchase the smallest available edition? Simple: This device is not meant to carry around your entire video or music library, so there’s no need for all that storage space. The iPad, by design, is mainly a reading device and a mobile surf board for the Internet. So 16 GB ought to be enough (for now).
And since I already have an iPhone, I certainly do not need another gadget with an own data subscription. I know that people (even in my company) have successfully tethered their iPad with their iPhone, so the iPad does not require an own UMTS/3G data plan. Also, there’s usually a wireless LAN around wherever I might be, so there’s no point in having the 3G option in the iPad.
And let’s be also honest about another thing: Where do you actually use the iPad the most? In bed and – don’t lie – on the toilet. For people who still have and use the concept of a living room, they might even be using it there. And maybe it will also be used as a “book” on a regular desk.
But since the iPad is rather heavy for its size and since it’s also rather expensive, not so many people will use it outdoors. Amazon’s Kindle probably is a much more suitable eBook reader for outdoors use than the iPad. And for all the other typical outdoors stuff… Well, have I mentioned that I also have an iPhone?
I’m still evaluating if and how an iPad can actually replace a notebook. The first killer criteria AGAINST this is the lack of a physical keyboard. After two days, I still find typing on the iPad “cumbersome” to say the least, if not painful. I’m not good at using the touch interface keyboard, and I probably will never become good at it. And since I’m already 40 years old, I certainly don’t see the need anymore to add iPad typing speed to my skill set. As a teenager, I still thought that stuff like that would be impressive. You know, just like knowing all those magical computer commands that are nowadays performed with mouse clicks and that nobody really cares about.
Anyway. The keyboard is an issue, as is marking text for copy and paste with the touch interface. A mouse is easier to use and more precise for these things than the touch screen, but you cannot connect a mouse to the iPad. You can connect an external keyboard to it, but then there’s immediately this question: Why would you want to do that? The whole purpose of the iPad is NOT to carry around that additional clutter with you.
Still, writing a post like this on an iPad is a painful act for me and that is why I’m typing it… On a notebook, with an external keyboard.
Another thing that was a rather inconvenient experience last night was when I tried to watch a movie on the iPad with OPlayer HD. It was probably only a software issue, but the playback of the movie wasn’t fluent enough, it seems that it didn’t manage to playback full 24 or 25 frames per second. I gave up on it and turned on the notebook. Maybe also the movie rip itself was too demanding for the iPad’s hardware, I don’t know. Nevertheless, it was disappointing. But I’ll try another movie one of these days. Or maybe another player, if I find a good one.
What I already found to be an issue is the lack of interoperability between applications on the iPad. When you’re used to copying and pasting content from one app to another, as you can do it on any Linux/BSD, Windows or OS X computer, you’re in for a major surprise: That’s just not possible on iOS. It’s also not possible to easily share files between applications because there is no common file system. To use Steve Jobs’ own words: This is huge. But not as in “awesome, magical, beautiful”, this is huge as in PROBLEM, ISSUE, DESIGN FAULT.
The iPad is positioned in a difficult niche. It’s supposed to be somewhere between an iPhone/iPod Touch and a MacBook Air. But since a lot of people will look at it as a substitute for a real notebook, Apple’s decision of putting iOS on this device instead of OS X could be a serious problem, showstopper or deal breaker for a lot of people. It also makes you quickly question the usefulness of the iPad, depending on what you actually want to use it for. iOS is a very restricted platform and just cannot replace something like OS X or Windows.
Since neither the iPad nor the iPod Touch are (smart)phones, Apple’s standard excuse doesn’t work here: There is no carrier network in danger if apps on those devices go wild, so this cannot be the reason for all those restrictions and the walled app garden. But we know that Apple wants full control and an AppStore/iTunes store monopoly, but of course the company cannot publicly state this, so they have to come up with something else, no matter how ridiculous or stupid it sounds.
Although I am not a friend of Apple’s AppStore policies and censorship, from a pure user perspective the whole thing probably isn’t that bad. It’s convenient enough to purchase applications and iTunes takes care of installing software on your gadget and backing up your data from it. And all IT admins know this to be true: The less a user can do, the less he can do wrong or break.
Which leads us to target audiences. I don’t think that Apple had the average tech geek in mind when they designed the iPad, and I think that tech geeks will be looking forward to the avalanche of (cheap) iPad clones with Android or other Linux-based operating systems on them.
The iPad is more targetted at users that don’t care for raw computing power or “software freedom”, but who care for a friendly user experience and who just want to “use Amazon and Google” without having an IT system getting in their way. I can also imagine that (family) board games see a revival on the iPad – the multi-touch interface is pre-destined for such uses. Of course, it’s also a decent replacement for books and other print media.
But something tells me that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that we still haven’t yet seen the full potential of this device category. It took the industry quite a while to learn how to take advantage of graphical user interfaces and “serial pointing devices” also known as mice. I think it’ll take developers also quite a while to fully unleash the potential of mobile devices with touch interfaces (and network connectivity). The additional screen real estate makes a lot of difference to an iPhone, because it’s now possible to create a whole new sort of applications that simply wouldn’t have fit on a phone.
Applications like iBooks/Kindle, OmniGraffle and PenUltimate give an inkling of where the journey might be headed, and games like Shredder Chess or Plants vs Zombies already demonstrate how clearly superior a multi-touch interface can be for a certain class of games. There’s a lot of stuff that’s more fun to be done on and with an iPad than it is with a PC or Mac.
Do you already need an iPad now? Probably not. At least not yet. The device suffers from problematic restrictions and the entire platform class of slate devices is still in its infancy. But I think it is already apparent that we can expect great things to come from it in the not so distant future.

UPDATE:

Forget my comment about copy & paste not being possible between apps. I found out today that it actually is possible and I copied stuff from Pages to OmniGraffle or from Keynote to Pages and vice versa. So it does work. I probably was just too dumb to get it right the first time.