Why My Next Tablet Computer May Not Be An iPad – The ‘Book Mystique

About a year ago, I had a conversation with an old friend I don’t see very often, but talked to on the phone a couple of times a year. He’s a retired software developer, and has always used PCs, although he’s never been partisan about it. Anyway, he bent my year extolling the virtues of his iPad — I think the first Apple product he’s ever owned. While he’s never been much of a computer enthusiast, he was loving the iPad — one of the original models.

My friend’s ringing endorsement of the iPad helped persuade me to buy an iPad 2 a couple of months later. Last Friday, he called, and among other things we compared iPad notes. He’s still using his original iPad and still loves it. I’ve been using my iPad to for about 10 months now, and while I like it, I haven’t become an effusive fan, or nearly as affectionately attached to the tablet as I am to my Mac laptops.

My friend and I agreed that within their limitations, our iPads do what they do best — content consumption — really well, but from my perspective being primarily content creation oriented, not so much. My efforts to employ the iPad as a laptop substitute have been only marginally successful, which has made the device a source of frustration as well as satisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong, my iPad 2 gets enough use that it needs charging 2 or 3 times a week — sometimes more frequently. It’s my device of choice for casual web-surfing, quick email checking, and such like, but it falters as soon as you want to try copying and pasting something from a webpage or an email message. Text selection is both tedious and inconsistent, working about quarter-decently in some apps and miserably or not at all in others. Text selecting and manipulation even in dedicated text editing and word processing apps is cumbersome and slow at the best of times. I do use the iPad a fair bit for rough composition and preliminary editing, as I’m doing right now with this column, but final proofing and formatting gets shunted to one of my Mac laptops usually. Dropbox makes this platform-shifting a lot more tolerable than it might have been.

I’ve also missed capabilities like real multitasking; a user-accessible file directory that would let me, for example, upload individual image files to Web posting forms; easy app switching; and being able to display two document windows or application windows side-by-side. The app-switching at least was improved with iOS 5’s so-called “multitasking” (it’s nothing of the sort).

I’ve been told that I “don’t understand” the iPad, and that I should just get a laptop. I currently have three laptops in active service and I love them, but what I do understand about the iPad is that its compact and light form factor makes it comfortably usable in many locations and circumstances where a laptop wouldn’t be. I just wish it offered functionality that would make it an adequate laptop alternative in those venues.

That’s why using my ‘Pad in a Bluetooth keyboard case doesn’t appeal to me a whole lot. I actually don’t find the virtual keyboard all that bad, and a keyboard case basically gives you the form factor of a small laptop without the latter’s power, versatility, and productivity features, and you have reach over the keyboard to paw at the touchscreen at an awkward angle, as opposed to a real laptop’s trackpad.

Despite my frustrations with the iPad, I’ve developed operational strategies that indeed do allow me to use it instead of the laptops for some production tasks, but always I’m always conscious that it could be so much better, and the fact that many of the features I’d ideally like to have in a tablet are supported by Android has made me seriously question whether I’m not just beating my head against the wall by staying loyal to Apple.

Consequently, I had hoped that the third-generation iPad would incorporate at least some of the features that would enhance its usability as a production tool. Alas it was a disappointment. Instead the new iPad essentially brought an ultra-high resolution display — impressive visuals, but still essentially eye-candy that imposes a heavy toll on hardware overhead, bandwidth, and storage capacity — plus optional LTE data support and a better camera, but no enhancement of app level performance — in fact the opposite. Adding insult to injury, a 42 percent increase in battery capacity (and recharging time), and a roughly twice as fast graphics processing engine, are both canceled-out and more by the voracious demands of pushing four times as many pixels as the previous iPad display and the current draw of LTE if so-equipped.

Not only that, users of older iPad hardware are going to get stuck with storing code-bloated apps configured to support Retina resolution displays, with zero benefit to them.

Now, if the iPad and iOS software suit your needs and tastes in a tablet computer context, that’s great. There’s plenty to like about the iPad, and its sales performance, up 151 percent year-over-year in Apple’s second 2012 fiscal quarter, speaks for itself. However, with it increasingly evident that Apple has little or no interest in accommodating the needs of would-be iPad content creators and power users, I think more and more folks who fit those two categories, and who have had their appetites whetted by the iPad, perceiving its as yet unrealized potential as a portable production platform, are going to be taking a serious look at what’s outside the boundaries of Apple’s garden wall.

As previously noted, Android supports a lot of the functionality I would like to have on the iPad, things like working with two apps at the same time; the ability to cut-and-paste content between two apps’ windows opened side-by-side; taking notes in one app while viewing content in another app, less tedious text selection (press and hold to select a word), plus standard USB device connectivity and expandable storage options, not to mention Flash video support.

But soon there’s going to be Windows 8 as well. In a Tech.pinions blog last week, Nathan Brookwood notes that Windows 8’s forthcoming Metro tablet user Interface will add the missing user interface elements, thereby positioning Win 8-based tablets as the only ones suitable for those of us who want to both create and consume content on a single device. Brookwood defines content creation in this context as referencing a broad range of activities that contemporary PCs and Macs handle effortlessly, but that the process of execution on an iPad or Android tablet is at best arcane, and often impossible, rendering iPads and Android tablets at best suitable as ‚Äö√Ñ√∫companion devices,‚Äö√Ñ√π assuming you have access to a PC or Mac to handle everyday computing tasks.

A tablet computing aficionado who says he’s been using Windows-based tablets for almost a decade, but who also owns an iPad 2, Brookwood observes that Windows 8 will finally provide a more complete tablet computing environment than Apple has chosen to thus far, supporting all the touchscreen features that wow consumption-oriented users, but also able to support more serious computing endeavors. Those of us so-inclined will be able to tap on the Desktop tile and be instantly transported to a real Windows 7 desktop, with full-fledged desktop applications supported — not just stripped down versions some marketing type figured were good enough for tablet users. While the touchscreen interface will still work, you’ll also be able to connect a real keyboard and pointing device, which after 30 years of development have been refined t a point where they’re vastly superior for content creation input. Brookwood observes that Windows 8 will meld a modern multi-touch user interface that appeals to content consumers, with a Windows 7 environment that’s far superior creating content, and currently no other tablet OS can deliver that level of flexibility, versatility, and best of both worlds support.

Motley Fool Blogger Alvin Gonzales says that Microsoft and Intel are bent on reducing the iPad’s market share to less than 50% by 2013 (according to a Digitimes report), observing that with Windows 8, Microsoft’s flagship operating system becomes capable of running on tablets, laptops, and desktops — in contrast to Apple’s two two OS’s strategy for its mobile devices and Macs respectively, and Android being essentially a mobile OS.

Consequently, Gonzales thinks the advantages of having a single OS across platforms, bringing with it the substantial advantage of cross-platform application support, will have great market appeal, since any program that can be installed on a Windows 8 laptop or desktop will be able to be installed on a (x86-based) tablet as well. He predicts that this will allow Microsoft to leverage its large base of Windows users, who won’t be obliged to say goodbye to their legacy programs and switch to a whole different suite of software in order to benefit from the portability advantages of tablet computing the way Mac users migrating to the iPad are.

Also, what with Windows 8 being a full-featured Windows OS, users of x86-based Windows 8 tablets will be able to install third-party applications or add files directly rather than having to go through the Windows Store — unlike we Pad users locked into Apple’s walled garden and restricted to installing apps downloaded from the App Store.

I should also emphasize here that cross-platform software compatibility will not apply to Windows On ARM (WOA) tablets, which will support versions of popular Microsoft software like Office and Internet Explorer, but there will be no third-party desktop apps for WOA, which takes the shine off things in that context considerably, since Windows 8 tablet models that compete most directly with the iPad will likely be ARM-based.

However, by making Windows 8 compatible with legacy programs, Microsoft has enabled a much wider selection of software choices to run on x86 based tablets it supports. Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, HP, Asus, et al. are reportedly fixing to release some 32 Windows 8 tablets running on Intel or AMD chips in 2012. It’s as yet unclear how x86 vs. WOA will eventually play out in market share.

While Apple famously considers the iPad to be a “post-PC device,” tablets are in reality still basically computers, and many users like choices with computers. At least I know I do. It was the open platform “IBM compatibility” of DOS and Windows that resulted in the Macintosh OS losing its early lead in personal computing to become a niche product. True, Apple’s current market dominance over its tablet computing rivals, with the iPad taking some 70 percent of the global market, is much greater than any lead the Mac OS ever enjoyed. Another fiscal quarter of spectacular financial performance, nearly doubling its profit year-over-year, based overwhelmingly on iOS device sales, is testament to the fact that Apple will be no pushover when it comes to defending its tablet computer and smartphone market space. iPhone sales were up 88 percent and iPad sales up a stunning 151 percent over the same quarter of 2011.

However, Window 8 is still not in play as an option for tablet shoppers. That will change soon, probably by September or October at the latest, with Microsoft’s Windows group president Steven Sinofsky announcing at the Windows 8 Dev Days conference in Tokyo on Tuesday that the company will ship what it’s calling a “release preview” of Windows 8 in the first week of June, confirmed by a tweet from the Build Windows 8 developer blog., which should clear the way for a late summer or early fall launch.

With the combined marketing might of Microsoft and the constellation of major PC makers aligned against it, backed up by the power, versatility, flexibility, and value of Windows 8, Apple is in for the fight of its life.

I admire and appreciate the iPad’s superb build, materials quality and solid engineering, just as I do that of my aluminum MacBook and of most of the dozen or so other Macs I’ve owned over the past 20 years. It’s been a combination of hardware quality and superior software experience that kept me in the Apple fold for my entire two-decade personal computing journey. The build quality and standard of finish are still there, arguably better than ever with the precision of unibody aluminum construction. However, I’m finding myself less and less happy with some of the engineering choices Apple has been making — notably things like non user-swappable batteries. Or for that matter in practical terms with the iPad, anybody-swappable batteries, thanks to “sealed unit” internal non-access that convinced iFixIt to rate the latest iPad an abysmal 2 out of 10 repairability score of 4, and based on a year’s experience also retroactively demoting the iPad 2’s repairability score of the to a 2 from an initial 4 as well. A device that costs as much as an iPad should have replaceable batteries. Then there are irritations and angularities like non-upgradable RAM in the MacBook Air. I’m also not a fan of the Apple App Store as sole software distribution medium for iOS devices, and with Apple taking OS X in that direction as well.

And after more than 25 years of constant improvement, the Apple operating system experience has recently entered a downward trend as well, not only with shortcomings of the iOS, some of which I’ve outlined above, but with Apple also evidently intent on making the OS X experience more like the iOS, rather than vice-versa, which would have been my preference. Indeed, I think the course taken by Microsoft with Windows 8 represents a pretty close to ideal solution in theory, giving users a choice of interface motif, and tablet support for full-powered productivity software. We’ll see how well that works out in real world practical experience, but in the abstract, I find it mighty appealing, and am inclined to think it will appeal to a lot larger demographic than some folks seem to imagine — especially in the enterprise where the iPad has been gaining ground.

A year from now I’ll most likely considering a new tablet. The next-generation iPad 4 will be on my shortlist, but it won’t be the only candidate unless by some miracle (which I’m not expecting), Apple relents and decides to support longtime customers and supporters who would like to combine real multitasking and productivity support with the iPad form factor.

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