This is part I of my today's series featuring some impressions and thoughts on the iPad after having it in use since a few weeks.
Well, a lot has been written on the iPad already. Mainly the social media tubes are filled with it and I'm sure there's already been something like iPad-related getaway – which is not easy, since it's just everywhere. But I actually like to read other people's thoughts on it and I really see the discussion just starting to get interesting, because now the iPad is a) available for quite some time in the US and b) is getting available (and used) in more and more places all over the planet.
For me, the iPad has brought up quite some surprises. I never understood the early whining about the lack of a camera, USB port or "real multitasking". Ok, some way to connect it to an external hard drive or printer wouldn't be too bad, but I'm convinced this will come soon (no matter if it'll be USB or something without wires). But no – or limited (in terms of: by design) multitasking is something I appreciate, cause it helps me focus and concentrate on one thing at a time, which I'm quite bad at in general.
And here's the first surprise. Actually, it first came as a surprise, when thinking about it now it seems just obvious. The concept as well as the form factor of a tablet makes it a device that's implicitly designed to be shared with others, with your surrounding. The lack of a constant place as we know it from the PC, the fact that it's just a thin (though quite heavy) screen, in fact an everyday object to serve you as a window to the digital world. Something that seamlessly fits into your household and everyday life – with all its pros and cons. It could easily get hidden between paper magazines and newspapers (sic!) and fall on the floor when carelessly moved, or it might intuitively integrate into your cooking procedures and look quite messed up after a while. You put it here, somebody else picks it up sometime later to use it for something else somewhere else. You get the idea.
But the iPad, or it's operating system is not designed for that purpose (yet?). It's not a multi user device. Despite all these mentioned aspects related to collective usage, it's built for one single user. Whatever you do with it, no matter if you're using a bunch of apps or just logging into websites with the browser, the treatment of data is highly personal.
And I think this is quite the contrary of what it should be. It might be that Apple has avoided some kind of user management for the sake of simplicity – and there might be some other difficulties nobody understands (such as DRM restrictions etc.), but then again, why does Mac OS X have it? isn't this also an operating system designed to be for everybody's ease of use? And really, I don't use it on my MacBook. But it would be a killer feature on the iPad.
When we only had a single iPad for our design studio (we got it quite early for project research reasons), we needed to share it between the two of us. Because if you want to truly experience the product, you have to set it up to your very own preferences and work with your personal data. We found some rather cumbersome workarounds that nobody would like to apply for that purpose on a daily basis. And now that we have two devices on hand, I still want to share it with my girlfriend – or even with friends that come to visit. I already wrote about it earlier: the iPad is a piece of technology that is just there. Almost no barrier for a stranger to pick it up, use it and then suddenly finding her or himself unintentionally confronted with somebody else's private messages.
Let's not waste more time on the issue, as it will become available soon anyway. I'm convinced. That's what's going to happen for TVs as well, the smarter they'll get and the more they are going to be connected to the internet. And also, from an interaction point of view: for the same reasons described above (everyday object, ubiquitously integrated into environments ...), it totally makes sense to always password protect it. So why shouldn't there be different logins for different people, plus something like a guest user with restricted functionality and no access to other's personal data?
If you didn't fall asleep until here, please read part II:
Some more (rough and lenghty) thoughts on the iPad: Apps vs. Browser.
