Photo Illustration by Steel Brooks and Justin Franz

Is the iPad a window into the future of personal computing?

by Cameron Rasmussen

After testing an iPad demo unit at the device’s unveiling, Stephen Fry, tech enthusiast and dry wit extraordinaire, wrote a gushing, 2,000-word endorsement “I cannot emphasize this enough: Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it,” he wrote. “No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects.”

Web denizens, hustling to their favorite forums and blogs, quickly divided. Many responded in sprawling variations of “Not impressed.” Others interpreted the unveiling as nothing less than an Orwellian nightmare, with Apple’s tightly administrated operating system stomping all over the individualism embodied in more open user platforms. A final division supported Apple with statements ranging from cautious optimism to near-religious fervor.

So is the iPad magical or mortally flawed? Where does the hype meet the information superhighway?

If there were a hype chip, Apple seems to have over-clocked it on the iPad. Rumors of an Apple tablet hit the Internet about a year ago, and visions of Minority Report danced in gadget geek heads.

The 2002 Steven Spielberg film portrayed near-future technology as slick, touch-based computer interfaces and entertainment devices that constantly uploaded new, relevant information. Gadget geeks watched drooling in darkened theaters and bemoaned its phantom fictionality.

But this was it, the rumor mill churned. This was the must-have tech that would lead humanity into a world of stylish control and interactive media. Here was the device that could cause trouble for an on-the-lam Tom Cruise, thanks to its unparalleled connectivity and instantaneous updates.

On January 27, Steve Jobs unveiled the device with the nerdy sureness that made him rich and famous. He dropped buzz-phrases like “it just works” and repeatedly referenced the device’s smooth, seamless operation.

True to form, the Internet exploded, with predictions and apps caroming around cyberspace up to Apple’s release of the iPad on April 3.

Fan-boy Fry was right: Before you can fully evaluate the iPad, you need to take it for a spin. The device is seductive in its presentation. The user zips effortlessly from one task to another with no lag whatsoever. Every application preloaded onto the shiny device features a spit and polish that clumsier companies can only envy. The e-book reader spins open with slick panache.

Most importantly, interaction within the device is nearly flawless. The touch screen is perhaps the most accurate and responsive on the market. A first-timer interacting with the device will, no doubt, find it far more intuitive and painless than one’s first experience wielding a mouse and keyboard.

Apple seems to be aiming for the light computing market with the iPad — a niche previously dominated by netbooks. To that end, it has succeeded. Media consumption on the device is a fun, polished experience. Internet browsing — convenient yet cumbersome on a smartphone — matches a PC for ease of use. Games benefit from the larger screen, but without buttons, generally veer toward simplicity. While short e-mails, notes and messages are no problem, more extensive word processing on the touch keyboard is best avoided. Even today’s best touch technology can’t match the tactile, speedy experience of a physical keyboard.

Tech heads have justifiable complaints. The iPad’s specs don’t send data-crunchers into a tizzy, or, for that matter, even raise heart rates. But the device’s horsepower is certainly sufficient to run any current app with snappy responsiveness, and only the most technically demanding could take issue with the 1 GHz Apple A4 processor.

The overall specifications, however, provoke big complaint No. 1: “It’s just a blown-up iPod Touch.”

The similarities are startling. The minimalist form factor, the operating system and the prominent screen all scream iPod Touch with scary intensity.

The difference between the products is, of course, size, size, size. No one wants to read “The Great Gatsby” on an iPhone. The cinematography of “Lawrence of Arabia” is probably not best appreciated on a 3-inch screen. The New York Times’ front page requires a lot of annoying scrolling to properly navigate with such meager screen real estate. In this respect, the iPad has positioned itself in competition with the netbook and e-reader arenas.

Once again, however, the iPod Touch similarities come roaring back with even worse implications. The lack of multitasking, for instance, returns in all its frustrating prominence. In part, this keeps the device purring along at a brisk speed, but with the reliable performance come limitations. An iPad user, for example, can’t listen to the Pandora Internet Radio app and write an e-mail at the same time. To the company’s credit, Apple has addressed the issue with the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0, a firmware update featuring limited multitasking. Even so, the update won’t be made available until the fall.

Another oft-cited criticism is the iPad’s lack of Flash support, but many counter-arguers say Flash is on its way out. The next iteration of HTML(5) will natively support embedded video. Even so, the critic responds, Flash retains a prominent place in today’s Internet, and for a device as ambitious as the iPad, shouldn’t we be judging it on its immediate merits?

These issues, along with the lack of a physical keyboard, limit the iPad in comparison to a netbook. But for e-readers? The iPad has the potential to single-handedly obliterate the e-reader market. The 9.7-inch screen looks nice. Not only is text a pleasure to read on the screen, but the richness of the display suddenly makes image-intensive publications, like comics, graphic novels and cookbooks, electronically viable.

Apple’s competition, however, isn’t about to let it gobble up potential new markets. Google has already made significant headway in challenging Apple’s smart-phone dominance with its Android operating system. Microsoft also resurrected its mobile division with the unveiling of Windows Phone 7. The new operating system completely gutted its archaic Windows Mobile 6 series with impressive results.

The market is gearing up for a corporate fight and consumers are picking sides. Technophiles have divided over one principle issue: the administration of applications.

Apple offers a tightly controlled user experience, the so-called “walled garden.” The only way to add functionality to its devices, outside of hacking the software, is through its famous App Store featuring more than 100,000 apps. Apple monitors and approves every app that graces its store. If it finds that an app is in poor taste (Baby Shaker) or offers functionality it doesn’t like (Netshare, which allowed iPhone users to piggyback their laptop onto their phone’s 3G Internet connection) or aids the competition (Google Voice), Apple will ban the app.

Geeks hailed Google as the savior of techno-tinkerers everywhere. Android was completely open source, allowing the savvy to fiddle to their heart’s content. Google opened its own app store. At 10,000 apps and counting, it’s a fraction of the size but has the capacity to grow. Android also allows users to add apps downloaded from the Internet, effectively neutralizing any corporate control over device functionality.

All this hand-wringing over apps is tied to the iPad’s future. After all, it’s not the miraculous tech that will make the tablet a success. It’s the diversity of functionality brought about through the App Store. Not only does the device support existing apps, but new apps specifically for the iPad are already appearing. Netflix has made its peerless library of streaming TV and movies available for the device. Popular newspapers and magazines are releasing apps that transform their print iterations into polished multimedia experiences on the iPad. Utility websites like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com are optimized for the large touch screen interface. While most digital artists are loathe to abandon Adobe Illustrator, pen and digitizers, powerful art apps, are nevertheless available on the iPad. The iDisplay app even allows the device to double as a second monitor for an iMac.

But Apple’s biggest trump card is its stock with the masses. Despite pseudo-hipster affectations, Apple has become, in essence, a populist company. Its products are simple, streamlined and easily understandable to all but the most computer illiterate.

“With the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of ‘that’s too complicated for my mom,’” wrote Cory Doctorow of the technology site Boing Boing.

None of this matters. The iPad almost certainly will be successful, and it’s off to a promising start with 300,000 sold on launch day and more than a million sold (including the 3G version) before MJR went to press. Perhaps it won’t become as omnipresent as the iPod — at least not within the lifetime of its first hardware version — but it will sell splendidly. Will it change the course of the technological future? Will future offices and schools be equipped with touch interfaces rather than the modern mouse-and-keyboard set up?

“One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object,” Fry wrote in Time Magazine after the iPad’s debut. “Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide humankind has yet devised.”

It’s too early to allow the iPad such legendary technological status. But it could well be a 9.7-inch window into the future of personal computing. Right now, we don’t know the extent that consumers will embrace Steve Job’s technological valentine, and even if it exceeds expectations, it probably won’t transform the market within its first generation. Once it expands beyond the limits of its current hardware and operating system, however, the iPad could well put a new face on mobile computing.