It’s the future. You have a device in your pocket that is exponentially more powerful and has hundreds, maybe thousands of times more storage than the largest computers of 30 years ago. Maybe you have a bag with a tablet computer in it which is roughly comparable in terms of storage and processing power to the phone in your pocket. Only bigger. They are massively-capable devices by any measurement we care to throw at them.

You’re listening to music from your phone on your headphones.

This is where our story gets a little strange. Where did that music come from? More and more, people are streaming music from an online service without actually storing anything on their local device. Services like rdio, 8tracks, spotify seem to be growing in popularity. Most people think the notion of buying music on a CD is quaint or even absurd. If you happen to be someplace and want to watch a video on your tablet, chances are you’ve downloaded it or streamed it from somewhere. Almost nobody would consider buying a movie on a DVD and transferring it to their iPad.

iPad Workplace 2.0 by mbiebusch

Yes, iPad. If you have a tablet, there is a high probability it’s one of those things that Apple sells. Android on tablets has not taken off with the exception of the Kindle Fire. And Apple just released a new one this week.

While they’re marvelous devices, getting content onto them is something of a challenge. They only support a very narrow band of video formats for playback. If you’ve downloaded a video from somewhere, unless you carefully checked the format beforehand, it probably won’t play directly on your iPad. If you’re a determined sort of individual, you might have Handbrake or Miro Converter on your computer and can transcode that video before transferring it to your iPad.

The key ingredient here is “computer”. There are no tools native to the iPad that let you do this sort of conversion. Worse, there are very few players capable of playing back these alien formats on the iPad. The short-lived VLC promised to do for the iPad what it does for general purpose computers but it was not meant to be. Now it’s dead. There is an Xvid/DivX player but it is predictably awful.

This is no accident. Apple really wants you to get all your content from the iTunes Store. They’ve made it difficult to write software to do this sort of thing on the iPad and even more difficult to actually get it into the app store where people can download it. They’ve limited the codecs they support. And they don’t provide tools to convert video to it on your computer. Services like Netflix exist and will happily stream video to you if you’re a member, but you’re borrowing that media. When it’s off their servers, you don’t get to watch it again.

How many years until this same thing has happened to computers? Not soon enough for the media companies.

• iTunes connectivity – it already hooks into the iTunes Music Store via wifi, why not allow it to browse and playback music from shared iTunes libraries on the LAN? I would love to be able to access my music or friends’ music when I’m visiting and don’t have a laptop around. Syncing tunes wirelessly and sharing tunes would also be fantastic additions.

It was probably the feature I most wanted back then, and the last one to arrive. This pleases me.

There was one other item on the list that never made it, and that’s having access to the radio channels in iTunes. That feature’s largely been supplanted by the availability of 3rd party radio apps. Just as well too, since Apple hasn’t really done much with their radio channels and I’m honestly surprised they’re still in there. Now hopefully Apple can keep itself from killing off third content providers entirely.

What do I want next? Here’s a short list:

• “Lossless” music downloads in the store. Even better would be HD audio, DVD-A or SACD quality music. Unlikely given how uninterested the recording industry (and, I guess consumers) seems to feel about it.
• Multiple encodings. Like video, it’d be neat if I could store a lossless version of a track and a lower-quality compressed version for carrying around on my ‘pods. iTunes can do it with video so audio should be easy.
• Alternate formats. WAV, FLAC, WMA, OGG. Unlikely at best.
• Separation of services from the core of iTunes. App, Music and Movie Stores, Ping (I predict Ping’ll disappear altogether in a year or so), Books (?), TV and Movies…

iTunes has gotten hugely complicated and is the cause of many slow-downs and beachballs during the course of the day. Most of the time, I just want a music player. I never actually watch movies or TV in iTunes preferring other players. I only use it to get video onto my iP*ds but I’d much prefer not having to clutter up my computer’s storage with the extra video copies. Hell, while I’m thinking wishfully, maybe it’d be nice if Apple would let me play AVI/XviD, WMVs and WebM video while we’re at it to save me the trouble of transcoding.

I won’t hold my breath. All signs point to Apple locking down iTunes even tighter (and bloating it even further). Talk of removing optical drives on all future Macs and forcing users to buy everything through the iTunes Store is not that far-off considering some of the recent money grabbing. Then again, maybe they’ll get broken up for anti-competitive practices. I give that a couple of years at their current rate.

On the surface, this would seem to be the easiest of the different streaming types to achieve. In iOS 4.2, we have “Airplay” streaming to connect to an Airport Express or Apple TV. It works fairly well, but I get occasional glitches causing drop outs in the audio. Less than ideal. I’m not sure if this is because of network issues or because the devices themselves are too resource constrained to provide a continuous stream of bits.

Airplay is even worse if you want to try playing a video game to your home stereo. I was getting lag of around 2 seconds while playing Orbital. Stick with headphones or plugin directly to some speakers if you want big sound.

For streaming music, I usually use the Remote app on my iPhone or iPad to send music from my home machine to the Airport and it works much more reliably.

But what if I want to use my headphones? I could sync the music that I want through iTunes, but that’s slow and annoying. I’d still like to be able to browse my home machine and stream music directly to my device like I can in OS X. We keep hearing rumours that Apple’s working on building a cloud storage service for your music. With nearly 200GB of music on my network and limited upstream bandwidth, this would be impractical. I’m fine with keeping a limited selection of music on my devices when I’m out in the world, but having full access to my music when I’m on my home network from all of my devices would be awesome. Using a feature like “Back to my Mac” to be able to stream from my home collection when roaming would be great for bonus points.

Apple’s never really done much with their built-in streaming radio service in iTunes either, and I’m a little surprised it’s still included at all, given their push towards moving everyone into the iTunes Music Store. I still use it and have a few channels I still listen to regularly (hello GrooveSalad!). It’s surprising that I need to install a 3rd party app to do this, and to be honest, I’ve never found one that I actually like. I’ve tried Fstream and a couple others whose names escape me, they were so underwhelming. Dedicated channel apps like CBC are great for individual radio streams, but are of varied quality and fill up my home screen with multiple, redundant apps.

One feature I never looked for but now have access to is AirPrint. Apparently with a few select HP printers, I could print directly from my iPhone to a networked printer. Even if this feature worked with printers I actually own, it’s not something I could see myself ever using. I am so close to being a paperless being, I think I only ever print things when dealing with government agencies and insurance companies. For printing photos, I need a real computer with a calibrated monitor and gamut-proofing tools.

Having used iOS 4.2 for a couple of months, I’m happy to say that it’s a big improvement over the 3.2 OS that the iPad shipped with. Multitasking makes the iPad feel more like a real computer, though app switching is somewhat awkward. I love the brightness control in the little “iPod control area” in the multitasking … app bar? dock? I don’t know what to call that area — in the left-most area. I still have no idea if keeping many apps open eventually bogs down the operating system or not. I tend to scan through this area every so often and close down apps that I’m not using. On the iPhone, the differences are less noticeable, but an incremental improvement nonethless.

The iPad represents a shift towards a kind of computing that is both attractive and terrifying. An experience that is highly tailored with most of the ugly underpinnings hidden away behind a curtain of abstraction. Those same ugly underpinnings that let you do interesting things with your computer if you’re of a technical bent.

That first paragraph (and a bunch since) was typed on my new iPad using the WordPress app. Typing is something I haven’t had a lot of practice doing yet but so far it isn’t quite as bad as most of the reviews have led me to expect. Well, let me clarify a bit: typing in portrait mode is not awesome. In order to hold the thing, you need your hands. This forces you to type with your thumbs and the iPad is wide enough that this is awkward. Landscape-mode typing is pretty nice if you can lay the iPad flat, say, on your lap. Of course then it’s tilted away from you if you’re at all reclined, so it’s at a bit of a funny angle. You may find you need to contort yourself into variations on the fetal position to find a “comfortable” seating angle. Still, for a first try, I was touch-typing pretty quickly on it with not too many mistakes.

What changed?

I said before that I wasn’t interested in the iPad. I certainly tried to hold out despite being bombarded by ads, friends, parents asking me when I was getting one and deb, enthusiastically suggesting we get them. Yes, dear reader, I am weak. Weak with the need for new gadgetry!

I think the iPad is a new class of gadget. I’ve tried suggesting that my Dell Mini 10 was a suitable competitor for the iPad (look! it’s got a real keyboard!) but honestly, it’s different. I consider the iPad to be more of a big iPod than a full-blown computer. I can sync music and videos to it including my huge backlog of Ted talks. It’s nearly ideal as a couch pad for looking things up on the web or for light reading. I’m looking forward to traveling with it in place of my 1st generation ipod touch. I think I’ll still be using my Kindle for longer bouts of reading however.

Which one?

I got the iPad 64GB with wifi only. I was really tempted by 3G, but without the option to share my existing data plan with it, I was not that interested. Sure, Rogers has a decent plan at $35 / mo for 5GB, but that’s on top of my cell phone plan. I’d even consider paying 10-15 / mo to share my existing data plan between the two devices. I think Rogers missed out there. Also, wifi is going to be more available in more locations over time so eventually, it won’t be that big a loss. And I can use the extra $400 / year or so to, I don’t know… upgrade my phone!

Accessories

The iPad only comes with a couple of accessories in the box. A USB-Dock cable and a wall-wart style power adapter. The usual minimal pamphlets and Apple stickers are also included. I was a little surprised at the included power-adapter. It looks like an older-style MacBook adapter with the detachable two-prong plug. I’d have expected something a little less chunky, maybe like a slightly bigger version of the iPhone power adapter. The USB cable seems to have been updated a bit with a squarer piece on the USB end. The actual dock-connection seems to keep getting smaller though which makes it hard to grab onto to remove it from the iPod… pad.

The first things I bought for it were the Apple iPad dock (sans-keyboard) and a sleeve for carrying it around.

The sleeve was from Kensington and claimed to be “for the iPad”. Whoever designed it, had probably heard there was an iPad coming, took a stab at the dimensions and sent it off to manufacturing. It’s terrible. There’s enough room inside of it to probably store two iPads and a bunch of other stuff along the edges. I should have checked with it in store on some of the demo units they had out. I’ll replace it with something classy from Sena when they’re available.

The Dock is a dock. Not much to say there except that: a) it’s substantial in weight, which it should be because the iPad itself is fairly hefty and, b) it’s hard to actually dock the thing in it. The iPad uses the same old dock connector that all iPods have used since the beginning. It’s practically an industry standard! The problem is, the iPad is much bigger, and lining up that little slot with the dock’s edge connector is tricky, requiring lots of leaning over and scrutinizing-with-your-tongue-sticking-out-concentration to get the connection right. It’s more fiddly than it should be. Also, it works for portrait mode, but not landscape. I’d like a landscape dock for movies or pictures. As it is, it works well enough for standing the thing up on my desk.

Apps

If you’re excited about playing all your iPhone or iPod games on your iPad, or you have a slew of apps, don’t get too excited. They kind of suck. Sure, you can load them and even double their size, but with the exception of a few of the games I’ve tried, it’s not great. Orbital works and doesn’t look too bad from the chunkier pixels. Some apps I’ve tried are also acceptable, but I would have thought Apple of all companies would have made a better effort to make them look better. Proper font sizing and the nicer on screen keyboard for starters.

After syncing all my stuff, the first thing I did was delete most of the non-iPad apps.

The built in apps have all been updated for the new screen size. Some with some cute interface flourishes that would be grossly extravagant on a regular computer. iCal and Contacts have book-like wrappings around the edges. Mail and Safari are about what you’d expect and Mail works quite well. Safari is a bit frustrating with it’s simplicity, but the bookmark syncing with MobileMe is nice.

A few of my favorite apps that have been updated to work with the iPad include Instapaper, Kindle, and Stanza. There’s a separate version of Good Reader which I also recommend.

WordPress

While taking a sweep through and finding which apps were iPad-ready, I loaded up and was pleasantly surprised that it worked with my new fat iPod. This post started at that moment and I’ve been continuing to use it to write and edit it. It works well, though you don’t get a rich text editor like you do in the online app. No big.

Colloquy

Another happy accident was learning that colloquy was already universal. It looks great and seems to work pretty well though I haven’t figured out how to get notifications to work.

Air Video

This is a gem of an app recommended by Mr B. If you have a collection of videos in various formats (avi in xvid/divx, mkv, maybe others), you install a server on your Mac or PC and feed it your videos directory. Then with the app on your iphone or iPad, connect to your server and play video converted on the fly. You can also queue up conversions to save on CPU cycles. Very cool and works well on the videos I’ve tried.

Twitteriffic

Normally on the iPhone I like using Twittelator pro. The version for the iPad looks a little crazy in the UI department so I thought I’d try something different. On the recommendation from several friends, I thought I’d give Twitteriffic a shot. So far I’m liking it. It’s simple, offers a nice set of features and has some unobtrusive ads. I guess there’s a pro version for money but so far I’m happy with the lite version. Also, Twitter in safari is decent, but I wish I could default to the full web version rather than getting dumped into the mobile version all the time. It’s the main reason for wanting an app at all. How about a pref @twitter?

AIM

The lack of iPad support in Beejive was a little annoying and made worse by a $10 grab for a new HD version. That left me without a nice-looking IM app. There is a version of AIM for the iPad however which is quite slick, despite a confusing and probably useless Lifestream section that hooks up your AIM contacts twitter, flickr, delicious and whatever other streams they choose to associate with their account. For AIM messages though, it’s great and has an interesting interface.

There is already a ton of apps available for the iPad and I only skimmed the surface of them here. As I find others I like I’ll be sure to drop some reviews. I’ll follow up soon with a review of some games.

Watched some of the live stream from Engadget on the iPad announcement today. It was, as expected, a tablet shaped like a big iPod. It comes with wireless and it can hook up to a 3G network if you buy the big one. Notably, for me, were the things it didn’t do:

• No camera (!)
• Poor battery life
• Limited storage
• Multitasking?
• iPhone OS

It’s kind of neat, but honestly, I can’t see myself using this thing very much. It seems tailor made for air travel, when you want to watch a movie on a decent screen or maybe type up some notes. Pretty-much exactly what Andy Ihnatko wrote for the Sun-Times. I travel a fair bit, but certainly not enough to warrant adding yet another gadget to my collection. It won’t replace my Kindle with its awesome battery life and relaxing screen.

As a gaming device, it may become compelling at some point, but as the iPhone has proven, accelerometers are great for one type of game: Doodle Jump. Virtual controllers through touch are not a great control mechanism.

The lack of any mention of multitasking is even more worrisome, making this not very good for communications. I can’t run an IRC client and a messenger client in the background while surfing the web (on Safari, of course, there will be no Firefox for this due to their restrictive rules). Sure, there may be push notification, but that means leaving whatever I’m doing and launching the app before I can respond, possibly losing context. No video camera means no video chat.

In short, it’s a big iPod. I’ll wait and see how it does over the next year, but won’t rush out to buy one.