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“The screen size is a huge difference. Try browsing the Web on the iPhone. Works well but you have to keep zooming in and out. You’ll need to zoom on the iPad, but not as much — you’ll see a lot more of the page which will make a big difference to the browsing experience. Same thing with photos, and videos, and pretty much everything else. While the iPhone is mainly a phone that does more, the iPad is a fully functional information consumption device. The fact that it uses the iPhone’s OS is also irrelevant because the OS in question is suited perfectly for what the product is intended to do. Instead of looking at the iPad as a big iPod Touch, you should look at it in isolation and ask: is this a good tablet device? The answer is: yes.”

Interesting post over at Smoking Apples, where Milind Alvares shares his thoughts about the iPad as a breakthrough device that will change the computing world as we know it forever.

From the post:

“I propose the next major shift in computing platforms has begun. It began with the iPhone, and it’s more evident with the iPad. Computers of the future won’t have a file system as we know it. There won’t be a Finder window, there won’t be a home folder, there definitely won’t be an applications folder. So far progress in the computing world has been all about adding new features. From now on its going to be about removing things to make room for a better experience.”

This is an interesting theory. Pretty much what Google is building with Chrome OS: making the file system structure invisible to the user, pushing everything to the web. But there are many drawbacks in doing this, and Milind just got it right:

“Take word processing for instance. iWork documents will reside on the web, but only immediately required documents will be cached locally—why would you want documents from 2 years ago available for editing? These documents will be available on the iPad for editing, iPhone for viewing and projecting, and any other device that fits into Apple’s product lineup. That’s where Google has it wrong. To roughly quote Jobs in 2005, “the marriage of cloud services, with rich local client apps, is a great thing”. Google wants to do everything in the cloud, including writing the software that drives it—as is seen in their Chrome OS. Apple wants to create rich local functionality that drives itself with data from the cloud.”

This is the main point. You can’t force the user to edit documents online, because you don’t know if the user will have a 24/7/365 active internet connection. Everyone should, sure, but the reality it’s a little but different from this utopia. Just as I wrote in my post about Chrome OS some time ago, a total-cloud OS is going to fail. Turns out that the solution lies in both “clouding” things and caching them locally. You want to open a recent document? Just fire up Pages on your iPad and choose it. You remember you had this 6 months old spreadsheet that could come in handy again? Head over iWork.com and download it again. That’s how cloud computing should work in my opinion, that’s what Apple will do.

What really bothers me is thinking that the file system structure will die at any level. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those people that believe the iPad is introducing a new era of personal computing. But thinking that for this reason desktop computers will change forever into biggest iPads is just as dumb as thinking that mobile phones will replace my dial-up home phone. Sure I don’t use my home phone that much, but when everytime I need it - it’s there. I believe that in the next years I’ll use the iPad maybe even more than my Macbook, but it won’t replace. The Finder window won’t disappear, it will be different. But it will be there.

Mike Rundle nailed it.

“This is the iPad’s intended audience. People who have a PC and use 10% of its features and software 90% of the time. People like my Mom & Dad who browse the web, read news, send email and watch videos. People like my cousin Jenny who chats with friends, uses Facebook and uploads photos. Regular folks. Consumers. People who use computers to stay informed, connected and entertained.”

Excellent blog post on Cocoia by Sebastiaan de With.

“Fortunately, there’s not that much stuff in the iPad UI that I’d call ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’. Apple has shown once more that they’re at the top of their game, and the interface is sublime. If iPad had preceded iPhone, we’d all be lyrical and hopeful for a smaller device that did even a few percent of its awesome feature set. Instead, this natural evolution of the iPhone OS is being heckled by people that fail to see how extending the underlying ideas of iPhone’s UI helps interaction with ‘serious’ applications like iWork.”

A must read.

The reaction to the official iPad announcement has been hilarious. Pretty much like every official announcement, it seems like you have to either completely love or hate something in order to give your opinion about it. But while this way of thinking doesn’t work in real life, so it doesn’t in technology. You can’t judge a new device in 2 hours, just as you can’t in a week or in one month. And please notice that the iPad it’s only been announced: it will be out in 2 months.

That said, I think people are missing the whole point about Apple’s newest creation when comparing it to a big sized iPhone. Sure, it looks like a fat iPhone if you ask me. Point is, it doesn’t feel like an iPhone at all and the fact that it looks like the iPhone is actually the explanation of what I’m talking about. Plain and simple. Don’t get me wrong: the user interface is very similar to iPhone OS, it takes some elements from it (toolbars, buttons, icons) and pushes them into another dimension. I don’t know how this OS will be named, but iPad OS doesn’t sound bad at all. The big difference between the looks like and the feels like problems lie in the screen size itself. Many people can’t look beyond the form factor thing and they just go out and say “it’s a larger iPhone”. I can’t blame them if they don’t have a vision. By creating a product with more screen real estate, Apple will provide a device with more information on it. All those menus that you used to have in a dedicated tab in your iPhone can now be accessed with a single tap on a button without losing the information you’re looking at. It’s in the user flow where the iPad will be different from the iPhone: you can do things faster, in one place, without losing or breaking the experience.

Take a look at the Mail app, my favorite so far: you don’t have to go back and forth between the inbox and the single message view, you just hit a button and boom, here’s the “contextual menu” for that, with the inbox listing your incoming messages. I can go on with this for hours, but I’m pretty sure Tweetie for the iPad won’t have a single compose window anymore.

Second of all, the iPad we saw yesterday isn’t about tech specs. Neither it will be in 6 months or later this year. Sure it’s got a pretty aluminium case, a gorgeous shiny screen and 802.11n wifi, but I believe Steve wanted to put the focus on the reason you need it rather than plain numbers.

“We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts - we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad”

A great piece of tech, which has to be so great and yet intuitive to establish itself in a third category of products. This leads me to the question “Do I need an iPad?”. Yes I do. Speaking for myself, I need a device I could carry around the house, in the garden or in bed that lets me access and work with my stuff. That lets me check and manage my stuff. Couldn’t I use an iPhone for that? I could, and I’m currently using it. But this doesn’t mean it could be a lot better and most of all, the iPhone doesn’t let me manage data. I check things (stats, docs) but I don’t manage them. The iPhone is a device meant for “checking and accessing the most important things of your life” on the go. Nobody ever said it could be your mobile office, and Office clones apps in the App Store don’t justify that. I don’t write posts on my iPhone. With an iPad running iWork, I probably will.

I’m not saying the iPad it’s perfect, because it’s not. The OS is still incomplete, it’s a first iteration and we all know how much the iPhone got better in 3 years. I’m just saying that the iPad has a reason to exist, that there’s room for a 3rd category of products and Apple can fill that empty space. And as Josh Helfferich said yesterday “this is how past computing dies — with thunderous applause”.