by Larry Magid
As I think about last week’s Apple iPad announcement, I recall PC-maker Lenovo showing off its IdeaPad U1 Hybrid at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
The IdeaPad is an interesting cross between a laptop and a tablet. Unlike other tablet PCs, the screen actually peels away from the base station. In laptop mode it runs Windows 7. But when you use the screen by itself in “slate mode,” it runs a home-grown Lenovo operating system that’s optimized for use without a keyboard.
I thought it was cool and it was a clever-enough idea to win CNET’s best-of-show award for computers and hardware. Still, there wasn’t a great deal of buzz around the product. And, despite its rather weird design, I didn’t see a lot of press either praising or damning it. It was just an interesting idea from a company that makes some of the most respected laptops on the market.
Contrast that with Apple’s iPad announcement. The amount of pre-announcement hype was out of control. The blogosphere and even the mainstream press had a feeding frenzy speculating over what Apple would unveil. Apple was officially mum, but it’s likely someone in the company was leaking bits and pieces to help build anticipation. There was even a report in TechCrunch ahead of the announcement claiming that Steve Jobs was overheard saying it “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.” When Jobs finally took the stage to unveil the iPad, he called it “magical and revolutionary.”
With all of this hype in the back of my head, I was one of hundreds of tech journalists to show up at Yerbe Buena Center in San Francisco on Wednesday to find out what all the fuss was about. The street in front of the building was crowded with TV satellite trucks and the press — many arriving hours early — were anxiously speculating about exactly what Jobs would pull out of his hat.
The answer is the now much-written-about iPad, which is getting a mixed reception from the press and those who are Tweeting and blogging about it. Writing in Thursday’s Mercury News, my colleague Troy Wolverton said he wants to buy one but “just not yet.” He’s waiting for version 2.0, which he hopes will support Adobe’s Flash and allow multi-tasking.
My take on the device was less charitable. In my CBSNews.com post, I called it “underwhelming.”
But my verdict has to be put into the context of all the hype. Had Apple called this device the “Ipod Touch 2,” I would have praised it as a really good follow up to an excellent product. I would have still questioned whether there is a market for a device that’s too big to put in your pocket but not as easy to type on as a laptop, but I would have given Apple the benefit of the doubt, just as I did with Lenovo.
It’s great to innovate, it’s great to introduce new ideas to the market and it’s great to “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks.” After all, experimentation, including experiments that fail, are an important part of what drives innovation.
But this was more than just experimenting with a new concept. To begin with, the concept isn’t new. There have been dozens of tablets or slate computers and none of them has been able to attract more than a niche audience.
I was at the Comdex computer show in 2000 when Bill Gates introduced the tablet PC. A year later Gates predicted that the tablet “would become the most popular form of PC within five years.”
Of course Jobs’ tablet PC is different than the ones built to Gates’ specifications. For one thing, the iPad is mostly about content consumption, and it’s built on the successful foundation of several generations of iPods, iPhones and Apple’s iTunes and iPhone Apps stores. Apple is also doing content deals with book publishers to assure plenty of stock for its new iBook Store that will compete with Amazon.com towards Apple’s goal of turning the iPad into a book and periodical reader.
The content, the elegant design, reasonable starting price ($499 for one with 16 GB of storage and no 3G modem) of the iPad and Apple’s superb marketing skills all bode well for this new device. Yet, I’m one of many people who came away a little skeptical and a bit disappointed, not because it’s not a good device but because it didn’t (perhaps couldn’t) live up to all the hype.
I pretty much expected it to look and work like it does, but I also expected Jobs to delight the crowd with “one more thing” that would make me want to rush out and get one of my own as soon possible. That didn’t happen.
This column first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News
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