Monday April 19, 2010 – Stewart Wolpin
A warning to HP and other PC companies with the upcoming Slate tablet PC and other post-iPad tablet PCs: Stop trying to sell your new devices by touting alleged technical superiorities. Resist emphasizing faster processors, array of connecting jacks and memory slots, Flash compatibility, 1080p video playback, built-in cameras/video recorders, and that they run Windows 7.
What HP and Microsoft and all tablet makers to follow have missed is that iPad is not a tablet PC.
Ever since the late and tragically under-appreciated Ed Roberts introduced his MITS Altair personal computer in 1975, the PC has been championed as an enhanced productivity tool. The justification for its purchase has always been something like "It'll help me work faster and easier and better." The iPad, however, may be the first "personal computer" not designed as an enhanced productivity tool. This is why some folks can't figure out what it does – it doesn't "do" anything, at least work-related.
Not that iPad can't be a productivity tool – I'm writing this column on an iPad using Apple's Pages word processing program and mailed the draft to myself using iPad's excellent email program.
But even as I'm writing this, I want to hit the Home key and tap on iBook to continue e-reading James McManus' poker history "Cowboys Full." I want to watch Paul McCartney's "Good Evening New York City" concert I synced from iTunes or stream a movie from my queue on Netflix. I want to touch-surf the Web. I want to play EA's addictive (for a writer, anyway) Scrabble. I want to browse my photos. I want to check the lowlights of yesterday's Mets' loss on MLB.com's At Bat 2010 app (I'm a masochist). I want to do anything but tap tap this column. I want to play.
Rather than enhancing productivity, iPad enhances fun.
If you ask any of the more than half a million iPad purchasers why they bought one, they will do their best hem and haw stammering Ralph Kramden, unable to come up with a fully realized rationalization. Though ultimately unexpressed, they bought it not because they needed it, but because they wanted it. They intuitively knew, given the thousands of available apps and games, the easy touch access and Apple's seamless OS/iTunes/app/hardware integration, that iPad would simply be fun to futz with.
But HP Slate and other Microsoft Windows 7 tablet makers think all they need to do is deliver another enhanced productivity tool, a touchscreen/keyboard-less netbooks, yet another enhanced productivity tool in another form factor, to compete with iPad. Touch will make Slate perhaps easier to use, but it won’t likely be described as fun. And that misses the whole point, and why the iPad is a success and why other tablets to come may not be.
