Posts Tagged ‘iPad’

Beginning of the end for the laptop

Something I said a few months ago in a previous post,

…tablets are a new form of computing devices, one poised to become more powerful and user-friendly than the netbook/laptop form…

I mentioned the JooJoo in that post, but the iPad pretty much demolished any chance the JooJoo had at success.

The iPad itself has done phenomenally well and my optimism for tablets seems to be shared by the general public. Despite lackluster first impressions of the iPad on tech sites when it was announced, the iPad has managed to sell at a staggering rate (2 million sold, 2 months after going on sale).

My prediction of the tablet overtaking the netbook and laptop form-factors seems to be coming true as well; from the Wall Street Journal,

…internal estimates [at Best Buy] showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%.

Nice summary at SAI.

Multitouch

I came across the following video of a toddler using an iPad for the first time. It’s amazing to watch and see how quickly she is able to acclimate to the touchscreen interface and navigate to and launch the apps she wants. I certainly haven’t seen kids able to do this with the traditional mouse/keyboard combo much less a touchpad on a laptop or netbook.

This is exactly the reason I was optimistic for the JooJoo … and why I’m optimistic for the iPad and the HP Slate, and touchscreens in general … it’s the touch-based user input which is poised to radically reshape and simplify the personal computing experience.

The accompanying blog post at laughing squid provides a nice write-up and analysis of the UX experiment. The concluding remarks are interesting:

Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.

The video along with this remark instantly reminded me of the TED conference where Jeff Han presented his multitouch interface and expressed his disappointment, in regards to the $100 laptop, of introducing a new generation to computing with the standard mouse and pointer interface.

It’s also amazing to remember seeing this video is 2006, where multitouch seemed like some conceptual idea that would never find its way into any real consumer-level product – only about a year later the iPhone was introduced.