On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 09:56, Brian Butterworth <briant...@freeview.tv> wrote: > Sorry, I didn't realise we were back in the 1970s where the software that > runs on the iPhone can be called an operating system. > And it clearly doesn't have a keyboard.
Not just an operating system, but a very close relative of a commercial UNIX. From what I can tell, iPhone OS isn't far off POSIX-compliant at all (mostly because a lot of userspace utilities are absent). It doesn't have a keyboard built-in, but you can get the keyboard dock, or use a Bluetooth keyboard. There are a lot of people who the iPad won't be right for, and shouldn't buy it -- because if they do, they'll spend all their time bitching and moaning about what it can't do. Lots of people seem to conflate "it doesn't do the things I want" with "it's rubbish" (and the same happened with the iPhone, and the same happens with other classes of products), when really that's a huge fallacy; you don't see people complaining that the Nintendo DS doesn't run background applications, or that you can't open a command prompt on the Wii, because they'd probably be laughed at. But, this is the danger in breaking new ground; not necessarily in terms of ideas, but definitely in terms of execution. It's a piece of consumer electronics. A very powerful piece of consumer electronics, but a piece of consumer electronics nonetheless. There's a bloody good reason that Apple scaled up iPhone OS instead of scaling down Mac OS X [again]: the latter is a pain in the backside to turn into something usable by many people. The big target market for the iPad are the people who have never bothered buying a computer (or did, but it's now about eight years old and virus-infested), and actually don't really want one because it's a lot of hassle; the people who type URLs into Google; the people who just want to listen to some music and watch videos, look up web sites, get some e-mail and play some games. Maybe write a letter or two. There isn't a device on the market today which is appropriate for this group of people (despite many attempts over the years), yet it's a pretty huge market. Many "power users" won't like it, because they think a tablet should be a slimmed-down laptop and be capable (from a UI perspective) of everything a laptop can do: except that in doing that, you kill off any chance of it being appropriate for aforementioned novice market. Apple has pretty successfully demonstrated that iPhone OS is usable by all and sundry, but will have got some pushback that the form factor of the iPhone and iPod touch isn't ideal for some kinds of pretty common and ordinary activities. While it's useful to be able to read your e-mail on a device the size of the iPhone, composing a long e-mail is a pain (hardware keyboard or not). The same applies to lots of other things. This is where the iPad fits in. There are changes afoot in the OS - baby steps, but 3.2's just a point release, and in that context there's a lot to be positive about. Developers are going to have a field day with it, and there's a decent chance that the iPad will kill off a lot of the more frivolous App Store apps. Personally, and this seems to be a view shared by lots of people (though I wouldn't claim it to be the majority), there are plenty of occasions where I don't need the grunt of a laptop, and it's actually not all that convenient to open it up to do stuff, but a small-form-factor device is a less than ideal. I may be a developer, a sysadmin and a power users, but I'm often just an ordinary end-user and want to browse the web or play some games without having to faff around, and that's with the proviso that I don't have to do much faffing as it is (it's still more than it should be). It's a device which can be left on a coffee table and be unobtrusive, until you want to see the TV schedules for the next seven days. As much as many of us currently do reach for our laptops or smartphones to do just that, you'd be hard pressed to argue that a middle-ground between the convenience of a smartphone (which you can just pick up and put down when needed) and the useful size of a laptop screen isn't something a lot of people wouldn't buy into, quite possibly in preference to either of them. I expect we'll see plenty of applications appearing as it starts to sell, too: similar things happened with the iPhone, as developers started to explore what's possible. Now, for the (again) "power user" group, there's lots of stuff which could be transposed onto a different device - there's nothing particularly "iPad-specific" about having a cool newspaper app with embedded video, for example, but the competing devices aren't here yet. I doubt it'll be long before some start to appear, though, with varying degrees of success (and there's always Microsoft's second tablet push, which may or may not be more successful than the first). M. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
