iPad Review: Don’t believe the hype – a million people can be wrong

A couple of weeks ago I launched the BNPC (Buy Normal Personal Computers) campaign to try and stop the flood of PC users switching to Apple. However, I’ve got to admit that so far things haven’t been going well. In fact it seems that more and more people are switching over to Apple products and the company is reporting record-breaking sales.

The new iPad hasn’t helped. On Monday Apple announced that 1 million had been sold in just 28 days. Less than half the time it took to shift the first million iPhones.

Although the iPad is not yet available in the UK, my company had one sent over from the US, and I got the chance to take it home over the Bank Holiday weekend to see what all the fuss is about.

Make no mistake, as with many first release products from Apple, it’s not perfect. Steve Jobs argument against Adobe’s Flash may be well founded, but not having Flash compatibility did limit my experience of the web.

The iPad lacks other features too, most notably a camera. While this was no great loss to me over the weekend, the absence of a viewfinder means that cool Augmented Reality apps such as Layar, will not work on an iPad, which seems a shame.

Another minor quibble is that the iPad feels surprisingly heavy when you’ve been holding it for a while, although this didn’t seem to bother any of my kids – even my two year old – it was noticeable to me as I spent hours playing Angry Birds (for research purposes of course).

More significant for me was the real sense of being in an Apple controlled ‘walled garden’ when using an iPad, with access to Music, Films, Apps, and e-books controlled by iTunes, the App store, and the new online Book Store. As a veteran Apple user I should have been used to this, but somehow the lack of other input devices made the iPad feel far more cut off than say a MacBook Pro.

None of this mattered to my children, who immediately fell in love with the iPad and enjoyed playing games and interacting with its large screen high quality display. As a parent, I was really impressed by the animated e-books such as Toy Story. These brought familiar content to life in creative and engaging ways, and showed what the future of children’s publishing could (and should) be about.

Ironically, although the book reader worked well – it felt a bit dull in comparison to the other applications. I did like some of the magazine and comic book apps, but whether these would get me to start buying magazines again as opposed to simply accessing content on the web remains to be seen.

• So, is it an overblown iPod Touch? Well, yes.
• Is it another industry game changer? I think so.
• Did it lead to near death battles for possession within my family that lasted all weekend? You’d better believe it.

The iPad is made for families. To compare an iPad to a Kindle or a Nook seems unfair – it simply blows them away. Whether it emerges as the industry leader in this new product category remains to be seen. But I’m pretty sure that Apple has once again created a new genre of devices that will in time transform the ways in which we engage with books, newspapers and magazines.

What does all this mean for my campaign to stop people switching to Apple products? I concede it’s a major blow. The fact that Microsoft has dropped its plans to launch a tablet PC is another set back. But, it’s not too late. Google is rumoured to be working on an iPad killer, in the same way they designed the Nexus One to take out the iPhone, but we all know how well that turned out…

Social Media 09 – A Different Perspective

Although I’ve already written a short blog post on the last week’s Social Media 09 for Digital Public, I wanted to kick off my Urban Mashup blog by reflecting on the day from a different and more personal perspective.

The event itself was organised by Mashup* and featured a whole host of social media aficionados, digital guru’s, and online monitoring experts. The headline speakers were advertising luminary and Engine President, Robin Wight, and TV presenter Sarah Beeny, who generated a wave of positive Tweets from delegates when she picked up her newborn baby to sooth him during her presentation.

The event felt like a human Twitterfall, with speakers given strict 10 minute slots, and trooped on and off in quick succession.  Although this didn’t leave much time for reflection, a couple of impressions were left with me that don’t appear to have been addressed by other people’s write-ups of the day.

The first came during the talk from a pumped up Dan Klein who set out to convince us that nobody crunched more social media data than his firm Detica.

During his talk entitled ‘Social Network Analysis on Steroids’ he recounted how they had processed the data on every single transaction made on Ebay since 2001, and then went “looking for criminals”.  In this case, people buying Ammonium Nitrate. According to Klein, having found the top 50 traders, they reported the potential bomb makers to the US government. Although he kept emphasizing the legality of what they had done, I know I wasn’t the only one left feeling slightly uneasy by the civil liberty implications of all this.

However, it was Klein’s next case study that really grabbed my attention. He explained that Detica had also processed the details of every transaction made in Apple’s iTunes, and commented that this had revealed some interesting facts. For example, according to him: “people don’t pay for Hip-Hop in iTunes, and we know who they are”.

I found this remark extraordinary on two counts:

• Firstly, I was curious to know how artists like 50 Cent, Eminem and Jay-Z had managed to amass multi-million dollar fortunes if people aren’t paying for their music.
• Secondly, I wondered who was the “they” he was referring to?  I caught the eye of one of the handful of black guys in the audience. We both shrugged and gave each other a look, as if to ask: “is he talking to me?”

At this point, a scene from the 1989 Spike Lee film ‘Do the Right Thing’ flashed into my mind. It’s the one in which the character named Buggin’ Out begins to question why there “ain’t no brotha’s on the wall” in the pizzeria owned by the Italian-American, Sal.  The point he makes is that since Sal’s pizzeria is situated in a black neighborhood and sells pizza to black people, Sal’s ‘Wall of Fame’ should include some pictures of black celebrities.

I began to wonder about the Social Media 09 parallels, because for all the diversity on display in terms of age, gender, and professional experience, a common theme seemed to emerge as speaker after speaker took to the stage.

The clues could be found in the cultural references involving the pronunciation of fine wine, to the names of the presenters. When the second speaker named Giles appeared at the front, he quipped that:  “Social Media appears to be full of people that went to Public School!”

Although I resisted the urge to emulate Spike Lee’s character Mookie by throwing a trash can through the window, I did feel the need to use my opportunity to speak to point out that not everyone in social media went to Public School, as did Josh Feldberg who spoke after me.

I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the event organisers Mashup*, who deserve credit for pulling together such an interesting line up of presenters. Nor am I having a go at the other speakers (well, perhaps with one exception). They were being themselves and using the cultural references that they could relate to.

I guess I’m asking a broader question of “where are all the brotha’s and sista’s?” when it comes to social media. We know that black and Asian people participate in social media just as much, and in some cases more than white people, so why are so few involved in the cutting edge of social and digital media production?

It’s not a question I think I can answer right now. It is one that is being asked in the US too. I’m sure that I’ll return to it in this blog because I passionately believe that we’ve got to Do the Right Thing.

Feel free to comment, disagree, or debate below.