Now that the iPad is available in the UK and other countries, and has been around in the USA for a couple of months, It's time for some other users to have their say and tell us what they think...
First up in a series of guest pieces is Frans-Jozef Rutjes with a look at how the iPad has been accepted by his family.
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I should have known better, really. But in the mist of the sheer excitement that came with the opportunity to replace my wife’s ailing PC with a crisp, white MacBook, I side-stepped my caution – I should have known better.
Even with the ‘Design Thinking’ power of Jonathan Ives and his peers, nothing had prepared said MacBook for the ambitions harboured by my 2-year old of ‘getting higher up’. That is, of course, literally getting higher up: stepping onto a closed MacBook to reach for something on a bedside table.
What started as a small crack, ended up with an ominous black spider-like crevasse across the entire screen of the MacBook. Apart from seriously hindering any viewing pleasure – no website looks good viewed only from the bottom half of the screen – it made me winch every time I glanced over to see my wife still battling on, squinting at her favourite bookmarked websites. I suspect it says something about the ease of use of an Apple product and its associated software, when my wife can still use it with only half the screen showing and the mouse cursor frivolously playing hide and seek in between the blacked out areas of the screen.
Having said all that, rather than being furious with my son, I suppose I should really thank him for how he ‘stepped up’. In fairness, his unbound enthusiasm did pave the way for my latest purchase of Cupertino magic: the iPad.
Throughout the years I have rarely been able to capture my wife’s imagination with technology. Deeply rooted in the realities of everyday life with kids, fashion and keeping me from running off with my imagination, she simply has never been that impressed with what it might have to offer.
Also, she appears to possess a translation skill I lack. Whilst I might opt for a 265GB HDD recorder with Freeview and FreeSat because of its high-tech pedigree, she looks at the shiny black box as a means to allocate time to herself: Freeview equals CBBC, which equals kids bottoms on sofas and eyeballs silently glued to screens, which in turn equals the ability to spend some quiet time to herself.
I suspect that if I understood this mechanism better, over time I might have been able to harvest more approvals for acquisition of much needed gadgetry. As it stands, I spent a few lost days trying to justify the purchase of an iPad, using the argument that she was a ‘content consumer’ not a ‘content creator’ and therefore, why would she need another MacBook? But in the end I just ordered her one.
It was after the order confirmation email had slipped into my inbox that I noticed something curious happening. For the first time ever I saw a sliver of interest for something technological appear in my wife. Apparently, she had seen the TV commercial and came to the conclusion that the new iPad was ‘only a laptop screen’. Apart from the obvious fact that I had - yet again - been totally inept at describing the device (why had I not simply described it as ‘just the screen from your MacBook in your hands’?), it struck me that she was asking me….questions. Many questions, as a matter of fact, but the one that stuck was “How will I know how to use it?”
Cracking question. Obviously a silly one. Or was it? As an iPhone owner and a happy technocrat, I assumed that using it would be obvious to anyone. Blind to how my average description of technology makes little impact on my wife’s understanding of it, I attempted to clarify that there would be portrait and landscape web surfing, touch-screen delights and ‘capsule content’ wrapped into individual ‘apps’. I even ventured as far as showing her (at the bottom half of her cracked MacBook screen) YouTube videos of 'unboxings' and ‘first-surfs’ to show her what to expect. But in the end, I just unboxed it upon arrival and simply handed it to her.
And when I did, this is what happened: I didn’t see it back for hours. And even more significantly, there wasn’t a single question for what literally seemed an eternity. To put this in perspective, it took her all of two minutes to ask me to turn off predictive text on her new phone and it took her less than ten minutes to ask me to turn off the previously mentioned HDD recorder, as it seemed to ‘speak a different language’.
However, it took her 4 hours to ask me how to turn off the iPad….in case she wanted to. In case she wanted to? Amazing!
It seems to me that unlike any other object, the iPad has managed to unlock something worthy of a Dan Brown novel. Slightly populist, flirting with insider know-how and elevating the obvious to a higher order but with dead-on purpose that leaves readers wanting just a little more. And without being a critic or an advocate; keeping interest going appears to me precisely what is at stake here.
So far, the iPad hasn’t disappointed on this front. When my wife's interest in surfing appeared to wane (after all, there is only so much swivelling websites from portrait to landscape view one can take), she discovered apps. When finding interesting apps became more of an effort than a surprise, she moved recent pictures from camera to iPad with the adapter I ordered for her. When she had flicked and re-flicked through her pictures my 7-year old son sat next to her and they started to surf the web together handing the iPad backwards and forwards. And in the end, when they switched off the iPad, it wasn’t because they got bored but because they had to, in order to rejoin family life and have dinner.
From using it to liking it has been a small step this time. But with new technology and a vast knowledge gained from exploits that ranges from the Newton MessagePads to the iPhone, Apple have pushed boldly ahead and are now demanding the leap from ‘like’ to ‘love’.
And from where I am sitting – next to my wife, eagerly awaiting being allowed to have a go on ‘her’ iPad – they’re allowed to claim at least a little victory in our household.
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