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  • The Causes of iPad Disappointment



    Letdown. Disappointment. Anticlimax. These words have appeared in nearly all the first articles written about the newly unveiled Apple iPad, barely a day old in the world. The reasons are not entirely important in the long run, but many of these stories themselves will admit that expectations were raised beyond reasonable levels, that Apple had no hope of impressing everyone the way they did in 2007 with the first iPhone. This environment of fanciful conjecture and presumptuous theorizing was the result of an industry’s decade-long fascination with getting the idea of a tablet computer to stick – seemingly against the wishes of the consumers meant to buy them – and the belief that Apple can succeed where other companies embarrass themselves. They’ve done it before, after all.

    It never helps that Apple says very little about what it’s got until it’s got it. The veil of secrecy provides theatrical levels of entertainment at every event; charged affairs where people whoop and whistle from the moment Jobs takes the stage. As press conferences go, they overdeliver. But on the eve of events as the iPad’s debut, such enthusiasm cuts both ways, and the company is left with the unenviable task of managing expectations without any direct communication – a task that has become increasingly hard over the past few years.

    In the beginning, Macs were a relatively quiet business; high profile products that most people saw but never considered owning. The success of the iPod energized Apple’s public image, and eventually sensational moves like the decision to cancel its hottest product, the iPod mini, in favor of an impossibly innovative new replacement, raised the bar not only for its hapless competitors, but for the company itself. Even then, the shifts from small to smaller iPods with color screens where black and white displays were once standard, were no indication of the iPhone’s shape or form before January 2007. That device’s unprecedented introduction, so many orders of magnitude beyond what had been expected of Apple (a phone that played music, and that wasn’t as ugly or challenged as the Motorola ROKR, would have sufficed for many), changed the pre-event guessing game forever. Do one magic trick, and you’re always going to be asked for more.

    Consider that at the time of the iPhone’s release, touchscreens were not a new technology. Palm’s PDAs and countless phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system had touchscreens for years, and were fairly well liked. Yet as the tech world watched Steve Jobs scroll a contact list with a flick of his finger, it was impossible to make the connection between that and the experience we had become accustomed to. The older technology, resistive touchscreens, required styluses or fingernails, with scrolling conducted with bars that were clicked and dragged. A series of small innovations (capacitive touchscreens, direct contact momentum scrolling, and a smoothly-animated graphical interface) combined to redefine the way we expect to interact with handheld computers today. It’s a classic Apple play: refine existing technologies, add advancements in software, and produce an entirely new class of product.

    Given the rise of ebook readers like the Kindle, and the continuing efforts of PC makers to fashion smaller and cheaper computers from low-power CPUs like Intel’s Atom, it was only natural to think that Apple would soon do the same for the popular netbook category or a tablet*. It would be another game changer equal to or greater than the iPhone, we began to hear. In the days leading up to January 27, a quote attributed to Steve Jobs was circulated, to the effect that the tablet would become his greatest achievement. John Gruber of the Daring Fireball blog predicted that Apple was ‘swinging big’ with a new product that one would buy instead of a laptop. Others dreamt of new multi-touch interfaces that would further bury Microsoft’s second stab at tablet computer, shown to be an HP “slate” running Windows 7 without any modifications that might make operation with a finger possible in lieu of a mouse. In all fairness, many of these outsized rumors were based on the presumption that the tablet would cost up to USD$1000. What could possibly cost that much, close to a full computer, except a full computer? It would be ironic if the thousand-dollar figure was leaked by Apple to increase the impact of the final $499 price point, only to backfire by raising expectations.

    These pre-announcement assumptions by enthusiasts and tech writers are now par for the course, as are the disappointments that follow each new product revelation. The iPhone 3G largely met expectations because it corrected the one deficiency that kept the original iPhone from greatness**: the speed at which it accessed the internet. It also coincided with the opening of the platform with the iPhone SDK, which led to the app-happy state of affairs we now enjoy. Regardless, complaints about the low resolution camera, unremovable battery, etc. continued to get a public airing.

    Last year’s iPhone 3GS was roundly criticized for being an unexciting upgrade, retaining the same looks as its predecessor with little more than a megapixel and speed bump, effectively delivering the previous year’s expected iPhone but late. It went on to become a huge success. The buying public is immune to disappointment, it seems, perhaps because they don’t read blogs that sell them pipe dreams.

    The iPhone 3GS announcement, and the internet’s lukewarm reactions to it, would be a good analogy for what’s happening with the iPad, except nobody hoped for the next iPhone to summarize a decade of engineering efforts. Like the iPhone 3GS, the iPad initially appears to be an evolutionary product, being based on existing technology Apple has repeatedly shown in public. It’s faster and more powerful, but not radically different from known territory. At first sight, it’s hard to imagine what the changes mean in actual use. You might think you can live with the old model and how things used to be. That’s a shame.

    Apple is positioning the iPad as a third pillar in their portable product lineup: more than a smartphone, less than a laptop, yet better at some things than either of the other two. This instantly invalidates the idea of buying one “instead of a laptop”. Clearly you are meant to have both. It syncs with a Mac or PC the same way an iPhone or iPod does. It’s a secondary computer, but it’s also an appliance (see Farhad Manjoo’s articles on Slate.com – here and here).

    It sends email, it plays games, and it will be fantastic for Twitter, but in my opinion, the iPad in its current form holds the most value as an interactive document, or to use a term repeated many times last night, an ‘intimate’ way of experiencing media. Despite having no plans to purchase a Kindle DX or similar reader I suspect that I will fall in love with the thing the moment I hold a book-sized slice of full-color webpage in my hands. As Manjoo writes, “Everything about it—its size, shape, weight, and fantastically intuitive user interface—feels just right.”

    With the first iPhone, Apple understood that touch interfaces are an emotional experience. Pressing the pad of your finger to a virtual page (in Eucalyptus, for example) and turning it fools some part of the brain that isn’t dedicated to understanding a screen is not the same thing as paper. It’s satisfying, even though a facsimile of a real experience. It’s more realistic than using a fingernail, which one never applies to a real page, and more personal than a stylus. My guess is that if capacitive touch of that quality wasn’t available, the iPhone project would never have gotten the green light.

    I submit that the iPad takes one more step towards solidifying the illusion of digital media with real, physical presence. It’s not just a bigger iPhone, it’s an iPhone big enough to pass for a printed page and fool your mind. A frame that holds websites with long-form writing, augmented with video and animation, that we can hold lazily, effortlessly, in our hands or laps like the glossy magazines or newspapers they approximate, is nothing short of magical, to borrow another marketing word. If the iPad became transparent like a slab of glass when turned off, wouldn’t be exactly like the science fiction movie ideal of a portable computer? Don’t you want to live in the future? I say use your imagination.

    —

    And yet more frustration sprang from the absence of anticipated features, some of which are explained by the iPad’s positioning as a third pillar, while others invite more guesswork and predictions. Q. Why doesn’t it have a camera? A. It’s not for photography, and videoconferencing is the realm of a phone. Q. Why doesn’t it have USB ports/connect to an iPhone for syncing and tethering? A. It’s not a primary computer. Q. Where’s the multitasking and improved notifications? A. iPhone 4.0?

    I believed that an update to the current iPhone OS, version 3.2, would be announced during yesterday’s event, which didn’t happen. As we know, the iPad runs a version of the OS with this number, but for the next 60 days it’s not something you can buy. That gives a 60-day window to expect iPhone OS 3.2 to be released for existing iPhone users. Will this bring some of the iPad’s new features to the iPhone, like the iBooks reader and iBookstore? My guess is no. These will remain exclusive iPad features for the time-being. In that case, iPhone OS 3.2 might only bring a few bugfixes and trivial UI enhancements. I believe Apple is already looking ahead to iPhone OS 4.0, to be announced in the March-May window, and released in concert with the next iPhone model. Improved notifications are a must, and I’m fairly confident they will be present.

    The other concern, third-party app multitasking, is far and away the number one demanded feature for the iPhone OS amongst people I know, but I’m becoming ever more skeptical that it will materialize. Apple has invested heavily in push notifications as an alternative, too much for it to be merely a stopgap measure. With the iPad, which Apple is attempting to push as a viable machine for occasional work (more than a smartphone, less than a laptop), the lack of multitasking is even more apparent. If I’m writing a document in Pages and need to move back and forth quickly between a website, email, and a notes app from which I might want to copy information, iPhone OS 3.x requires me to switch in and out of the Home Screen each time, closing and reopening the apps.

    The non-multitasking answer? Persistence and a quick launcher. iPhone OS 4.0 could enable a system-wide method for saving an app’s state (what you’re doing in it) when you quit, and having it restore upon the next launch. And according to Gruber, everyone who’s laid hands on it agrees the iPad and its new A4 processor are incredibly fast. Add that combination to a home button double-click that pops up a list of your last five apps, and you’re effectively alt-tabbing between running applications without the battery drain.

    iPhone OS 4.0 will be a big deal when announced, whatever it actually does, and Apple understandably couldn’t show its features yesterday as part of the iPad. But because they share the same OS, it stands to reason that whatever the iPhone gains from here on out will also be on the iPad. Being that the iPhone is incredibly important to Apple and already accounts for 32% of smartphone profits worldwide while receiving rapid software development both from within the company and out, it’s inevitable that the iPad’s image will soon evolve beyond that of an underwhelming giant iPod touch.

    ~

    * Legend has it that research for a “Safari Pad” tablet wound up becoming the basis of the iPhone, so it’s possible that the universe is completely backward.

    ** It’s worth noting that the original iPhone was also criticized for its camera, built-in battery, price, and not supporting third-party applications, Java, Microsoft Exchange, MMS, copy and paste, etc. despite being ridiculously ahead of the pack in terms of miniaturization, engineering, web browsing, media playback, and user experience. After three years, competitors have yet to match the software or browsing. Someday, the iPad’s reception will probably be remembered in a similar way.

  • The Colonial Bar

    That much of the building’s history has been recorded and can be found online without too much trouble. I’m trying to assemble a better picture, mostly from anecdotal information offered by the neighborhood’s older residents, who’ve stopped by to check out the newly-revived icon, as told to the bar’s current staff. My assumption is that the Colonial’s current claim of being “established in 1924” is accurate, as it must have existed in some form to serve patrons such as the governor. Whether or not it continued to operate up until the Japanese Occupation of World War II is uncertain.
    During the occupation, I am told the Ellison Building was commandeered by the Japanese army for use as one of their headquarters, which would make sense, given the proximity of the place to the Jalan Besar Stadium where the infamous “Sook Ching” screenings and executions took place. My knowledge of this period in history is regrettably weak, not having been fortunate enough to watch any of Channel 8’s many Chinese drama serials set during the war (2). In any case, I recommend reading the aforelinked article. As many as 100,000 people are said to have been killed by the Japanese in a matter of weeks, with one source claiming 30 million victims throughout Asia.
    When asked to confirm whether the Ellison was indeed a Japanese army HQ, my grandmother replied: “We were too busy hiding and trying to survive then to pay a visit to the Japanese headquarters.” In my opinion, there was no need for the sarcasm; I did ask nicely.
    At some point after the war, the Colonial was resurrected and was known to have been in business at least between the “60s and 80s”, according to the current manager. I can attest to not having seen the bar during any of the years where I shuttled up and down Bukit Timah on my way to Sim Lim Square, which is to say all of the last decade. If it was, it stayed hidden behind the signage for an Indian eatery and a second-storey roach motel for backpackers. This post-war period is where most of my questions about the Colonial are concerned. Does anyone remember it? Under what circumstances did it close? On October 24 2009, the newest version was unveiled with little fanfare, incongruously positioned between a decaying Indian newsagent and a tactical military equipment supply store. Diagonally across the street, another remodeled local icon, Tekka Centre, is now a floundering mall called The Verge.
    ~
    The first thing one notices is the snazzy, illustrated logo of a helmeted British army man on the signboard and on posters throughout the premises. These materials have obviously been designed with some care and effort, although they are not at the level of say, Leo Burnett’s work for the Ya Kun Kaya company (3). Several large LCD television screens display a mix of live sports and insipid cable fare such as Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, while the music is the kind of radio-derived playlist one might expect to find Jason Mraz and Norah Jones on. Volume levels are conversation friendly.
    Few colonial touches are present in the decor scheme, if you count the black and white floor tiles arranged in a loose checkered pattern, but for the most part it’s comtemporary with strange design contradictions. The black bar counter is sleek and frames a liquor shelf dramatically lit from above, but other furnishings are on the cheap side. There’s a pool table, foosball table, and touchscreen games machine in an adjacent wing, which is what you’d expect in an above-average pub, but the roof doesn’t fully extend to cover this section. You actually see trees and the sky above, while an intact original spiral staircase winds its way through like some ancient tree embraced by a hippie boutique hotel built around it. No doubt, the place has a charm of its own, but it’s raw while trying not to be. I sense the hand of a younger entrepreneur behind all this, which leads to interesting questions like, “Why bring this bar back?”, “What’s their connection to the Ellison?”, and “Ellen DeGeneres? Really?”
    But we could sit here all day talking about aesthetic details and whether or not the specter of colonial rule makes this an appropriate place for a foreign man to be seen with a local woman, or we could talk about how absolutely cheap the booze is. My friends, it is CHEAP. When I first wandered in a week ago, Happy Hour (till 8pm) prices were an incredible $15 for two jugs of Tiger beer. That’s draught beer, and yes, one jug (four glasses worth) for $7.50. They can’t keep this up, I screamed aloud, they’d be crazy to sell drinks at these prices! And so when I returned today I found that they’re not crazy, just a little unsound. The new Happy Hour deal is a single jug for $11, which is still cheaper than any hawker center or kopitiam I can think of. For context, that’s less than the cost of a pint in most bars where you’ll find white people drinking today. Colonialism is dead, long live the Colonial!
    —-
    (1) According to a 2007 article at JewishExponent.com, and the Singapore Tourism Board’s Little India website.
    (2) I hear The Little Nyonya is a good example, if one were so inclined.
    (3) Full disclosure, one of my former bosses worked on them.
    —-


    —
    Edit 8/2/2010: This is Google Street View’s photo of the corner before The Colonial:

    —-

  • Eleven Finger (Eu Kee) Scissors Curry Rice

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  • Hipstamatic – a new iPhone toycamera app

    I was going to write about this on PositiveMachine.com, but decided to contribute a properly useful review to the iTunes store instead. I am republishing it here for those not using the Singaporean App Store, in the hopes that it brings some attention to this rather exciting new camera app. My one sore point: it is sooo very close in execution to an iPhone app I wanted to have built earlier this year. A different concept, but maybe someday I’ll convince the guys at Synthetic Corp to take it up.

    —-

    Hipstamatic

    I discovered this app by accident whilst absentmindedly searching for the keyword “Holga”. The preview screenshots in iTunes don’t do it justice.

    It’s also the first camera application I’ve seen with in-app purchasing, which made me quite wary of this being something I might become tempted to sink a lot of money into, unnecessarily, over time. Everyone else gives free updates with more features, why should this be any different? The answer might be that the app itself is very different. It features a polished user experience that almost puts a real, no-longer-in-production camera in your hands, and the quality of its image processing is superb – some of the best I’ve ever seen on the iPhone. Its creators no doubt know that photography geeks are more than a little bit vulnerable to buying new equipment for a camera they love, and in-app purchasing is a brilliant way to exploit that. What’s 99c for a new lens, 3 colored gel flashes, and a new black border on all your pictures? If only things were so cheap in the real world with Lomography and Superheadz products.

    But freshly installed, one can get some brilliant results out of the two included “lenses” (film choice only affects the borders/frames, except in the case of the single B&W option available in one of the in-app purchase packs), but I’m willing to bet you’ll be so impressed with the whole experience that you’ll pick up one of the extra add-ons within a day. So budget for the price of the app (currently at $1.99, a so-called introductory price) plus 2 x $0.99.

    More than any other photography app out there – and I have bought more of them than I’d have liked – this one gives you the feeling of owning a whole new camera. The UI design is a big part of this. You constantly see the front and back of the camera as you change settings and take photos. You have a tiny and inaccurate preview of your shot where the viewfinder is supposed to be. You don’t change the look of your photos by moving sliders or pressing radio buttons, you swap in visual representations of “films”, “lenses”, and “flashes”. Sure, it’s little different from any other photo app under the surface, except the results are up there with the best of them, but that surface gloss makes you forget Hipstamatic is taking shots through your iPhone’s camera. And the results back that up. Night shots taken with the “Jimmy” lens and the fake flash are soaked through with warm light, almost devoid of speckled color noise. It’s the kind of result you’d expect from a film camera that left its shutter open until the film was fully exposed. Marvelously rich and much more analog than you’d have thought was possible from an iPhone.

    Moreover, like ShakeItPhoto before the last update, Hipstamatic doesn’t give you the option of processing photos you’ve already taken with some other app or the built-in camera module. I wouldn’t like to see this behavior in every app, but it makes perfect sense here and really sells the illusion of a unique toy camera with risks involved. You don’t get a safety shot, you just get the one you take, which makes every shot somewhat precious. It also gives you a bit of a heart attack when you’ve captured something you think might be great, and then the app crashes. It does this quite a lot when saving at the highest resolution of 1050 x 1050px, even on my freshly-rebooted iPhone 3GS. I’m hoping the next update brings more stability, but even so, this fully deserves a five-star rating today.

  • On taking holiday photos

    Back from Japan and already making plans to learn the language and move over. Only half-kidding. I don’t think I could take the grind of commuting to a crushing office job every day, even with the weekend salve of maid cafes and pachinko. It’d have to be a work from your tiny home sorta job.

    Since I left talking about cameras, I’ll come back to the subject. The Sony WX1 held up really well and I took more photos with it than with the Panasonic Lumix LX3. Having it just two seconds away in my pocket at any time made all the difference. I think it’s my new favorite camera for casual street use. It struggled under tricky lighting conditions though, and couldn’t really handle park/nature scenes with shadows and subtlety. Comparing it with such shots from the LX3 really shows up its weaknesses.

    I usually have a two camera limit, but the iPhone’s camera complicates things, and I bought a Digital Harinezumi 2 from the Superheadz Camera Cabaret store in Shibuya (truly fantastic little place – here are some directions: Go north from the Tokyu Hands store, and it’s just across the street from the Ward Office (and the Shibuya Tobu Hotel). You’ll find it up a little road on the right leading towards the two Beams boutiques. The store itself is on the right, before you reach Beams, after the popular ramen shop with the logo that looks like the number 9 in Chinese. [九]) In all, I took about 2,200 photos with four cameras.

    Editing these poses many problems, as you might imagine. My approach now is just to shoot the hell out of everything. Multiple shots with different exposure settings, use the widest angles and the longest zooms, a few safety shots if people get in the way, and sometimes if a place feels interesting, just take a few shots in case I find something later in them to crop to. Sometimes along the way I’ll delete a few hopeless ones from the camera, but there isn’t always time. But when I get home, paralysis sets in. I can’t remember why I took a particular photo. Or I’m afraid to cut out too much of it. I try to reverse-engineer my intentions from the composition. Why is this shot this way, why is that the subject? I don’t dare to delete anything once home because every photo is an artifact of a place I cannot soon revisit, and must be preserved. I forget that sometimes I didn’t know what I was doing.

    I think the answer is to treat holiday photography like a two-stage process. It’s not just shooting and cleanup. Postprocessing is like shooting the photos all over again, with possibly different intentions. You have to go into it ready to make the effort. When you’re walking all the time and can’t afford to stop and study the angles and plan the perfect shot that will represent the atmosphere of a place, you just have to shoot everything and do the best you can in 30 seconds. Once back, you have to start over with new eyes and not work backwards.

    One obstacle to this is always your own memory. It colors everything and makes unimportant, uninteresting things seem worth sharing. Ideally, I’d only post about a hundred photos from the two thousand shot, but right now I’d be happy to come in under 600. I suppose a second round of culling the best into another Flickr set can happen later. I’m quite certain other people have the same problem, especially teenagers, as evidenced by most Facebook photo albums. Most casual photographers post everything, similar shots and bad shots along with their best. Completionists and hoarders have it worst, and I know I’m a little bit of both.

    Anyway I’ll post a link to the full photoset here when I’m done. At the moment I’m uploading as I go along, but might make some more of the poorer choices private as I go.

    — Posted from my iPhone

  • Going to Japan

    Leaving for Japan tomorrow with a couple of friends. It’s a trip we’ve talked about for the last two years but never got around to actually booking until now. Long-time readers will remember that I set up a wiki on this domain back in 2007 for notes on things to see/eat in Tokyo. I think we cancelled for a number of reasons, one of them probably being that I’d just left my job and wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Coincidentally, one of us going on this trip has just quit his. Some people like to go on long, liberating holidays after quitting. I’m far too conservative with money for that. Oh did I mention that I’ve just bought a new camera for this trip?

    I really didn’t need it, because I’ve still got my Panasonic Lumix LX3, which is by far the best non-SLR digital camera I’ve ever owned, apart from being a bit of a fatty. The Sony WX1, on the other hand, is as small as my Canon IXUS 80, but with a 24mm wide-angle lens and low-light performance that beats the rather noisy LX3. The only way around color noise on the LX3 is to shoot no higher than 400 ISO, but you’ll need steady hands for that. Sadly, the WX1 only offers 4:3 shooting; the other aspect ratios are just crops. But once you see how clean its handheld night shots are, you’ll want one too.

    I just thought I’d put that out there in case anyone was thinking of buying the same. It’s a good pocket companion to a more prosumer camera like the Canon G11, S90 or Panasonic LX3. It’s lack of manual controls will keep you from using it exclusively, while small and fast enough to rely on when the other one’s at home/in the bag. I swore off Sony cameras a couple of years ago because they were a bit of a pain to use and had poor outdoor white balance with our local lighting conditions. But this one is an easy recommendation so far (as long as you turn the Dynamic Range Optimization function off).

    This is a photo of what I had at lunch today, virtually untouched from the camera.

    Roast pork belly

    I should have more when I get back in two weeks. Mata ne.