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Ben Henry and I met through the local (Bay Area) coworking community, and hit it off well enough to start up an LLC to pursue a then-potential business opportunity. Ben is a sharp guy, and puts the lie to the notion that engineers are culturally retarded. For example, he’s about done with his year long project to watch all the movies in the Criterion Collection. I haven’t even heard of most of these movies. Ben also writes low level display code in C++ for small, mobile computing devices commissioned by extremely large clients. Which he can’t discuss… but he can discuss Apple’s iPad. For real.

Why Apple’s iPad is Dead On Arrival

-by Ben Henry

January’s announcement of the most hyped up product from Apple I can remember wasn’t as big a surprise as most were expecting. The Apple iPad is a gorgeous device that will have an even more beautiful marketing campaign.

For these reasons alone, I think people will buy it en masse. However, those of us who aren’t drinking Apple Kool-Aid and can evaluate what exactly the iPad will do for us will think twice about buying it. Let me clarify: by “buying it” I mean forking out the extra money to get the version with 3G. There is a $499 version, but it works with WiFi only.

The iPad is a tablet or slate like device that doesn’t have a keyboard, but instead relys on a massive capacitive touch screen.

This is the largest touchscreen of it’s kind we’ve seen in a consumer product. If Apple has done their homework (which they’ve proven to us that they have for the last 20 years as long as Steve Jobs is around), then this will be an amazing feat of technology.

Succinctly, capacitive touch sensors measure changes in capacitance by driving a grid of wires with electrical current and measuring the change in capaticance.

Since the human finger is essentially a ground, there is a massive spike in current drop where the finger touches down. The issue with the touch screens we see on modern smart phones is that the conductor is what’s called Indium-Tin Oxide (ITO), which is a very poor conductor – but it’s clear and unnoticable through glass.

To scale a touch sensor to 10″ means they either have multiple touch sensors arranged in a grid, or they did something that no one expects or knows about yet. Either way, this is an amazing step in touch technology.

The other great thing I can say about the iPad is that for around $30/month, you can get unlimited data transfer over 3G. This is without a contract, so switching to a different carrier, when available, will be trivial and without risk. Of course, this is only a great thing if you don’t live in San Francisco or New York City. The AT&T 3G bandwidth and connectivity in those places is just horrible.

I bet you’re wondering why I said I wouldn’t buy an iPad about right now, right? Let’s wade through some of the hype and see what we find, ok?

Hype: “The iPad is going to be a Kindle-killer”

Reality: The iPad is a perfect size for reading books, newspapers, documents and magazines. However, there are three things lacking on the iPad that exist on other e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. These are: 1. tactile feedback in the form of buttons, 2. e-Ink and 3. battery life.

Battery life on eBook readers is a direct correlation with the fact that they all use e-Ink. e-Ink is a display technology that has a very slow refresh rate (around 1 second), but which can keep a static display without using any battery power. This means that the battery is only used when the screen refreshes. With traditional displays, the screen is refreshed sometimes more than 60 times per second and in addition, most LCDs require a backlight in order to see what is on it’s screen.

This is hugely power intensive.

This basically means that the Amazon Kindle’s battery won’t die for potentially weeks of reading. Since the iPad’s battery is doing other things, like powering a backlight, the expected life-cycle of one charge of its battery is 10 hours at first. This, of course, may be fine for what you expect to use it for, but on trans-Pacific flights, this is unacceptable.

Hype: “The iPad will allow content creators with an answer to the question: ‘can we make money with free content by charging directly for it?’”

Reality: No. No matter what news agencies claim, a new device will not change how people consume it currently. The news they write will be free no matter what they try to do.

They could do something on the iBook store to offer people subscriptions to their Wall Street Journal, for instance. I may be willing to do something like that if it means consistant content and social functions that cannot be used the way we consume news currently.

Hype: “The iPad is a new idea.”

Reality: Not true. Like every PDA, tablet and slate-type device before it, this type of device is not a new idea.

The only thing that is new is the operating system. The iPhone OS did well for it’s device, but I’m having trouble understanding why more people are expected to buy the iPad than a cool phone – something they already had a need for.

Hype: “The iPad will kill netbooks.”

Reality: Do you own a netbook? Right. They’ve been selling like hotcakes, but Netbooks are not known to be something whos death wasn’t already emminent. They’re cheap, yes, but it’s impossible to type on, the buttons and other tactile things are cramped, and for someone who’s a normal sized American, it’s impossible to get any real work done.

Hype: “The iPad will change the way people use computers.”

Reality: If they use the iPad, I may agree that on a micro scale, the iPad will allow people to stop using what they currently use to access the internet and thus change the way they use computers.

However, as an engineer, the desk is the best place to get work done.

And there’s nothing better that sits atop a desk but a large screen and unattached keyboard. I don’t care if the CPU is inside a notebook form-factor, or a desktop, but I have a few requirements which are unmet in the iPad for what I do. Even if I had an iPad an used it every day, I would still need a desk and a big computer with a big screen and a mouse and keyboard input in order to last 12 hours days in Eclipse [ed. note: Eclipse. Gag. =].

To use the iPad in this way would require an external keyboard, and at that point, why not just use a notebook. It’s operating system is more versatile and I can’t imagine iBooks will be anywhere near as good as iTunes.

Conclusion

I see the iPad good for little more than it’s name implies: a notepad. This could mean applications to replace the paper alternatives (medicine, shipping, car rental, etc), but to have mass appeal, one has to replace or improve on something that already has mass appeal.

The alternative is to make a device that is cost effective enough to outlast all of the haters (like me) until it becomes a necessity (e-mail for example).

Ben Henry is an engineer, designer, farm/food activist, reader of literature, appreciator of good/clean/fair foods, urban beekeeper/gardener, pretend musician, professional music appreciator, consumer of great films and aspiring Olympic lifter. His day job is at Moto.