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 So... the iPad.
Sorry, sorry, sorry – not: “So... the iPad”.
I meant: “OMG THE IPAD I MEAN WOW WOW WOW! LIKE, OMG, APPLE FTW! OMG OMG OMG...” and so on and so forth.
Er, except... not quite.
Apple’s latest creation seemed to stir up a fair amount of interest among ordinary punters, but the geek overlords seemed to be relatively unimpressed at Cupertino’s paradigm-shifting, bottom-wiping slate-y offering.
Where’s the multitasking? Why isn’t it widescreen? We’re supposed to use iPhone apps? That bezel’s huge! Still no Flash? Where’s the camera? 1024 x 768 – what is this, the 1990s? Lame.
Safe to say, the nerds were unimpressed – as opposed to after the iPhone launch in 2007, which appeared to cause numerous hasty changes of underwear throughout the geek community.
But what the geeks missed, while sat wallowing in their righteous indignation, was that, unlike with the iPhone, they are not a target market this time. The Apple iPad, with its sub-$500 entry price, is very firmly a mass-market product, of which Apple wants to sell shedloads to ordinary punters, for whom shininess is more important than screen resolution.
Unfortunately, this may also be where Apple comes undone, just a little bit.
But, why should we here in the Middle East care? Well unlike the iPhone, we may actually get the iPad not long after other parts of the world. According to The National, UAE telco Etisalat was on the phone to Apple the day after the iPad launch – presumably spurred on by the fact that a) it sells as many iPhones as it can pump into the country, and b) it missed out on first bite at the iPhone 3Gs model.
This is excellent news for UAE punters – and by extension, the region as a whole. Not only are the time-lags shortening, but with a formal deal to bring the iPad here, regional users may finally get access to a content store – rather than just the apps store. And there’s the rub.
Content is the real bone of contention here – not tech specs. Here’s why.
Outside of the iTunes music store, Apple’s forays into content have had mixed results. Anyone remember the Apple TV? It was supposed to revolutionise the way we watched movies and television shows – but it didn’t.
Even on the iPhone and iPod Touch, video seems to have taken second-place to gaming as a follow-through market – and notice how a large part of the iPad’s launch talked up the gaming potential of the newer device.
The problem is video – and specifically, the restrictions Apple places on what videos can be played on its devices. In keeping with its locked-down ethos, the device maker only allows its own MP4 and MOV files, and then only of specific types, to play on its shiny toys.
Unfortunately, most people don’t use these files. Most people use AVIs – bog standard, old but reliable, and the de-facto standard for illegal downloads through torrents and suchlike. Newer high-def movies and shows are often distributed in MKV format – again, unsupported by Apple.
This is why the Apple TV flopped – and why, in my view, the iPad may not be quite the rip-roaring success many predict, in the long term.
iPad owners are going to be extremely limited as to what they can put on their shiny slate: they can’t (legally) copy DVDs or Blu-ray discs onto it, they can’t use their (illegal) video downloads, or most probably, their existing video collection – at least not without going through a long-winded and fiddly conversion process, which is more the realm of geeks than punters.
In short, iPad owners will, pretty much, have to buy everything they watch on the device – and they’ll have to buy it from Apple.
So unless someone is very literally coming to digital video for the first time ever, they’re faced with spending a substantial sum to keep themselves entertained.
Otherwise, the iPad is essentially a very large MP3 player, an e-book reader that needs recharging every few hours, or a web browser that can’t display most web pages properly – including ads, let us not forget.
Oh yeah, in case you missed that one – the iPad, as with the iPhone, can’t display Adobe Flash elements in web pages. So, that instantly rules out virtually every interactive site, and the vast majority of banner advertising.
People may be happy to put up with these things when it’s on a 3-inch screen – but not on something that looks like it should be displaying everything perfectly. It may yet come to pass that Apple enables Flash on the iPad – but we wouldn’t count on it.
In short, the geeks won’t like the specs, and the ordinary joes won’t like the fact that they can’t make it do much – the iPad risks falling between two stools.
This is why, for the Middle East market, it’s more vital than ever that Apple does open up a content store here – perhaps one of the very few regions where downloadable video is not as mainstream as elsewhere.
If it doesn’t, we may well be left with a few excited early adopters snapping up the iPad – only to discover it really isn’t much good for anything at all, unless you want to get geeky with file conversion tools and the like.
In that case, Apple may find its iPad swiftly turns into an iDud.
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