photo credit: Rego – twitter.com/w3bdesign
First things first, I have not seen the Apple iPad. I am an enthusiastic owner of an Amazon Kindle. I honestly don’t see what the hype is about. Granted, I never do with Apple products, but I can’t even see it from Apple’s point of view this time. The Kindle is perfect at what it does, largely because it doesn’t do that much. You read order, download, and read books on it. Period. The Kindle does that effortlessly and the e-ink is easier to read than paper. The pages are consistently sized (an under-reported feature of the Kindle that helps quite a bit) and the battery lasts forever. The Kindle also weighs almost nothing and you do not have to choose between it and a laptop in terms of weight or space. In sum, the Kindle solves the problem of “I want to read something” quite well.
What problem does the iPad solve? It will have the low battery life of anything with an actual monitor, so it can’t go that long without being charged, so add in the bulkiness of a charger 40% of the time to the transport of the unit. It is harder to read (again, relative to the Kindle) so that’s another strike against it.
Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, maybe the competitor isn’t the Kindle, but rather some segment of the iPhone market. Perhaps there is some segment of the world that is clamoring for multimedia computing power that is available while in motion. But the obscurity of the Microsoft Tablet OS/PC indicates that there are not legions of people clamoring for walkable computing power.
Happily no one’s products depend on me, so good luck Apple.
This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog
