So, I leave for 9 months and the whole world goes crazy? Not that I want to make any suggestions about correlation equalling causation, but if the boot fits...
But stop a moment – the world's been crazy for just about ever, you say, what in particular are you talking about? Well, the two Steves of the title are one Steve Jobs, who recently released what just might be the most disappointing piece of technology in a very long time (or might not), and one Stephen Fry, who as far as I can make out is just about the only person on the planet who isn't horribly disappointed about the finally unveiled iPad. More of that anon.
First, what really exciting, crazy happenings have happened in the past nine months which I absolutely must comment on? Well, flicking through notes I've had for my news section in nós*, there's not a lot jumping out at me that needs my late-to-the-game dissecting. Android is the notable exception to this, finally stepping out of the shadows and in handsets like the Hero and Nexus One really giving Apple something to think about. While on the subject of HTC, their press person in charge of promotions on this small island has promised that I can have a Hero to play with at some point in the very near future, and this will (fingers crossed) be followed by a Nexus One when that makes its way across the pond. Stay touched for a blog post (or two) once I've had some time with either or both of them. Although I haven't really had the chance to play with it just yet, Android represents what everyone wished the iPhone to be – an open, powerful and flexible platform which all of geekdom can get behind. The other area which still holds some serious intrigue is the whole netbook/tablet/smart phone/laptop, will they, won't they, mish-mash of a mobile computing shootout which has being going on around us for really quite a while now. This iPad business ties right into that, so with the assumption that I'll get to phones in particular at some point in the near future, what of this newest "game changer" from Apple?
Well, like everyone else in the world, I dismissed it immediately upon seeing it. No e-ink, no flash, no USB port, still need a PC or proper MAC, no multi-tasking, no really sensible way of using it – what's the point? And then I thought some more, and I still thought that. I mean, what were they thinking? Steve Jobs may have been the genius behind the iPhone, which I admit to lusting after for quite some time now, but surely he'd lost his way really, really badly this time? And then I thought some more, and still couldn't figure out what I could say that wouldn't be exactly the same as what everyone was already thinking, and then finally I watched the video the other Steve posted about it for Newsnight, and I started to twig what was going on. Now don't get me wrong, I still think it is very much a missed opportunity, and I also still think that it isn't actually all that good. To ladle the conditions on a bit more, I very much recognise the fact that Stephen Fry has a serious amount of fanboy-ism to him, even if it is wrapped up in an almost unprecedentedly sophisticated package, and I still think that the fact that you need another computer to actually use the tablet means it misses out on an entire section of its potential market, albeit a relatively small section. But...
I think it is a game changer, or at least will be. There, I said it. And before you splutter and hit back a few times, I know it's not that good, really I do, and I honestly don't even own so much as an iPod, never mind anything else by Apple. Thing is though, that UI has always been key in the mobile sector (even more so than in other sectors, where it's also pretty important). Stephen Fry recognised this in the iPhone around the same time I did (although he had the good sense to commit his thoughts to print, whereas I didn't). I think it's somewhere in this article (which is worth reading anyway, even if I've grabbed the wrong link) that although the very first iPhone mightn't be perfect, come version 3 it'd be pretty bloody close. Somewhere in the same article (or maybe it was somewhere else, I'm just going off the top of my head here) he pointed out that the UI was key. I had my first play with the iPhone less than a month after its release, in an Apple store in central Chicago, and that UI was just... wow. They just know how to make a UI in a way that nobody else can approach (although I do quite like a lot of what Microsoft have done with Windows 7). So even back then, when the iPhone didn't have 3G, and it didn't have GPS, and the app store didn't exist, that UI was gonna find it a pretty big following pretty quickly (those who are being particularly pernickety will point out that by the time I made this pronouncement the iPhone had already shifted something in the order of 100,000 units (or was it 200,000?). I can only counter this by pointing out that I don't actually keep track of sales figures while on holidays, nor did I then, and the queue had just about disappeared by the time I made to the Apple store).
Anyway, the iPhone started out pretty mundane, in many ways, but the UI meant it found a huge following and could keep selling while Apple figured out what people wanted it to do. The iPad will follow a similar pattern – right now, it doesn't really do anything, and so will sell "only" a few hundred thousand units. People will use it, whether on the move or on the couch, for watching videos and reading newspapers, even though a netbook could probably do just as good a job for the former, and an e-reader very much has the edge in the latter. In time though, things will change. V2 will more than likely see the introduction of a camera for video conferencing (although I still amn't too sure if people actually do that outside a business setting – I've used my webcam all of about three times), and some other improvements under the hood. By version 3, I don't think an e-ink screen is out of the question (this all depends on there being colour e-ink screens available at a reasonable price point in that sort of time scale, but that could very definitely happen. Well, maybe). Certainly they'll have introduced multi-tasking of some sort by then (rumour has it that could happen this year), and wireless USB could well have rendered the lack of a USB port irrelevant, at least as long as there are drivers made available. We'll hopefully see haptic feedback too, and the pictures make it look as if a svelter bezel mightn't go amiss (although they haven't changed the iPhone form-factor since release, so this one might well not happen for some time). Whatever improvements are made though, it'll improve, and people will get used to the idea of computers in all sorts of places where people didn't use computers before, and suddenly I won't be the one guy on the bus using a laptop (or at least, I'll be using a laptop while drooling over the iPads that everyone else has). People will use them on the couch at home. People who need to carry around clipboards all day will come around to the idea of being able to check their e-mails while they're at it. People will use them in cars (hopefully not while driving), and people will have them as fashion accessories, pulling them out at Starbucks or wherever they might happen to be to check the weather, send a quick e-mail and just generally let people know that they're at the cutting edge of the ever-advancing torrent of Apple-chic. And this all ignoring the crowd who'll buy them because they look just like those really cool future computers from half the sci-fi movies/programmes ever released.
Now, I might be wrong. I've been wrong before. Apple have been wrong before too – Apple TV was only released 4 years ago, let's remember, and that utter failure of a device is still on sale, as far as I know. Still, Apple don't often get it wrong, and for my money the netbook is a very good concept, but far enough from being a great one that there's room for the tablet in there somewhere. What's more, content still isn't really optimised for the netbook, whereas with Apple doing the heavy-pushing there will be a whole torrent of people making content specifically for tablets, including Apple themselves pushing e-books and e-newspapers (or whatever we're calling digital papers these days). Content is king, after all. That's why in 3 years time, Stephen Fry and I will be sitting smugly reading articles by the same people who wrote off the iPad, talking about how it has revolutionised mobile computing, and laughing at how remarkable their turnaround was.
(I should probably admit that others have also gone against the tide of negative public opinion, most notably (to me at least) Anand Lal Shimpi from AnandTech, who has an excellent piece online here. But we're still very much in the minority).
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