I got an iPad at work as a reward for exactly how above-and-beyond I’ve gone. Which is coincidentally not very long after I got myself a Motorola Droid and said a number of things about Steve Jobs’ mother to Ajit. Which now means that Ajit got a lot of joy out of congratulating me on acquiring my new Apple toy.
Some vague quick thoughts on the subject:
- Android and iPhone OS both have weird quirks that require you to discover them or have them explained to you.
- The Apple Store is pricier. I was able to get everything I wanted for my Droid in the app store without paying for a thing. This was not true for the iPad when I searched for the same apps.
- There are a lot of little details that Android took care of that make it slicker in certain ways than the iPad. These are only apparent when you've installed a bunch of apps. Basically, you can "plug in" to the web browser or camera on an Android phone to add more actions like sharing to Facebook or Twitter or Flickr.
- My coworker Brian claims that the Out of the Box experience with iPhones is better. I disagree. My Android was content to work against the cloud right out of the box. The iPad needed to be synced to iTunes first. Furthermore, the iPad software requires Mac OS X 10.5 and I never bothered to have IT upgrade my office MacBook Pro above 10.4. Either way, the real power is the applications you add to it and the web browser and both of them start out in the same state.
- iPhone apps scaled up to iPad sizes are not fun at all. It's an intrusive reminder that your device is not quite Steve Jobs perfect. As a duly elected representitive of the iPad users, I suggest that iPhone developers need to get off their butt and port, because I deliberately pick iPad apps over iPhone apps. :)
- The iPad needs haptic feedback like the Droid. Haptic feedback rocks in ways that clicky keys don't.
One longer thought: Many years ago, I was in grade school but of above-average reading comprehension... so I'd read Scientific American.
(I explain to people that I'm homozygous for nerd. My mom's a computer programmer and my dad an aeronautical engineer)
The article was where I was introduced to the concept of Ubiquitous computing at PARC. They were talking about computers that seemed to be fairly Star Trek, with wireless communications and several sizes of computers that you could spread out on your desk that pretty much resemble an iPhone and a iPad.
I doodled in my little doodle pad designs along the concept. I had one, that I've probably lost, that was based around machining a block of metal with recesses such that you could mount a few chips against a PC board and skip out on IC packaging or anything like that because the PC board would seal against the block of metal. The whole thing would be glued and sealed together into a stack, such that no space was wasted. It's not dissimilar to the way that the iPad and iPhone are constructed, actually. I'm sure that, given enough time, they will reduce the circuit-board portion of the phone even further.
This is fairly similar to the way the iPad is constructed, actually. I'm sure I wasn't the only person to get that sort of dreamy idea after reading the PARC thing.
Playing with both my iPad and my Droid, I feel like we're actually approaching this science fiction future that was predicted in the 80s by PARC and Star Trek TNG.