First Impressions on iPad

Being a geek and currently interested in mobile devices, I, of course, got an iPad right away. After a week of playing with it, I thought I should share my first impressions. I should say that I currently use a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. I was able to use Apple products only after they started using Intel chips and hence PC emulation was made possible. I need to use a PC regularly, and I hate to use multiple laptops. So, even though I was an Apple user very early on with the first Macintosh computer and Steve Jobs follower with the NeXT (I still own the original cube by the way), I had to use PCs for about 15 years in between.

Since iPad seems to apply to multiple user segments I thought it would be appropriate to look at those segments in turn:

iPad as a consumer device:
Just like iPhone, I think Apple got it here. iPad has a great screen, it has a very simple and responsive interface, great graphics, and an impeccable flow. I think the multi-tasking Steve Jobs talked about in the press conference last week would be greatly beneficial here, but iPad is a good generalization of iPhone/iTouch success.

However, there are three major consumer issues. The first is that you have to use a dongle to transfer your pictures to iPad. I personally hate that. Those dongles get lost, get messed up after heavy use and do not work just when you need them to work, etc. It would have been much simpler to add an SD card slot. The second consumer issue is the camera. More than a still/video camera, it would have been great to have a front facing camera for video conferencing, but that issue has been beaten to death. The third issue is the lack of Adobe Flash. It is just annoying to go to your favorite website, like Hulu, and find out that the device you just paid at least $500 for cannot display it.

iPad as a business device:

Not surprisingly, similar to iPhone, there are more issues here.

On the software side, not being able to display PowerPoint presentations right out of the box is a big problem. I know Powerpoint is a Microsoft product, but it is used almost exclusively in the business domain. Converting to Keynote is not an option either because my colleagues and my partners cannot display Keynote. I did not try it but according to the reviews, even Keynote app does not work properly on iPad.

On the hardware side, lack of SD card support is a big issue. Even the dongle does not solve this since I don't see a way to write to the SD card. It looks like the dongle is only designed for downloading photos. Second, the virtual keyboard is a problem. This is a hardware issue since it has to do with the size of the device. In the portrait mode iPad is too large to type in the mobile phone mode (using your thumbs). In the landscape mode, it is too narrow (at least for me :-) to type properly in regular keyboard style. It is also too slippery to type in your lap. After I got it, I took six plane rides in one week, so I had a chance to try it out in multiple plane trip scenarios. By the way, in the beginning of the week, I was a big hit with the plane crew. Everyone wanted to see it. By the end of the week, it was already almost old news. They saw it multiple times.

Finally, lacking a pen is a big business use issue for me. I have a great portable device like iPad and I cannot take notes, make drawings, and doodle in meetings. I did try to doodle using my finger but it just does not work. You can draw simple diagrams but you cannot write. There are some pens you can use to draw on iPad, but first they are too thick and rubbery (so they don't glide) and they also suffer from the palm interference issue (If you rest your palm on the screen while you write, it will interfere with your writing. Especially left handed people are effected by this). We will be continuing to search for a better working pen. By the way, there seems to be a software performance issue with writing as well. Look at these circles I drew in Draw.

We get much better performance from $100 devices. Hopefully, this is just a software optimization issue that will get resolved soon.

iPad as an Education Device
In its early years, Apple's greatest strength was education. Later, the focus has shifted to consumers. The form factor of the iPad screen makes it more education friendly, since a lot of existing content such as books and Flash based learning objects are in 4:3 aspect ratio. Oh wait, iPad does not support and looks like will never support Flash. There goes the education market. It may come back when all interactive education content are rewritten in HTML5. The second impediment for iPad as an education device is price and the third is the lack of a pen.

Now, having said all of this, I think iPad will probably be a huge success among university students since they can probably afford it, they are used to typing as opposed to writing, and certainly do not care about learning objects. University students behave more like the general consumer market anyway.

On the other hand, I am not sure community college students can afford an iPad and it certainly is too expensive for public schools to distribute to their students. Furthermore, it is somewhat fragile when it gets dropped. Look at this "crash test" for example:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/193388/apple_ipad_stress_tests.html
Especially in lower grades, this will be an issue.

The final issue I have with iPad as an education device is the lack of SD card support. Unfortunately, WiFi is not everywhere as much as we would like it to be, and the most common form of sharing and transporting content among students is to use an SD card.

In summary, if we want to close the digital divide, I am afraid iPad is not the solution yet. We still need to look to $100 tablets coming from tens of mostly Asian companies, but more on that later.

Enjoy your iPad. I certainly am enjoying mine.

The following post has been copied from a post of mine on February 02, 2007.  It seems to be getting some interest even now, or maybe now more than before.  So I decided to repost it.   

Google the Spy?

The issue of privacy has long been a big interest of mine and lately I have seen it become an important topic in the world of free internet services. You can see some of my views on privacy in a previous post.

John Battelle asked a crucial question about ownership of Google search profiles on his blog, which was followed by a very interesting comment discussion.  That question was: who owns my personal search history? 

    

Something happened to me recently that turned this discussion upside down.

A couple of months ago, l was pitching our product to a VC in a coffee house in Palo Alto.  He wanted to compare LeapTag to Google Personalized Search, so he logged in to his Google account from my laptop. We had a nice discussion. 

    

A week ago, I received an email from him asking me if the following searches were ones I made recently, and he included a list of searches. 

    

My jaw dropped! Those were all searches I made a mere half an hour earlier - two months after our meeting.

I realized that he had never logged out of my laptop, and that all the searches, personal and professional, that I had done for the last two months using my laptop were now part of his search history.  He had access to all of it – as if it were his. Now who owns what?

    

I cannot begin to express how violated I felt.  He had access to all my searches which could potentially reveal a lot about me. I had no idea what he now knew.  I cannot even access those searches myself to find out.  So, right now, I have no idea what my exposure is. 

    

I think with Personalized Search, Google has created a tool that not only allows Google to spy on people but also allows people to spy on each other.

    

Since then I have performed a test to verify this behavior. First I created a Google account called "GoogleSpy" :-). I logged into that account from a different PC at work and then I logged in to the same account from my laptop.  Google was happy to let me log into both machines and did not log me out from the other (we know from experience that Google does not log you out even after two months!).  On my laptop I performed a couple of searches.  Here is a screen shot for one:

    

         

Now, the only indication that something may not be right is the login name in the upper right hand corner.  Busy people that we are, who notices anything in the upper right hand corner?

    

Then I went to the other PC.  Both of my searches appeared immediately in my search history (pretty fast service I have to admit :-)).  Here is a screen shot:

    

    

The first search is one I made from the PC and the last two are searches I made from my laptop. 

    

Yes, I did give my permission for someone to log in to their Google account from my laptop.  However, I reasonably expected Google to log him out after a while even if he did not log himself out.  Then I realized that this is probably not a bug, but rather an architectural limitation.  Google cannot tell when a person has finished using a particular computer or if in fact if that person actively uses multiple computers.  For personalized search to work well, Google needs to capture all of a user’s search activity.  While doing that aggressively, Google became a tool for compromising my privacy. 

    

As a result, my search results are not only "owned" by someone else, I don't even have access to them. 

    

I don't want to accuse Google of building spyware because I don't really think that is their intention. But in effect, Google Personalized Search can be used as spyware.

    

So who owns my search results? Apparently not me.

    

After starting four companies in three different sectors, I decided to attempt a blog that I can maintain through the current company as well as whatever new areas I happen to stumble upon in the future. I would like to share my thoughts about past and future experiences in this blog. I will start, being the lazy person that I am, by reposting an article about Google while I was running LeapTag.

I hope you enjoy these.