I recently read an article exploring the idea that new tablet devices, including the iPad, will create a greater demand for SaaS and cloud storage.  This is an interesting perspective to me because I don’t think we’re too far away from the day when “iPod as a service” becomes a reality and there is no more need for DRM.  Paying $9.99 a month for listening to any song ACROSS any compatible device you have, and having the option not to “own” any of the albums or songs sounds good to me.  Rhapsody has an early model in place already that does this to an extent (it supports a few devices, but not ANY device). With the continued development of “As A Service” business models and frameworks I can’t think of a reason why iTunes or a future “Google Tunes” cannot do it tomorrow

What used to be called Storage Area Networks a decade ago and was intended to make enterprise storage more robust and accessible is now commoditized and called the Storage Cloud. Computation is also becoming an accessible commodity with the Elastic Compute Cloud. Access to applications and storage is now more consumer friendly and unlimited. If you think about it we’re in a sense going back to the Mainframe days. Only now you can access a “mainframe” with theoretically unlimited computing and storage power, for personal use, through your phone, sitting on a train and not just for dedicated scientific or business applications. Everything is becoming more seamless and transparent. For once we needn’t worry about operating environments, compatibility, or file formats. We can now focus less on the Information Technology and more on the Information.

The defining characteristic behind the adoption of any pervasive computing enabler (SaaS being the front runner right now) has been the degree of mobility of the associated commercially available User Agent (iPad, iPhone, HP Slate, Android devices like ICD Gemini etc). While it can be argued that these devices are still in their infancy, if Moore’s law is anything to go by, we’ll see significant improvements in associated enabling technologies, specifically connectivity and bandwidth, as these devices gain market share. As the enablers do more the devices themselves need to do less without overall loss of functionality. In other words pretty soon you will find fully functional clients getting smaller and thinner simply because the technology has matured to the degree that storage and computation is not a constraint anymore. Just so long as you are connected to a pipe that’s fast enough to shuttle data back and forth without latency (IEEE 802.16 anyone?).

Taking the idea of smaller sizes and integrated capabilities a bit further I can’t help but imagine what new possibilities nano-scale technologies and quantum computing will offer in the near future. For those more inclined towards theoretical computing foundations there seems a greater push to look beyond the traditional Church-Turing conjecture that all computing technology based on registers and pointers is arguably inspired by. What seemed like sci-fi fantasy 20 years ago is in our pockets today. Mark Weiser’s Smart Device is now a reality, the internet of things is probably not too far away. By all indications could “Hyper-computation” be doable in 20 years or less? Regardless with the advent of full virtualization, on demand licensing and increased bandwidth we’re in for some good times ahead!

When Apple announced the iPad I was excited and let down at the same time.  Finally they released the mythical Apple Tablet.  It took me a few days to look past the fact that on the outside the iPad appeared to be a giant iPhone/iPod Touch.  I consider the iPad a Trojan horse in the computer world.  Apple is ushering in the age of software over technology, and it is easy to see how the Web, Widgets, and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) have inspired its apps.  With Apple’s refusal to include the Flash Player as a part of its web browsing experience a rift has grown in the Flash community.  I have always been a big believer that I am a developer over a Flash Developer and I see the iPad as a new platform to grow into.  I wrote a post that outlined a few of my thoughts on why the iPad will change the way we view RIAs and recently it was published in Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine.  It is my pleasure to share it with you here.

Also, if you do not get a free copy of Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine I suggest you sign up for it.  It is free and there are lots of good articles in it so how can you go wrong?

All the panelists at the iPad panel in SXSW were in agreement that the iPad is a new genre of mass market device. It’s large form factor made it difficult to carry around all the time unlike a mobile device. Because it lacked a full keyboard, it was not a workstation in the sense that a laptop or desktop is. I would call the iPad a casual consumption device. It’s not meant to replace my laptop or the mobile phone. If I am composing a blog post, photoshopping or coding, I probably want to do it on my laptop. If I am standing on the train on my way to work, I would use my phone to consume my news and RSS feeds. The iPad is ideal when I am on the couch and just want to surf the (non Flash) web, watch some Youtube or play some games. It’s also great for bedside reading I would imagine. One of the panelists even went as far as saying that you would probably bring the iPad to the toilet.

I got my hands on the iPad the day it came out and here are some impressions. It’s heavier than I thought. The Kindle is super lightweight and I have it in my backpack at all times. The fact that it’s a bit weighty might dissuade me or someone else to carry it around as much. I didn’t hate it but I wasn’t in love with it either. However, it wasn’t built for people like me. I do a lot of content creation whether it’s coding, designing, writing a blog post, or uploading a video to Youtube. I also don’t really listen to music or play video games. However, the target audience is not people like me who are producers of content but rather consumers. The iPad is perfect for this. With a few simple taps you can do things like listen to music, watch video, read facebook, and play games with relative ease. The file system is completely abstracted from you. The old desktop paradigm of files and folders is gone. That was true with the iPhone as well, but it was mobile device, and people who had no need for a smart phone never saw the benefits.

You might argue that the iPad is a giant iPhone. In fact in some ways it is even less than a giant iPhone. It doesn’t even come standard with apps that the iPhone ships with, like calculator, weather, and stocks. You can’t make calls and, it doesn’t have a built-in camera either. It’s more like a giant iPod touch in that respect. I think this is where the similarity ends.

The one big thing I notice is that all the existing iPhone apps look horrible on it. This represents an opportunity in it of itself for enterprising app developers who missed the boat on iPhone apps. However playing with the iPhone apps on the iPad also exposes another issue. iPhone apps are very single minded. I mean because the real estate is so small, you can really only do or see one thing at once whether it’s a list or a view. It’s very rare that an app presents you with more than just one dimension of data at a time. Because the iPad has a much larger screen, you can now have child parent windows on at the same time. Apps like Outlook which show you both the list view and the detail view now don’t have to show you only one view at a time.

Secondly, I think the use cases are different. With an iPhone, you are mobile, on the go, on the run. You are basically in between states and you only have a few moments to access information. Most people I see on the train with their iPhones are either playing casual games or listening to music. With an iPad, you are probably comfortably situated somewhere, either on the couch or bed. You have some leisure time to consume content for more than a few seconds or minutes. So an app designed for the iPad would be more similar to a desktop app in the sense that the user has some time to devote to the task.

I also thought the form factor lends itself really well for dashboard applications. Dashboard are at a glance apps that usually don’t require a lot of interaction. You want to take a look and see the key performance indicators (KPI) and maybe drill down. I can see this on factory floors as well as command centers. Dashboards are passive displays and currently you can see plasma or 42″ LCD screens being used like this, but I think a personal dashboard using an iPad is something down the road as well. Its form factor is also convenient for being handed down from person to person in a more intimate presentation or discussion. I hate it when I have to bring people over to my laptop or try to hand my laptop to other people.

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us at Roundarch went down to Austin Texas for the yearly new media conference, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. Although SXSW started out as purely a music festival to fill in the void in business during the spring break, it is now the highest revenue producing special event for Austin. It’s music festival has over 1,400 performers at over 80 venues over four days. The event now has an interactive conference and film festival all bunched up in the span of a bit over a week.

SXSWi seemed really big this year. It seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year and quickly becoming the “it” event for anyone in new media whether it’s digital marketers, social media folks, tech entrepreneurs, web technologists, bloggers, venture capitalists, publishers, agencies, etc. SXSWi is the one place where one can run into successful tech entrepreneurs and CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, famous authors like Guy Kawasaki and Tim Ferriss, and twitter whales like Pete Cashmore of Mashable and Evan Williams of Twitter. It’s a really great conference for those interested in hearing what the thought leaders of the online interactive industry and the herd are doing. I recall last year I didn’t meet that many people from Chicago but this year it seemed like everywhere I turned I met someone from Chicago. Many of them were SXSW first timers. My overall impression was that companies are starting to have a social media budget and sending these people down here.

Panels at the SXSWi conference typically fall under business, web design and development, nonprofit, or emerging technology. I stuck mostly to the web design and development track. Some of the notable panels I went to include scaling web applications, iPad, designing seductive interactions, and game mechanics. One of the things I really enjoy about SXSW is seeing and learning how others are doing things and their willingness to share.

Two big themes of this conference were mobile and social media. Just the sheer number of people whether they be social media enthusiasts or professionals doing some sort of social media work for companies was astounding. The demographic is definitely skewed towards the people with iPhones and it almost always guaranteed to bring the AT&T network down. Last year AT&T had to have a mobile antenna nearby. Location based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla also made a big splash this year. Last year people were using solely twitter to find out where their friends were at SXSW. This year, one of the most useful tools was the trending feature of Foursquare that showed you which venues had the most checkins.

Some people come down to SXSW as much for the conference as for the parties. Companies ranging from big software corporations like Microsoft as well as startups like Gowalla make an effort to throw big parties in order to please the vocal and active online crowd. On any given night, there’s probably around 3 different parties going on and lines are usually ridiculously long. Personally I’m a bit too old for that and it’s not how I roll. I prefer a more intimate and quite setting so that I can really get to know and connect with the people I hang out with. One evening, a small group of us ended up in a Thai restaurant with one of the Backupify guys (another great midwest startup) Ben Thomas. One another night, a small group of Chicago folks met up with some Youtube engineers to have a great private barbecue. In this type of setting I am able to learn more about what they do, converse and connect. In short SXSW is a great way to develop connections you otherwise wouldn’t make. Your mileage may vary depending on your age and tolerance for alcohol. I personally like going to the sessions. I think the early morning sessions separate the men from the boys and you typically see some hardcore technical ones in the morning.

This year’s keynote with Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter was a bit of a let down. The one big Twitter announcement of the new @platform was covered only very briefly. First of all, the person doing the interviewing is probably a better writer than a speaker and should have probably stuck to his day job. Many people in the audience complained and even Guy Kawasaki made a jab. Personally I think Guy should do all the keynote interviews. He is entertaining and gets right to the point.

The SXSW experience is what you make out of it. You can go to tons of sessions and learn a lot. You can make friends and lifelong connections at various parties. You can spend time with vendors and learn what their product roadmaps are. Five days is definitely on the long side and by the third day, I feel pretty exhausted but I recommend it if you are in the industry.

This was a panel of people from different industries: gaming, print, and publishing and their take on the iPad. Unlike Apple’s existing products iPhone and Macbook, which entered existing markets, the iPad is creating a new market for a device that is neither mobile nor desktop. One speaker defined it as the recliner app or toilet seat app. There are currently 75MM+ iPhone OS (iPhone + iPod touch) devices in the market with a hockey stick growth curve.

The panelists include:

• Bill Jensen @billjensen, director New Media at Village Voice. 14MM pageviews/week across 14 newspaper sites. 90% of business is local advertising with a 70% growth over the past 3 years.
• Shervin Pishevar @shervin, CEO of Social Gaming Network, one of the leading social and mobile gaming companies, and over 11 million installs on the iPhone and tens of millions of users on Facebook.
• Jason Grigsby @grigs, co-founder of CloudFour, a web and mobile development firm.
• Katherine Tasheff @tasheffka from Hyperion Books

Shervin actually got to spend some time with the iPad and he was amazed at how fast he got used to the virtual keyboard. Pundits question whether or not people would get used to typing on the screen, but Shervin said he was able to get to 85 words per min in 10 minutes. He also noted that the chip is fast and that there is a significant performance improvement compared to the current iPhones. This will translate well into the gaming space.

• Of the top grossing apps in the iPhone app store – 76% of them are games
• Estimated to be $30 billion industry by 2013
• iPad preorders – estimated 51,000 in first 2 hours
  90,000 in the first 6 hours
• Estimated to be 20MM iPads in the market by 2013

Katherine noted that ebooks already outnumber games in the Appstore. However since most of the top grossing apps are games, one could hypothesize that the phone form factor is not as conducive to reading and that ebook content in general do not perform as well as games. Essentially books haven’t changed since the 1400s. The industry is very slow to change because their model has worked so well for so long. However book sales have declined 5% over the past year. The ebook represents an opportunity for those who can come up with compelling content and experiences that fit the ebook model.

iPad is a great web browser. It’s got a new super fast Javascript engine. It’s resolution is that of a standard browser. It will support the latest CSS and HTML standards. Basically web apps are going to look great on it. This opens up opportunities for developers to make great iPad apps that bypass the Appstore distribution and let them keep their 30%. Also it will lower the barrier to entry as far as having an app for the iPad. Also iPad makes for a great dashboard appliance for scenarios such as the manufacturing floor.

In summary, the three industries see great opportunity since it’s a new product entering a new market reaching potentially a whole set of new users.

I won’t beat around the bush. The iPad is the future of computing. And I don’t want it. Well, not yet.

Just Like Any Other Tablet

Many look at the iPad as a wi-fi enabled 10” 1024×768 flatscreen with no USB port, SD card slot, or camera. They look at the iPhone OS and wonder why you’d use something with far less functionality than the hundreds of other tablets that have been on the market since the early 2000’s.

What they’re missing is the potential for the iPad to be the start of something new. Coming in the form of an evolved iPhone, something familiar to most of us, it doesn’t seem all that new or different.

But imagine, for a second, using the iPhone as your main computer. The reason you never have to dig through folders to find what you were working on, deal with software conflicts, or spend time cleaning up the iPhone after removing a piece of software is because the iPhone approaches computing from a different angle than the computers we’re used to dealing with every day. By expanding the iPhone from a small pocket tool to a larger device, Apple is trying to apply the iPhone’s model of computing to the tasks we currently use laptops for.

Yes, It’s Underwhelming

At the iPad’s unveiling I could sense the disappointment in the discussions within my company and across much of the internet. When the iPhone was first introduced, it blew away notions of how a phone worked and what kind of experience a low-powered mobile device was capable of.

People were hoping for a similar sense of disbelief with the iPad. They wanted it to save the publishing industry, they wanted new input methods, they wanted “out of control” multi-touch interactions, and most importantly they wanted it to do things they hadn’t even dreamed of doing yet. In short, they wanted to feel like Apple had developed the future and was showing it to them. That’s what the iPhone introduction felt like.

Instead, what people got was something they’d already seen. And so it was easy to pick out the flaws. No open app distribution model? No camera? No multitasking?

But when you’re looking at the prototype of a new computing platform, those complaints are irrelevant. All of them will be added in time. What cannot be changed are the fundamentals of the software design.

The iPhone got these fundamentals dead right from day one, and the iPad is now inheriting them. Fundamentals like a touch-based interaction model. Fundamentals like an easy to understand way to acquire and run applications. Fundamentals like the complete change of focus from navigating a confusing hierarchical file system to a simpler task-based interaction model.

As Andy Ihnatko says,

“It struck me that Apple was making a clear statement with the iPad: ‘We were right about the iPhone.’ They had a clear and ambitious concept about an entirely new computing platform and an entirely new way that humans would interact with hardware. They were so right about it that when the time came to build a tablet device, changing the UI seemed vulgar at best. […] If the iPhone had never existed, the iPad would still have made sense as a touch-based computer.”

A New Interface

The very things that make the iPad so great are also its biggest weaknesses. By developing a new interaction paradigm — touch-based rather than mouse-based — Apple has rendered all existing desktop software incompatible with the platform. To truly take a step forward, this is necessary.

Starting from zero is a daunting proposition. It is the reason Microsoft has never been able to garner mainstream acceptance from the tablets it promotes, despite grand proclamations about the coming tablet revolution back in 2001. In Microsoft’s universe, compatibility is king, hence the constant attempts to put Windows on a touchscreen. The taskbar, windows, dropdown menus, contextual menus, rollovers, and the rest of today’s pervasive interface elements make for an awkward tablet experience, but one with the advantage of an entire universe of software already built for it. Starting from zero, as Apple is doing, takes guts. The risks are exponentially higher, as are the rewards.

Apple is bootstrapping the process by launching the iPad with enhanced versions of the same applications that have been successful on the iPhone. Watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web, checking email, and more are all designed to be seamless and elegant experiences. With these basics, the iPad is capable of meeting the casual needs of some people. In addition, it features compatibility with the existing library of iPhone apps, although this is of questionable value for many. Even with these boxes checked, it won’t come close to replacing a laptop for most people.

I Still Don’t Want One

For years, the tech industry has chased the dream of the device that fills the space between the mobile device and the computer. The difficulty with this space is that there isn’t obvious demand to fill. Devices have to muscle in and make their own space. The iPad may be one of the best to try, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not something many people need, myself included. My colleague Ben McNeil summed it up when he said, “This device doesn’t seem to blend everything I need but rather gives me one more gadget I own.”

And like a child needing a parent’s steadying hand on the saddle when learning to ride a bike, the iPad needs to be tethered to a real computer for tasks like backing up, downloading photos, and syncing music. Until my files live online, rather than on a hard drive tied to one computer, the iPad won’t seamlessly integrate into my digital life without a lot of awkward shuffling and copying to make things available to the iPad on an as-needed basis. I don’t need to pay for the added complexity of working this device into my life, and my iPhone already does a good job of surfing the web on the sofa.

And Yet

Given the option, the prospect of carrying an iPad around is already so much more enticing than using my laptop. I yearn for the portability, the battery life, and most of all, the efficient and focused interface that my iPhone has given me a taste of.

I want the productivity and joy of using something that sheds the 20+ years of baggage my computer has inherited. The design decisions made in the 1970s that seem unprepared for the scale of my online life today, such that I am constantly having to organize and clean and manage my system.

As Fraser Speirs states,

“The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

I want something that lets me get The Real Work done.

A Whole New World of Apps

Application development on the iPad has the ability to sustain bigger apps than what we’ve seen on the iPhone. The 99 cent app market on the iPhone has exploded because the device lends itself to quick, cheap entertainment. Lots of people will spend a buck for a couple of minutes’ excitement while waiting at the bus stop or standing in line. The iPad won’t be used in those situations, so the demand for those cheap thrill apps won’t be as strong.

Instead, people will start demanding more functional apps. Apple sent a clear signal by showcasing a highly functional and polished office suite in the form of iWork for the iPad. By doing this, they were in effect asking others to follow their lead by developing desktop-class applications. This call is already being answered. The Omni Group, the leading Mac development house responsible for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan, among others, has announced an immediate pause on developing their next generation of desktop software while they port their complete portfolio of applications to the iPad.

Apple also has the advantage of being in a better position than anyone else to cultivate a healthy 3rd party ecosystem of applications. It may be counterintuitive considering the discontent over their tight control of app distribution. But Apple has developed something even more valuable than open application distribution: a cohesive platform. This advantage may diminish in the future, but when launching a new platform it is incredibly important. Software developers will be hesitant to invest significant money developing applications if they are not sure what hardware, and by extension how many users will be able to run them. Android is starting to feel the effects of varying versions of the OS spread across a myriad of hardware configurations. Apple, meanwhile, has shown with the iPhone that it can drive a platform forward while minimizing the expense of dealing with device incompatibility.

What Happens Now

I won’t bother with a prediction about the iPad’s success or failure because they’re a dime a dozen in the wake of its launch. This post isn’t about whether Apple will tumble from its current summit or climb the next peak. This is about understanding why the iPad is more than just another tablet.

For the iPad to succeed, it doesn’t need to be a home run now, it simply needs to stick around and gain a modest number of users who are willing to pay for apps. If that happens, in 5 years time we’ll start to see a healthy ecosystem of applications that begin to turn the iPad into a viable general computer replacement. And in 10 years time we’ll see a new generation of users that have adopted iPads, or whatever Android- or WebOS-based tablets are around at that point, as their main computer. We’ll see existing expert users spending a large portion of their time doing work on tablets.

Of course, even then most of the computing landscape will still revolve around the traditional computers that are deeply entrenched today. But it will also be clear that they are part of a waning era. In 20 years’ time they will have relinquished the spotlight to take the place of the mainframes of yore: running back end services and thousands of custom business applications for years to come, while people use touchscreen devices for their everyday online lives.

And at that point, we’ll look back and realize that this drastic shift from Old World to New World computing, as Steven Frank terms it, began with something that at the time seemed like a boringly predictable, some would even say say lacking, evolution of an iPhone.

Nigel Warren is a UX designer at Roundarch