Early in October I wrote a somewhat disparaging blog entry about my initial impressions of the iPad that I had just purchased. Since then my perceptions and opinions about the iPad have changed significantly. The most notable change has been in my understanding of what problems the iPad was designed to solve. Rather than it being designed as a product to generate information, it is designed to consume and manipulate it.
Part of my problem with the iPad over the first 3-4 weeks that I owned it stemmed from my expectations in how I expected to use it. As an analyst and writer, I by trade generate information. So my working hours are primarily spent writing and editing blog entries, case studies, white papers, special reports and Buyer’s Guides.
To perform these tasks I have a desktop with two large landscape monitors that I use to assimilate, correlate and interpret the information that I gather. Further, in order to generate these different types of content, I am constantly typing, editing, copying, cutting and pasting data.
Unfortunately the iPad is not very adept at any of these particular tasks that I need to perform on a day-to-day basis. Even if I did purchase the optional keyboard and Office-like software (which I did not purchase) to better facilitate these tasks, I still saw the iPad as a complete waste of my time and money.
Now nearly eight (8) weeks after I purchased my iPad, my view has changed significantly in large part because I have re-oriented myself as to how I should use the iPad. In other words, I no longer want to use the iPad for the express purpose of generating content. Instead I look to it as a means to consume and manipulate content that others have already produced.
By way of example of how I use it to consume data, I was in San Jose, CA, a couple of weeks ago meeting with a prospective client. In the course of doing so, the client asked to see a sample DCIG Buyer’s Guide as well as a sample DCIG Case Study.
In the past I had printed off this content on paper in anticipation of these types of requests because laptops took too long to boot up and were too bulky to carry around. Now I store all of these documents as PDFs in the iPad’s iBook application so these prospective clients could quickly see a professionally laid out version of these documents.
Further, using the iPad in this manner even saves me money! When I printed these documents out in the past, I would print them out on high quality, glossy paper. While printing off one or two documents was not terribly expensive to do, if I was printing off a few hundred, the print job could have easily cost me hundreds of dollars.
Now using the iPad my prospective client essentially gets the same effect as me handing him or her a printed document without me needing to incur the expense of printing it or me having to first take time out of my schedule to print them off. Further, if the client likes what they see and want a copy of it, I can immediately email a copy of the document to them so they do not have to carry a printed copy of the document around.
The iPad also saves me money in another way. When printing off documents, I typically did so before I traveled. Depending on how many copies of documents I printed out, it could be a rather hefty amount of paper that would take up space in my suitcase and may even necessitate I check a second suitcase for an additional charge. Now I can just carry the iPad with me as I travel which potentially saves me another $25/each way on every flight.
In terms of how the iPad might be used to manipulate data, the use case for this was highlighted while I was at the recent HDS Influencer Summit also in San Jose, CA. HDS has found that in enterprises administrators are walking their data center floors using iPads to administer systems on the floor. So to accommodate this growing trend, HDS has made its Hitachi Command Suite 7 available as an applet that can be installed on the iPad.
What HDS has recognized is that the iPad is suitable for manipulating data in its Command Suite 7. So by HDS porting this app to the iPad, it gives administrators all of the functionality they need delivered to them on a device that is well-suited for them to do their job while on the move.
The iPad still only has a limited amount of use cases for me personally because of the type of work I do. Even this blog entry was not typed out on the iPad but on my desktop with two monitors.
But what I failed to consider when I wrote my initial blog entry some time ago is that a growing number of people (maybe even the majority of people) are no longer generators of content but consumers and manipulators of it. This is especially true of those who are mobile users.
It is when the iPad is viewed through this lens that I begin to appreciate the iPad for the marvel of engineering that it is. While it may never meet my day-to-day requirements to generate, it was also never intended to do that.
What it does do, however, is enable me to nightly enjoy one of the 200+ X-File episodes in the privacy of my own room while also providing some business benefits. I now see how it enables me to work more efficiently and effectively and it is in that respect that the iPad is a real breakthrough from a product perspective. This aspect of it should help ensure that as a technology it is more than just a flash in the pan but will have long term viability as a necessary business tool that provides a quantifiable value-add.