At this point it’s already the stuff of legend. In geek circles, the Apple Tablet is more coveted, more sought after, and more mysterious than Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the jackalope combined.
One thing that seems increasingly clear is the market has been dancing around the question, “what is the perfect computing form factor between smartphone and full notebook?” for some time. The unexpectedly popular netbook craze is one answer to that. I think Apple’s tablet will be another.
Moreover, I think the Apple Tablet will be disruptive to the still formative eReader and digital publishing industry. Amazon is the current forerunner there, with the popular Kindle taking the lead over earlier player Sony and smaller companies like iRex, FoxIt and Bookeen. They’re already sitting right on top of a pile of published works to distribute, and right now their vertical strategy is almost the only game in town.
But it won’t be for long. And there are some major corners of the publishing industry who haven’t quite chosen sides yet: newspapers and magazines. Some in those camps are flirting with the forthcoming Plastic Logic Reader, and others are poking at the idea of developing their own hardware devices and trying to build their own vertical markets for content.
In other words, the time is right — for Apple to swoop in and steal the show the way they did when the music industry was struggling to find the answers to how to go digital gracefully. Let’s take a look at why an Apple Tablet would not only be a timely device, but could be poised to be a powerful player in the shift to digital publishing.
It Won’t Be a One-Trick Pony
There’s both an upside and a downside to single-function devices. The upside is they do exactly what some sizable niche market wants and they do it better than almost anything else out there. The downside is they appeal to sizable niche markets, and risk being subsumed by multi-function devices sooner or later.
Case in point: your phone. You can’t buy a mobile phone that’s just a phone anymore. Well — you can, but you have to reach for it. Not so long ago MP3 players and portable video players were separate devices — now you’re hard-pressed to find a media player that doesn’t do both… and for that matter, isn’t also a phone.
Portable gaming devices have cameras (so you can send photos to Facebook, of course), still cameras shoot video (as do media players, which could unseat single-function devices like the Flip Mino…), heck — even printers have app stores these days. Steve Jobs even alluded to this himself in a recent interview with David Pogue: “I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
It Will Be in Color
Let’s face it, one of the biggest limitations of e-ink is that displays are currently only monochrome, except for the Fujitsu Flepia that is only being sold (expensively) in Japan. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has gone on record stating that a color Kindle would be “multiple years away” because of the progress (or lack thereof) being made in laboratory prototypes.
Other companies have color e-ink products in the works, but even they don’t see any mass production before the end of next year at the earliest. And even when we get there, e-ink technology faces unmatchable competition from the existing technologies of LCD and OLED in the visual quality afforded by the contrast ratio department. The best a color eReader can hope for currently is about 20 to 1 contrast ratio, with LCD typically measured in the thousands to 1 range and OLED in the tens of thousands to 1.
For all of these reasons, we see every opportunity for someone like Apple to swoop in and upend the digital print content market with an awesome tablet device married to the great content delivery engine it already has with the iTunes Store. And most importantly it won’t be just books — it will be graphic novels and newspapers (with ads!) and slick, glossy magazines (with ads!).
Once you start thinking about all the places a “magazine” can go once it gets on an interactive device with an internet connection, you can imagine publishers starting to find a digital ocean they can finally swim in. One could argue they have that ocean already, but think about how multi-touch on a device you can hold in the hand offers something distinctive from mouse, keyboard and monitor land.
And what is iTunes LP if not a stepping stone to a great multimedia content delivery engine? With iTunes 9, Apple is already selling digital books (warning: iTunes link).
It Will Be Multi-touch
We touched on this already in the last section (pun intended!): the secret’s in the interface. We’ve been trundling along with mouse, keyboard and monitor as the primary computing interface for a dang long time at this point. The tablet PC was at least successful enough to stick around, but it didn’t exactly revolutionize the computing world after the form factor’s introduction in 2001. And only recently did they start supporting Multi-touch input.
To what device do we owe the relatively newfound popularity of multi-touch? That’s right. That one. It turns out that multi-touch is an intuitive way to interact with a lot of different objects, because human beings are so attuned — perhaps even evolved — to using our fingers to perform these kinds of gestures. It feels so natural because it is natural.
Apple has already brought Multi-touch to the trackpad of its MacBook Pro laptop line. The next logical step is to bring that interface to a larger, tablet-style computing device that doesn’t have to be quite as portable as a mobile phone, but will be held in the hands nonetheless.
It Will Be Sexier
Don’t get me wrong, the Kindle isn’t an eyesore or anything. It’s just a bit, shall we say, utilitarian in some respects. There’s markedly more suave in evidence in the Kindle 2 versus the original (see the comparison below with the original Kindle on the left). And yet, it still falls on the geekier side of the spectrum.
One thing that limits the Kindle’s sex appeal? Its keyboard. With the iPhone, Apple has already proven that a digital device doesn’t need to waste lots of screen real estate with all those keys. Of course, there are still those in the hardcore QWERTY camp out there, and we don’t see the physical keyboard disappearing from all computing devices anytime soon.
However, there is one conspicuously suitable form factor for a keyboard-less computer: a tablet. Give it one big juicy screen and a virtual keyboard, take down the Apple Store for a few minutes, and listen for the sound of thousands of early adopters reaching for their wallets. And once those early adopters bring that thing home for the holidays, fuggedaboutit. Everyone will have to have one. And they won’t even entirely know why.
What do you think — Apple Tablet: inevitable fact, or wishful fiction? Will Jobs and company go after the digital publishing market, despite protesting too much? Will you be untempted by an iSlab, or have you already been practicing your credit card quickdraw for the next Apple event?
