Tag Archives: iPad

The iPad and Productivity

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This, by Coding Horror programmer Jeff Atwood:

After using the retina iPad for a while, I was shocked just how much of my everyday computing I can pull off on a tablet. Once you strip away all the needless complexities, isn’t a tablet the simplest form of a computer there can be? How could it get any simpler than a tablet? Is this the ultimate and final form of computing? I wonder. It’s a display in your hands, with easy full-screen applications that have simple oversize click targets to poke your finger at, and no confusing file systems to puzzle over or power-draining x86 backwards compatibility to worry about. Heck, maybe a tablet is better than traditional PCs, because it sidesteps all the accumulated cruft and hacks the PC ecosystem has accreted over the last 30 years.

Apparently, there’s still this debate about whether the iPad is for consuming media or creating it. Of course the answer is both, but to get down to it, the debate is really about whether you can be truly productive on iPad as opposed to a laptop.

I have to say that in my experience, an iPad is a wonderful productivity device. At a recent conference in Milwaukee, I took pages of notes on my iPad’s Pages app (which were delightfully, automatically synced everywhere via iCloud) without missing a beat. And over the past few months, I’ve even taken to keeping my handwritten meeting notes in it, using a stylus and the Penultimate app (although I think I prefer using the onscreen keyboard to a stylus).

Web publishing remains a little suspect, but that’s mostly due to ArkansasBusiness.com‘s older backend (which we’re replacing very soon). And if you’re a WordPress blogger, the WordPress app will probably do most of the time.

Of course, I’m a writer. I don’t do a lot of spreadsheets and programming (although there’s apps for all that, I’ve read). So there’s that. But for me, there’s no question that the iPad is a solid productivity device.

Video: The New iPad on Today’s THV

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Above, my live hit this morning on “Today’s THV This Morning” ahead of today’s third-generation iPad launch. Drinking game: Every time someone says “device,” take a shot! And that white earbud in my ear? That was my audio link to the studio today, connected to an iPhone in my back pocket.

Today was obviously my first look at the new iPad, and the display really is all it’s cracked up to be: super high-res, vibrant colors, near-imperceptible pixels. It’s also seems every bit as speedy as you’ve heard, and definitely leaps and bounds over my first-generation iPad. And in terms of network speed, Verizon’s 4G LTE connection should really shine on the iPad. Web pages rendered quickly, and video loaded almost instantly. Oh, and video and picture quality? Off the charts, owing, again, to that gorgeous display.

There were no lines at the Midtown Little Rock Verizon store we were at, at least when I was there from roughly 6-7 this morning. But it looks as if demand will be strong (pre-orders from Apple are already sold-out).

Will I upgrade? It depends. On paper, I probably should. I use my first-generation device heavily every day. But I’m also still really happy with it and its performance (while it had gotten a bit crashy lately, stability seems to have improved after the OS 5.1 refresh), and it’s hard for me to give up on something before it’s outlived its usefulness.

But if you’re a first-time buyer, or if you’re a heavy ebook reader who wants improved resolution, it’s a no-brainer. This “device” will serve you well.

ArkansasBusiness.com, on iPad

ArkansasBusiness.com, on iPad

Meanwhile, looking at ArkansasBusiness.com on the new iPad, I get what folks like Josh Topolsky are saying about how unforgiving the display can be to websites that aren’t optimized for such a high resolution.

The headers for our main menu, in fact, seem blurry, and look even worse if you zoom in, something we’ll definitely keep in mind as we redesign our site this year.

I think we’ll see a lot of web designers — and obviously app designers — rethinking their designs in light of a such a high-res display.

More
Stephen Hackett, who writes 512 Pixels up the road in Memphis, viewed the new iPad at a new Verizon store. You can get his thoughts on Verizon 4G LTE, the iPad’s hotspot capability on Verizon and competing Android devices right here.

The ‘New iPad’ Review Round-up

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The New iPad

The New iPad

The embargo fell last night. With the new iPad (iPad 3) devices on their way to stores — and the hands of those who pre-ordered — it’s time to take a look at the reviews:

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal/AllThingsD:

I’ve been testing the new iPad, and despite these trade-offs, its key improvements strengthen its position as the best tablet on the market. Apple hasn’t totally revamped the iPad or added loads of new features. But it has improved it significantly, at the same price.

It has the most spectacular display I have ever seen in a mobile device.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

Reading on the big retina display is pure joy. Going back to the iPad 2 after reading for a few hours on the iPad 3 is jarring. With bigger pixels, anti-aliased text looks blurry; with smaller pixels, anti-aliased text looks good; but with really small pixels like these, anti-aliased text looks impossibly good — and what you thought looked pretty good before (like text rendered on older iPads) now looks blurry.

Josh Topolsky, The Verge:

Yes, this display is outrageous. It’s stunning. It’s incredible. I’m not being hyperbolic or exaggerative when I say it is easily the most beautiful computer display I have ever looked at. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you hold this in your hands, or maybe it’s the technology that Apple is utilizing, or maybe it’s the responsiveness of iOS — but there’s something almost bizarre about how good this screen is. After the launch event, I described the screen as “surreal,” and I still think that’s a pretty good fit.

(Bonus: His Apple TV review.)

David Pogue, The New York Times:

My Verizon test unit got download speeds ranging from 6 to 29 megabits a second in San Francisco, Boston and New York — in many cases, faster than home cable-modem service. According to tests by PC Magazine and others, AT&T’s 4G network is smaller, but often faster. No doubt about it: life begins at 4G.

Now, 4G is a notorious battery hog. It scarfs down electricity like a football team at a hot dog eating contest.

Apple, however, was determined to keep the iPad’s battery life unchanged from the last model: nine to 10 hours on a charge. In my all-day nonstop-usage test, it did manage nine hours.

MG Siegler, TechCrunch:

The most notable of these is the LTE functionality. Put simply: it’s fast. Really fast. Faster-than-my-WiFi fast.

Yesterday, I clocked the new iPad using LTE at over 40 mbps down and 20 up on Verizon’s network. That’s about twice as fast as my current home cable broadband. For good measure, I tethered the new iPad to my iPhone 4S to compare it to Verizon’s 3G speeds. It’s about 40x faster for downloading.

Jason Snell, MacWorld:

The new iPad is also heavier than the iPad 2. The new model weighs either 652 grams (1.44 pounds) for the Wi-Fi-only model or 662 grams (1.46 pounds) for the 4G model. In contrast, the Wi-Fi iPad 2 weighed 601 grams (1.33 pounds) while the AT&T model of the 3G-equipped iPad 2 was 613 grams (1.35 pounds). So your standard Wi-Fi iPad has put on about 50 grams or a tenth of a pound. It’s a small weight gain, but I can’t call it imperceptible. The first time I picked up the third-generation iPad, I could tell that it was heavier.

What does this increased weight mean in practice? Probably not very much.

Things to Consider About Apple’s Monster 1Q Earnings

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Yep. Apple pretty much killed it yesterday. Top line, from its first-quarter earnings announcement:

The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

As Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo noted on Twitter yesterday:

And he’s right. Google’s most recent quarterly earnings report shows revenue of $10.6 billion, with a profit of about $2.7 billion.

Now, just for fun, let’s see how that compares with the world’s largest retailer. In its most recently quarterly earnings report, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville reported revenue of $109.5 billion. Profit was about $3.3 billion.

Finally, Apple’s current rival for world’s biggest company (by market cap), Exxon Mobil: its most recent quarterly profit? $10.3 billion.

So to recap: Apple has bigger quarterly profit than the world’s leading oil company, the world’s largest retailer and the world’s biggest search engine. In fact, it has more profit than Google has revenue.

How’d Apple do it? By selling lots of stuff:

The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Heck, Apple even sold 1.4 million Apple TVs, which it still considers “a hobby.”

Other fun facts:

Matt Richman notes:

In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined.

And then there was this yesterday from Verizon’s earnings release, as reported by Bloomberg:

While iPhone sales more than doubled from the third quarter to 4.3 million units, total smartphone sales fell short, signaling waning demand for handsets that run on Google Inc.’s Android operating system, said Walt Piecyk, an analyst with BTIG LLC in New York.

“This is a little surprising during a holiday period, especially given all the marketing around 4G phones,” he said. Total smartphone sales were 7.7 million units, 1.5 million fewer than Piecyk predicted.

So more than half the 7.7 million smartphones Verizon sold were iPhones.

More: Dan Frommer’s excellent SplatF blog has the charts; John Gruber’s DaringFireball has the claim chowder.

Coming Soon: Flipboard for iPhone

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Flipboard

Flipboard

Flipboard, that elegant social media and news reader that looks great on an iPad, is coming soon to an iPhone.

That’s according to Flipboard’s first editorial director, Josh Quittner, in this interview with CNet news.

Quittner is the former digital magazine strategy and editorial director for Time magazine’s Time.com. He joined Flipboard in July, hoping to help create a sustainable business model of journalism.

Of the iPhone Flipboard app, he says this:

One thing we know is that people use their iPads, in general, and Flipboard, in particular, before breakfast and from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Prime time. People use their iPads at home and they use their laptops and their smartphones the rest of the day. What we hope is the iPhone app we’re creating is a product to be used during the rest of the day–it’s a very, very different product and with very different constraints and considerations than the iPad.

Quittner says the app is coming soon. The whole interview is worth a read.

Ad Exec: The Daily’s Readers Fall Short of News Corp. Goal

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The Daily

The Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only news app

Ouch.

News Corp. (NWSA)’s the Daily is averaging about 120,000 readers a week, or less than a quarter the number the company said it needs to make money, according to an advertising executive working with the iPad-only publication.

Read the rest from Bloomberg. It ain’t pretty. Newsonomics blogger Ken Doctor says it all:

The Daily’s proving to be a great R&D experiment but probably not a viable business. It’s not breaking through the national noise.

Still, big ups to Rupert and company for at least giving it the ol’ college try. My original assessment of the iPad-only general-interest news app here.

For the record, as much as I like the idea of a dedicated news app — or even something social like Flipboard or even, God bless ‘em, Aol’s Editions app — I rarely use them. The live web, rendered in Safari, is good enough for me.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire

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Kindle Fire

Amazon's Kindle Fire, one of three devices unveiled today.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire, one of three handheld devices announced by the online retailer today, is a handsome little tablet boasting a high-resolution color display, a speedy dual-core processor and the full array of Amazon’s robust cloud services. As an easy-to-use device with which to buy and consume media, it looks to be home-run. The price is right too: $199.

The early takeaways so far? The Kindle Fire is

The Kindle Fire is also another validation of Amazon’s and Apple’s multimedia strategies, even as each strategy has a different aim. Apple curates a media library in order to sell devices. Amazon builds devices in order to sell media.

These are two very different goals, but smartly assembled multimedia ecosystems are key to each. Any tablet/handheld competitors missing such a component faces an uphill climb.

Another neat little thing: As noted, the Fire is pretty much the same build as RIM’s ill-fated BlackBerry PlayBook, except that it runs a forked version* of Google’s Android operating system, and obviously not BlackBerry’s QNX. Early impressions of the Fire’s OS indicate a speedy, intuitive operating system that appears to be simple and well-organized. The point is, software is important.

Also: What a day for Android indeed.

And: Daring Fireball, on Apple/Amazon, Kindle Fire pricing and the joys of e-ink:

The e-ink Kindles are to the Kindle Fire what the music-playing iPods were to the iPhone, and what the iPhone was to the iPad — traction in the mass market based on trust and loyalty.

Solid assessment as always.

(* For the non-nerds, it basically means that developers started with Android code, and drastically re-wrote everything, making it unrecognizable from other Android devices today. It’s almost it’s own thing, but not quite.)

Ihnatko: Windows Metro A Threat to Android

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Windows Metro

Windows' Metro design scheme for tablets and desktops.

Everyone’s viewing Windows’ recently demo’d Windows Metro in light of what it means to Apple iOS.

Andy Ihnatko thinks about what it means for Google Android (with the necessary caveats about Metro being at least a year away).

Android is a terrific OS on a phone but on tablets, it’s been a complete shambles. Every Android-based tablet released thus far has been a functional and commercial disaster, posting insignificant sales and rebuffing every attempt I’ve made to find something nice to say about it. “Nice try,” I say, sincerely hoping Google learned enough to make the next edition a lot better than this. If a friend told me he planned to buy an Android tablet I’d commit myself to stopping him, owing to the same humanist impulse that would make me seize a child’s collar and yank him from the path of an oncoming truck.

That last part says it all, doesn’t it? Recently, someone asked me about buying tablets and whether any of the Android options were any good, and I told them you gotta go Apple or go home. All others need not apply. Not now, anyway.

But on to the main point …

Google isn’t staffed by a bunch of dummies. They could have turned Android tablets around. It would have taken them a year or two, or three, and their engineers would need a pep talk from Oprah plus a colossal butt-kicking from Mike Ditka. But if Microsoft gets any traction with Windows 8 and they can sell it on cheap, reliable tablets, Google won’t have that kind of time.

The way I understand it, with Windows lost in the woods, mobile-wise, a lot of manufacturers looked to Android. If Android continues as a jumbled mess, Windows 8 could quickly become the choice alternative to iOS.

Businessweek on Apple’s Rumored ‘iCloud’ Music Service

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Apple Deals May Transform Digital Music

Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars. And the music industry gets a chance at the next best thing after selling shrink-wrapped CDs: monthly subscription fees, à la Netflix (NFLX) and the cable companies.

Well, not a subscription service per se, but I get what they’re driving at. I remember back in the day, the infancy of the iTunes store, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs rejected the subscription model out of hand, saying that people wanted to own their music. Interesting how things work their way back around. Millions of people have signed on to Netflix’s subscription model, for example, and not buying as many DVDs and Blu-Rays. Of course, there’s the argument that music and movies are fundamentally different in terms of whether you’d want to own physical copies of them.

At any rate, I like where this is heading. And once again, it shows just how overrated being “first” to market is. Google and Amazon have each beaten Apple to the cloud with their respective offerings, which have received mixed reviews. Like it did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple might be poised to reinvent an entire product, having worked and waiting just long enough to get it right.

Abraham Lincoln

A House Divided: Tuesday’s Good Reads

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Abraham LincolnGreat reading crossing the desk this week:

Abraham Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech – 1858 - In the first graf: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

The Day After – National Journal – Fascinating account of how, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. government worked to modernize its communications and securities systems in the event of a major disaster. Recounted here, “an extremely secret, multibillion-dollar effort to reconstitute the nation’s doomsday plans.”

What Tablets Can Learn from the iPod Wars – CNet – What does the story of the iPod portend for Apple’s latest, great achievement, the iPad? CNet’s Donald Bell concedes some similarities. But in the end, “If a tablet is going to knock Apple out of first place, the iPod has proved that a better spec sheet, lower price (though it helps), or a cooler marketing campaign aren’t enough.”

On the News – The Working Library – Blogger Mandy Brown thinks about the news and news reading. What does the new world of news look like? “It looks like Instapaper, or Readability, or perhaps Flipboard, if Flipboard can learn how to aggregate information in a way that makes sense.” It does not look like a New York Times paywall.

Kubrick – Vanity Fair – Michael Herr’s excellent 1999 profile of the great director, including details of when Herr worked with Kubrick to co-write “Full Metal Jacket.” “Stanley was a good friend, and wonderful to work with, but he was a terrible man to do business with, terrible. His cheapness was proverbial, and it’s true that in the matter of deal-making, whether it was his money or Warner Bros.’ money, it flowed down slow and thin, and sometimes not at all, unless you were a necessary star, and even then: it bugged him for years that Jack Nicholson made more money from The Shining than he did. If, I feel I should add, Nicholson really did.”