The Precious

Well, the day has come and the iPad is here!  As many of you know, I run an IT consulting shop called Matrix Computer Consulting while the sun is up.  It is only at nighttime (and, well, lunchtime) that I switch into my alter-ego: Vice Mayor.

Hello!, my name is Andy Harrover and I am a life-long technology addict.

I started off in high school with a TRS-80 and went from there.  Interestingly, I learned nothing about computers in college.  Once I graduated, I was back into it after a couple of years.  I’ve been a PC guy all of my life…until Manassas Next.

The original Manassas Next proposal was to be done via a power point presentation but there was a problem.  Sarah and I were generating a lot of slides with great information but there were simply too many of them.  I think we were at 30-odd slides when we stopped.  The ideas were good but it wasn’t a compelling format – people zone out after a dozen or so slides!  So, we called a halt and split a bottle of wine.  It was at that point that we hatched the plan to make a movie.  PC’s have only recently gained compelling and affordable video capabilities but Mac’s have had them for years.  We decided to buy a Mac and have never looked back.  If Steve Jobs sells it, we’ll buy it!

Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that I plunked down my money the first day the ipad was available and walked out of the store with my very own iPad.  I waited until I got it to the car and very carefully opened the box and was greeted by….well, a giant iPhone.  The fit and finish are, like any other Apple product, perfect.  The operating system looks to be, more or less, the same as the phone.

I’ll start with my biggest complaint: the apps that are native iphone apps look terrible on the ipad.  However, this situation gets better by the day as many of the application vendors are reformatting the applications to fit the larger screen.  My second biggest complaint is that the iPad just isn’t a great book reading device.  It’s too heavy for the job and kinda hard to hold for long periods of time.  It pains me to say it but the Kindle might be a bit better at this.

Does any of this mean that you shouldn’t buy one asap?  No.  You should.  I think this thing is a laptop killer.  People will still buy laptops but they won’t take them on trips.  They’ll use the laptop as a home base and take the tablet everywhere else.  The native apps that are available are killer and the mail and calendar app integrate with my corporate email server in a format that is worlds better than the microsoft apps!

Really, when you think of it, the reason that the “netbook” form factor has been so successful is that fulfills a significant bit of the functionality that many people now identify as central to their computing needs: internet browsing and email.  The netbook does that but little else.  The iPad does that and tons more.  A bazillion apps in the iphone category and an emerging class of larger apps that fit the screen.  This thing, despite a couple of shortcomings that will be ironed out over time, is going to create it’s own class of mobile device.

Keep a close eye: everyone else is going to chase the iPad.  However, with it’s functionality, the itunes content delivery model and Jobs’ fanatical dedication to delivering perfection, they won’t catch it.  Oh, the title of this post?  It’s the name of my iPad..:)  iPad photo courtesy of Wikipedia and Glenn Fleishman