Jordan Berkowitz

The iPad Evolution

When the iPad was first announced, I, like many people, was underwhelmed. I thought I wanted an everything device that was the literal intersection of a phone and a laptop. Portable, long battery life, audio/video chat enabled, light, and seemingly able to do everything that those devices could do. I was wrong on multiple fronts.

While there are certain aspects of the user experience that are odd or confusing to me, over all the iPad is one of the most intuitive devices I have ever seen. Apple may be a little zealous in their commercial, but the statement “you already know how to use it” is fairly spot on.

Additionally, I do find myself wanting a more capable OS rather than a scaled up iPhone OS v3, but I’m patient enough to wait until the Fall for those improvements. Truth be told, I think this is one of those places where Apple’s extreme product development philosophy has handicapped them because of the isolation between the iPad dev team and the iPhone OS dev team. Clearly the iPad was developed for the current OS and not with v4 in mind. If that had been the case, the iPhone OS team would have intimate knowledge of the iPad and we wouldn’t be seeing a 3-4 month lag on iPhone OS 4 being rolled out on the iPad.

All that aside, the truly signifiant accomplishment here is the creation of a device that is useful in ways that I didn’t realize I needed. Furthermore, the iPad isn’t a big phone or a keyboardless computer; it’s a unique device that clearly has a place in the hardware hierarchy.

I’m going to spend more time in the future discussing apps, integration, and the like, but for now I want to end on one final point … this isn’t a computing revolution … it’s evolution and this is why it’s working so well. Revolutions break down walls. They require people to rethink their understanding of the way things work. This takes time, effort, and support from many different people and entities. Evolutions, on the other hand, can be surprising but often just make sense. The iPad does just that.