Sunday, January 31, 2010

Left Out (TechCrunchIT; + Apple iP* musings)

Read the full Steve Gillmor post for what appears to be a blanket forgiveness for all possible present and future iPad limitations.

Fear of iPad is now beginning to circulate with increasing velocity. It seems folks are realizing that regardless of how many things were left off the machine, it still will be bought by virtually everybody on the planet who cares about tech and its show business arm, social media. That means it’s going to be a huge galactic success. That in turn means we have to be very afraid of Uncle Steve owning our data.

Seriously, go read the full post, for more context-setting; I’ll wait here :)…

My $.02, after pondering the iPad intro and some of the petabytes of press/blogosphere/etc. iPad coverage:

1. I don’t want an iPad, at least not the 1.0 device. I’m sure my kids would love to have a super-sized Apple iP* (iPhone/iPod touch) platform device for games, and that there will be some intriguing multi-touch applications, but I can’t justify >= $499 for permission to buy content and apps exclusively from Apple’s stores.

2. I don’t want any tablet that doesn’t have two cameras, one primarily for interactive video and the other for, e.g., taking pictures of presentations at industry events, routine meetings, etc. (to be seamlessly placed in-context with related meeting notes).

3. I am still very pleased with my Kindle. It’d be even more useful for me if Amazon made it possible to more easily integrate the Kindle with other apps (e.g., for getting more value from my clippings collection by making it simpler to redirect clippings to OneNote or Evernote), but I can work around the limitations, for now (e.g., using OneNote and its text recognition capabilities to grab information items from the Kindle PC client, after capturing the clippings/etc. on my Kindle, since Amazon syncs info items along with reader clippings, annotations, etc.), and I believe Amazon will be very responsive to customer feedback and competitive dynamics – including, of course, delivering compelling Kindle clients for Apple iP* devices.

4. I want an app like the “infinite journal” in the Microsoft Courier project. For my needs, it represents substantive innovation, and not just a super-sized iP* device.

Maybe I’m an exception to Steve’s “virtually everybody on the planet who cares about tech and its show business arm, social media,” as I have a Kindle and a Dell XPS laptop that is a great fit for my roaming browsing/blogging/music/video chat/etc. needs. I am more focused on how I can create more value out of the myriad information channels and items I’m already working with than I am interested in exploring, e.g., multi-touch games or watching Disney movies while I’m on airplanes.

So, for now, count me among the “left out.”

Left Out

2 comments:

PXLated said...

You're not left out, you're just not the target - It's the old 80/20 and you along with some other notables are among the 20.

pbokelly said...

Thanks for the comment -- I think it's *intended* to be an 80-20 thing but that the sales patterns will suggest it's more like a Mac market share pattern than it is an iP* market share pattern. It'll be fascinating to watch the patterns emerge, in any case.