Will the iPad Get Third-Party Input Devices?

One feature of the iPad left unmentioned in the on-stage presentation but confirmed by Apple officials during the demo sessions afterward is that the iPad works not only with the $70 Apple keyboard dock but with Bluetooth keyboards as well. This could open the floodgates to other input devices.

One big question, though, is just how flexible the software will be. Even  a brief encounter, it became apparent that what you can do with the keyboard is limited to entering text. If you are sitting at the keyboard, nearly all navigation still has to be done by touching the iPad screen, which is ergonomically less than ideal.

Designing a navigation device for use with an all-touch interface is tricky; I find the D-pads and trackballs included on Android devices awkward. But with a separate keyboard it could be an attractive option, if only to avoid the need to reach out and touch the screen every time you need to do anything. Do the iPad human interface device drivers include support for things such as touchpads as well as keyboards? We don’t know yet.

We also don’t know whether the keyboard support of the iPhone OS 3.2 or future versions will be ported back to the iPhone or iPad Touch. You can physically attach the iPad keyboard to either through the 30-pin connector, but the software in the device would have no idea of how to handle the input because there are no device drivers. I find the idea of using a separate keyboard with  an iPhone or Touch a lot less compelling than with an iPad, but I’m all for the freedom of users to do whatever they want.

iPad: What About Printing?

Printing is one subject that has gone largely undiscussed in the torrent of words unleashed by the iPad announcement. But it is an important issue that Apple should address before the iPad ships.

You don’t expect a phone to print, so no one is bothered by the iPhone’s inability to do so. But people do print from computers, even netbooks, all the time. People print Web pages, email messages, and documents of all sorts. The extreme portability and e-reader-like form factor of the the iPad may reduce the urge to produce a dead tree image, but it isn’t going to eliminate it. And the fact that Apple is making productivity apps such as Pages and Numbers available for the iPad increases the mystery of why printing capability was (apparently) left out of the list of features.

Fortunately, Apple has a dead simple way to fix this. Bonjour is an extremely easy way to locate and connect to a printer (or an iTunes library; Apple also uses Bonjour for that) on a local network. It’s universal plug-and-play that actually works. It seems like it would be no great trick to add Bonjour capabilities to the Pad to enable printing.

If Apple doesn’t do this, I think it will have a lot of frustrated users on its hands. The iPad is all about simplicity, and making people transfer files to a Mac or a PC via iDisk or as an email attachment so they can be printed is no way to keep things easy.

iPad vs. Kindle: It’s Way Too Early to Tell

What is it about Apple announcements that causes otherwise sensible people to say or write really silly things? Most of the experienced observers present at Wednesday’s iPad announcement reserved judgment for the perfectly sound reason that what we saw was a very attractive piece of hardware whose software and , perhaps more important, back-end services are too incomplete to assess.

The fact that Steve Jobs gave only the sketchiest outline of the iPad’s ebook capabilities and told us even less about the iBook store did not prevent a fierce debate from breaking out over whether the iPad will or will not kill Amazon’s Kindle. Now this argument  would be fundamentally misguided even if we knew a lot more about the iPad. It is a peculiar conceit of the tech industry that any new product has the be evaluated as the potential killer of some existing category leader, completely ignoring the very real prospect that both the incumbent and the challenger might prosper. For example, I think it is entirely possible the Kindle and other e Ink-based readers continue to be the choice of voracious readers of fiction and mostly text non-fiction, while the iPad wins the market for textbooks and multimedia newspapers and magazines.

But I digress. What really puzzles me is the tendency of analysts to come to firm conclusions based of the flimsiest of evidence—or perhaps none at all. Consider Ben Elowitz’s Tech Crunch guest post “Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business” especially, reason #4:

“Apple has captured the magic of shopping. Once again, whereas Amazon does great with the functional needs of buying a book, Apple goes beyond to create an experience.”

Now for all I know, shopping at the iBook store will turn out to be a positively orgasmic experience. But neither Elowitz nor I have any idea of what it be like because the iBook store does not yet exist. All we have seen is a static demo the user interface—and one that it is hard to imagine what it will look like when hundreds of thousands of thousands of titles are offered.  I can accept the idea that some readers will prefer iPad’s glitzy finger-swiping user interface and animated page turning to Kindle’s prosaic but practical button-pushing. And some will favor the backlit LCD display over Kindle’s e Ink. But it’s much more of a stretch to believe that Apple will turn out to be vastly better than Amazon at selling books.

One thing that Apple and Amazon have both done superbly is the integration of their online content offerings—music, video, and apps for iPhone, books for Kindle—with the devices. But no one comes close to Amazon;s ability to market books. Only Amazon has been smart enough to send me an email when an author whose work I have bought in the past has a new publication. No one else’s recommendation engine (except maybe Netflix’s) come close to Amazon’s.

Another huge question left unanswered by the Apple presentation is the fate of the Kindle reader on the iPad. Now that Apple is entering the book business, will it allow Amazon (or Barnes & Noble) to compete, especially given the rumblings from the publishing industry that the iBook store may charge more for the same titles than Amazon.

One interesting dimension of the competition is that Apple and Amazon come to the book business from complete different perspectives. For Apple, content is the lure that gets customers to buy hardware. For Amazon, the devices are vehicles to sell content, which is why it doesn’t much care whether you read your Amazon ebook on a Kindle or an iPhone or a computer.

It’s way too early to declare a winner in this competition, or even to come to the conclusion that there will be a winner. My guess is that both Apple and Amazon can prosper in a rapidly growing market. But I’ll be the first to admit that it is nothing but a guess.

iPad: Apple Thinks Different

Steve Jobs surprised me today. Although the specifications of the iPad were pretty much what I expected, the device differs in subtle but critical ways from what I and just about everyone else thought it would be. But Apple, as always, has refused to let its plans be shaped by either its fans or its critics and the result is something different and unexpected.

The general assumption in the runup to the announcement was that the iPad would be a mobile device, bigger than the iPhone or iPad Touch, but still highly mobile. Thus, the obsessive and, as it turned out, mostly irrelevant, speculation about who the mobile carrier would be. Instead, the iPad is really a portable device, by which I mean that it is very easy to carry around, but unlikely to be used while actually in motion.

There is plentiful evidence that this is how Apple views the iPad. One question that  I has focused on was what rabbit Apple would pull out of the hat to enable data input on a mid-sized mobile device. The biggest surprise for me is that they didn’t really try. The on-screen keyboard is only usable if you put the iPad on a flat surface or at least your lap. There’s a microphone, but no provision for voice control.  But there is an optional $70 keyboard dock using the same mechanical design as the iMac keyboard.

It’s hard to say how necessary that external keyboard may be, I have learned that it takes a couple of weeks to assess an onscreen keyboard because each one comes with a fairly steep learning curve all its own. I was able to spend only five or ten minutes typing on the iPad. It’s very different from the iPhone in design, not just size. When you type on the iPhone, the letter you are pressing pops up at the text entry point. On the iPad, the key you are pressing dims, so you have to look at the keyboard rather than the text you are entering. It’s not worse, just different, and will take some getting used to.

Also striking was the emphasis Apple put on the iWork suite of productivity applications.  Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs are not mobile tools, but their availability helps the iPad fit into a market slot, one that does not currently exist,  between laptops and smartphones.

Apple’s choice of wireless technologies was also telling. The iPad is primarily a Wi-Fi device, with the availability of 3G, which unlike Wi-Fi is a truly mobile service, feeling like a  bit of an afterthought. It will be sold the way laptops are, not through the subsidized in exchange for a two-year carrier contract model used to sell phones. With no subsidy, the iPad can be sold unlocked. In the U.S., however, that may not be of great significance. There was no indication of a version that could be used with the CDMA network technology used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint, and if it has the same combination of radios as the iPhone, it would not work properly on T-Mobile’s 3G network. The only data plans announced were for AT&T, $15  for a hopelessly inadequate 250 MB a month, $30 for “unlimited” data service (though nearly all wireless data services turn out to have caps of some sort.)

Also telling is what Apple left off the iPad. There is no dedicated GPS receiver, so the iPad will have to rely on much less accurate network information to know its position (it will be more accurate on 3G versions.) No camera and no compass mean no augmented reality apps. The iPad would be awkward to use as a still or video camera, but I am a  bit surprised that there is no provision for videoconferencing, a use that is consistent with the portability model and the focus on productivity apps.

The area that Apple had the least to say about may ultimately turn out to be the most important to iPad’s success. It looks like a great device for reading books and viewing video. But with relationships between Apple and publishers and studios still in flux, Apple has little to say. The iBook store will put Apple into competition with Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble in the ebook business, but we know next to nothing about the specifics. And for all the talk about the iPad as the future of newpapers and magazines, only a New York Times app was demoed–and it didn’t look all that different from the Time‘s existing Web site or its Adobe Air-based Times Reader for PCs.

Video is problematic for a different reason. Like the iPhone, the iPad does not support Adobe’s Flash video format. When asked about it, Apple executives say they support the new HMTL 5 video standard instead. But Flash is going to remain the video standard of the Web for some time to come (think Hulu; it’s Flash-based and you can’t get it on the iPad). The open question is whether this is the result of a feud between Apple and Adobe or because of the difficulty of running the notoriously processor-intensive Flash systems running ARM processors, which includes the iPad as well as all smartphones. We should get an answer in the fairly near future when Adobe releases the ARM-friendly Flash 10.1.

My guess it the iPad will be successful, though less spectacularly than the iPhone. But if Apple gets the remaining details right, the potential is all to the upside.

Why Maps Are Becoming Free

A Brazilian Twitter follower, @rlcarbonell, asked “what do you have to say about this last move by Nokia Maps being ‘free’?” An important question, but one that cannot be answered in 140 characters.

Maps, and more to the point, the associated driving directions, are becoming free because the services that can be wrapped around them are more valuable than the map information itself. Google started the trend when it made free real-time, turn-by-turn driving instructions free on the Verizon Droid and, soon there after, other Android phones. Of course, google Maps has been free from the beginning on computers and many different handsets. But Google Maps used data from Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom) and Navteq (acquired by Nokia) and Google did not buy the very expensive licenses required to provide real-time navigation.

Instead Google built its own database of North American maps with information it gathered while collecting the photos for Street View. Owning its own maps, Google could provide real-time nav without paying any license fees. And nav leads to very valuable search ads. Advertisers are willing to pay a lot per click for people on the interstate searching for motels because these inquiries turn into sales at a very high rate.

Earlier this month, Nokia, taking advantage of its ownership of Navteq and the fact that Google isn’t ready to go with its own maps outside North America, announced its free Ovi Maps service for selected Nokia smartphones in 70 countries. Monetizing free maps is somewhat more difficult for Nokia than for Google, but they two will do it by providing paid services around free maps.

Apple is likely to be the net player in the free nav game. The current standard Maps iPhone app, which does not provide real-time navigation, is just a rebranded Google Maps. But  last summer, Apple quietly bought a mapping company called Placebase and is thought to be developing its own in-house mapping capability. It’s just a matter of time before Apple announces its own free mapping application for the iPhone and other products.

All of this is bad news for the paid competition, of course. Providers of paid services for phones, such as Telenav and TeleCommunications Systems (formerly Networks in Motion) are coming under a lot of pressure. Probably the biggest loser is TomTom, unless it can find a way to make money from its expensive Tele Atlas data in this new world of free maps.

The iWhatever Deadpan Line of the Day

Bloomberg reporter Mary Childs closed another shakily sourced report on the future of the iPhone with the remarkable observation on Apple:

The company plans to introduce a tablet computer later this month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I guess that qualifies maybe 4 billion people in the world to be the source, since we are all intimately familiar with the matter–without actually knowing anything about it.

Actually the sourcing of the rest of the piece, like nearly everything else written about Apple’s plans for anything, was equally suspect. Tim Horan, a telecom analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., was quoted as saying that the iPhone will be available on all major U.S. carriers by the end of this year. And his justification for the claim:

We believe AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity arrangement with Apple will be expiring by mid-2010. For wireless carriers, customers are demanding the device and they need to remain competitive.

The contribution of this to the store of human knowledge is about zero.

Isn’t it about time that all of us stopped parroting the Apple-releated blathering of everyone declaring him- or herself to be an analyst, especially when the latest breathless “news” really makes no claim to be anything more than a guess. All we know is that Apple is announcing something Wednesday and if it isn’t a tablet, their will be a lot of disappointed fanboys, investors, analysts, and reporters. Beyond that, those talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.

Bu the way, while it is possible that  the iPhone will become available to all comers when the AT&T exclusivity expires, it would require a new iPhone model or models. The current iPhone supports GSM and EDGE at 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 Mhz and UMTS/HSPA 3G at 850, 1900, and 2100 Mhz. To support T-Mobile, Apple would have to add 3G at 1700 MHz. Verizon and Sprint would need CDMA 1X and EV-DO at 800 and 1900 MHz, the former for Verizon only. That’s a lot of radios to cram into one little phone.

BlackBerry Goes for the Big Screen (Wildstrom @ nTersect)

BlackBerry Presenter

Both NVIDIA and I felt that the experiment of me writing for their blog at CES went well, so we have agreed that I should try writing a weekly post for their nTersect blog. It will generally go up on thursday afternoons.

My first post takes a look at a product introduced by Research In Motion at CES, the BlackBerry Presenter. It’s a little box that lets you send a PowerPoint presentation over Bluetooth from a BlackBerry smartphone to a standard projector or big-screen monitor. It’s a good idea that suffers from some bad choices in the execution. Read all about it here, and check back for new posts weekly.

Yes, That 1994 Tablet Was Too Good to Be Real

I didn’t think the multimedia newspaper tablet demonstrated by Knight-Ridder in 1994 could have been made with the technology available at the time. And, of course, it turns out that it wasn’t.

After watching and posting about the video, I contacted Roger F. Fidler, who at the time headed the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab and now is director of the digital publishing program at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. In an email, Fidler said:

The tablet you saw in the video was a plastic mockup. The page images shown on the device were taken from a computer program we developed to demonstrate how a multimedia newspaper edition might appear on a future tablet. At the time we were working with Toshiba and Apple Computer to pursue this vision. Unfortunately, development of the display technology required to make a thin, lightweight, low-power and relatively inexpensive tablet took much longer than we expected in 1994.

About 16 years longer, it seems, because the sort of impossible product envisioned in 1994 may now finally be coming to life.

The iWhatever and the Madness of TheStreet.com

I promised myself I was not going to write anything more about whatever it is that Apple will announce next week until they do it. But things are really getting out of control.  TheStreet.com has just published an article by Scott Moritz that may set a record to the number of errors, misconceptions, and wild leaps of faith ever crammed into one short piece.

Under the headline “Exclusive: Apple Tablet Heads to Verizon,” it asserts:

The hotly anticipated Apple Tablet — or the Apple Newton II — will feature a wireless chip made by Qualcomm. This discrete little fact would confirm that Apple has chosen Verizon (VZ Quote) as its telco partner, says Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar.

It doesn’t bother to tell us which Qualcomm chip Apple is allegedly using. We are long past the days when Qualcomm automatically meant CDMA2000. These days Qualcomm makes chips for all sorts of air links and one of its hotter product is Gobi, a radio that supports both EV-DO (CDMA) and HSPA (GSM) 3G technologies.

If true, it validates what TheStreet first reported in July — that Apple and Verizon are working together to sell the new Tablet.

Now we get “if true.” And even if true, it does nothing of the sort. At least not without a whole lot more information.

Moritz has a track record with Apple prognotications. He predicted back in March that a tablet would be an overpriced flop for Apple “which desperately needs a new hit.”  He borrows from that earlier report by describing the to-be-announced tablet as “an in-between device with no keyboard and a $2,000 price tag that includes a data contract.” Earlier in the same piece, he said that the tablet would cost $800 unsubsidized and that Verizon would take the price down by $200 with a two-year, $60 a month contract.

But I have to stop. All this is just giving me a headache.

I Want That 1994 Tablet (and My Hoverboard)

Over at Technologizer, Harry McCracken has unearthed a wonderful 1994 video by something called the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab on the electronic tablet newspaper of the future. It had many of the features being speculated about in the Apple iWhatever expected next week, and the newspaper demo, with its interactive maps and embedded video, bore a striking resemblance to prototypes recently shown by Sports Illustrated and others.

The thing I wonder about is what on earth is the device they demonstrate in the video? They describe it as weighing about two pounds and it looks to be about an inch thick with a screen of about 11″ that is vibrantly colorful in bright sunlight. In other words, something that might have been a mild sensation had it been shown as CES  earlier this month. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that the hot laptop of 1994, the IBM ThinkPad 755c, had an Intel 486 processor, a 10.4″ screen capable of displaying 256 colors, and no built-in networking (this was five years before anyone heard of Wi-Fi).

Was it just some sort of mock-up, brought to life through the wonders of post-production? Of course, we can’t ask the Information Design Lab, because it and Knight-Ridder itself are now dust in the wind.