iPad Has Its Purpose

Apple iPad has been causing all the buzz recently. Wall Street Journal wrote, “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it”. However, ever since Apple announced it, most comments have been quite negative. Complaints range from basic media demands like no front facing camera to geeky request of multitasking. While all these complaints are valid, I do believe the iPad still has its niche market. And yes, eventually the niche will become the mainstream.

Apple did not design the iPad as a main computing device for us to develop softwares and perform intensive processing tasks on it. It is meant for casual web-browsing and some occasional magazine/book reading. As I see it, the iPad really is a luxury living room device for people who want to check their Facebook or email during commercials of a TV show or read the news while drinking their morning coffee.

Let’s consider the following scenario. It’s 11PM and you are lying on your coach watching your favorite late night talk show. And during a segment you don’t particularly like, you want to check your email to see if your friends have replied your Saturday brunch invitation yet. You now have two choices: 1. Stand up and grab your 5-lb laptop with both hands, sit back down and carefully position the laptop on your lap but you can’t really lie down anymore. And finally you wake up your laptop and check your email. But now the talk show suddenly becomes interesting and you want to focus back on the show, however, you are stuck with this 5-lb metal block on your lap preventing you from moving or positioning yourself comfortably. Or you can have choice 2: while still lying on your coach, stretch your body to reach for your magazine-sized-and-weighted iPad like you would for your TV remote. After grabbing the iPad, you come back comfortably still lying on your coach and start checking your email with a few finger touches on a gorgeous screen. When the show comes back up you simply toss the iPad away like you do with your remote and start enjoying the show. Which option would you rather choose? I think the choice is quite obvious here.

The point I’m trying to convey here is simple. The iPad is a luxury living room casual device, not to replace your powerful work computer. You would not write code with it, but you would check your email on it. You would not blog with it, but you would check your Facebook on it. You would not write your paper with it, but you would twit on it. And that is the iPad’s purpose.

A reporter from PC magazine (If I remember correctly) summed it up quite well. He said, “Your laptop is now powerful enough to replace your old desktop, and now the iPad is your new laptop”. I think that is very much true. I no longer code on my desktop as my MacBook Pro executes my multithreaded system better than my Quad-Core windows desktop. However, it is simply too big, thick and heavy for me to use it on my coach or bed for casual browsing. And that is why I need an iPad.

Some of you may start yelling about netbooks. I would have to respectfully disagree. I never understood the point of a netbook. It is simply a smaller, crappier, and cheaper version of a laptop. It’s slow, buggy and clunky. And worst of all, I just can’t stand the tiny screen and keyboard. I mean all netbooks are just simply down right ugly. Forgive me for judging by the looks. But as a consumer device, don’t we all want the nice looks? Would you choose to buy the ugliest gadget just because it is cheap? I would certainly not. Style matters! I would much rather look at a gorgeous 9.7′ LED backlit LCD screen with multi-touch input than using a clunky, slow and awkward netbook. (No offense Google, but I think your netbook strategy is just wrong).

Though don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means saying the iPad is perfect. The “no front facing camera” is indeed a very valid complaint. I would love to video chat with my friends while watching TV or sipping my morning coffee. So Apple please get it in there, pretty please.

And finally, I’d like to throw in my 2 cents on the “no multi-tasking issue”. I do not see the need for multi-tasking on such a device. I mean would you want to check your email while reading a real book? If the book is that dull, then I guess you should just stop reading it for good. It is a casual device, which means simplicity is the key. Consumers would only want to focus on one thing and one thing at a time with the iPad. Adding the multi-tasking would make it more powerful. But more powerful also means more complexity, which is obviously not good for casual usage. I think the KISS principle applies here perfectly. Keep It Simple Stupid!

Horizontal vs. Vertical Feature Stack

Today Google announced its Buzz integration with Gmail service. In case you haven’t heard what the “buzz” is really about, it is yet another social network service that is very much similar to Facebook, in the sense that it allows Gmail users to share each other’s status, posts, links, pictures and videos. The interesting part though is that Google Buzz attempts to combine/integrate all the existing social network services such as Facebook and Twitter into its own interface. In other words, Buzz allows you to import and eventually export your social posts from and to the other social networks, like Facebook. You can see your friends posts on Facebook, receive tweets from Twitter, and eventually being able to publish to those services directly within Buzz. And, this is what I call a vertical feature stack.

By vertical feature stack, I mean a software that attempts to integrate several existing services into a single user interface. Kinda like the SSO (Single Sign On) idea, where a client/user can access all his/her services via a single UI/ID. On the other hand, a horizontal feature stack implies that a specialized UI or access point is used for each of the services. This is our current way of using these social network services, each one of them has its own access interface.

I remember first talking about the terms of horizontal and vertical feature stack with a friend last summer. He described the Asian market as more of a vertical feature stack oriented market, where users prefer a single UI being able to provide or access multiple services. He gave me the example of the IM client “QQ”, which not only provides the basic IM service but also a whole array of other social services such as emails, customized avatars, video/audio chat, blogs, social games, screen capture, customized emotions, social groups and more. Interestingly enough, this vertical feature stacked IM client eventually pretty much took over the entire market of all the services it provides. Internet users in China now use QQ as their main service provider for all these services. However, it’s a completely different story in the western market, where horizontal feature stack oriented services rule the Internet. I use Gmail as my personal email service, AIM as my IM service, Facebook as my “blog” and of course WordPress. I don’t use twitter but so many of my friends do, as whatever service you want to call it. I play social games on random specialized game sites such as EA’s social game site. I don’t have a customized avatar service but I’ve certainly seen ads of such.

Just think about how many application programs I have to open to get to all these things, iChat, Safari, Mail and a bunch of browser tabs or windows. This sure can quickly get out of control and become very hard to manage and switch between these services. A vertical feature stack oriented client, such as Google’s Buzz, can certainly help getting rid of opening a bunch of windows or tabs to access all the social network services. And that, can save me a lot of hassle. Not to mention being to able to see new “posts” coming in from all the sources must be a pleasant experience.

On the other hand, horizontal feature stacked applications do have their obvious advantages, namely specialization. A specialized interface design can significantly increase the human computer interaction performance. I’ve always hated the idea of accessing web-services using a general purpose web-browser just because a specialized standalone application program can do things in a much more efficient way. This is especially true on embedded devices such as a smart phone. Just think about how we access Facebook on an iPhone. The Facebook app of course! Who would want to go through all the hassle of accessing the general purpose webpage interface via a web browser?! No one!

Also, the horizontal vs. vertical feature stack comparison can also be applied to microprocessor architectures. When you only have a single CPU/core, you push all your processing tasks onto the same core. This obviously makes things very simple as all tasks are simply executed sequentially (assuming no hyper-threading). However, as history has proven, this strategy does not scale very well as tasks must wait for prior scheduled ones to complete before being executed. Simple to manage, but hard to be efficient. On the other hand, a multi-CPU/core architecture allows each task to be executed independently on its own dedicated processing unit in parallel, which greatly increases the efficiency but of course, coordinating and synchronizing between the tasks become exponentially more difficult. More efficient, but hard to manage.

At the end of the day, this really is a trade-off between efficiency and simplicity. Horizontal feature stack favors efficiency, where as its vertical cousin favors simplicity. Let’s see how this will apply to the social network services as time will tell the whole story.