The Prayerbook, Reinvented

A Different kind of review of the iPad

The iPad is to technology what the prayerbook is to religion. It may not be the entire bible but it sure does quote it, and includes quite a few original verses as well. Can religion exist without prayerbooks? Absolutely. Is it better off because of them? Many would argue yes. Apple is occasionally viewed as a religion or a cult due to the zealous nature of its fans and its us or nothing approach to its ecosystem. However, you don't have to be a Catholic to appreciate the prayerbook they've created and you may even find something in it for you that you didn't expect.

Most reviews of the iPad all go the same way. It's an amazing piece of technology and engineering but it doesn't do Flash, has no USB ports and is basically a large iPod touch. They might spend time telling you that it has an Apple branded A4 processor and has 512 Megs of RAM. You may then, as others have, compare it to a computer you own and say that you'd never buy the iPad because 512 Megs of RAM isn't enough to do the things you do with a computer. I admit, I first thought back to my old IBM Thinkpad 600e with a 400 Meg PII and 512 megs of RAM from 1998 when I heard the specs. The hardest thing for technical people to do in this day and age is separate the specs from the actual experience.

For the past twenty-five years or so, we have used specs of this nature to define the computing experience. I personally remember when we made the switch from measuring processor speed from MHz to GHz. It meant we were going to enter a new age of computing performance. Everything is going to run lightning fast and we will have as many programs as we want up at once. But something rather interesting occurred. We realized that most of the things we did on the computer didn't change at all. Word processing, web browsing, IM didn't appear to run any faster and we stopped caring that it could run more apps at once because we already had the six or so ones we cared about open.

Then came the evolution of the display. Displays started to become much larger and resolutions became much greater. We noticed this, cause we could now see two documents on the screen, side by side. Aspect ratios changed from 4:3 to 16:9. But again, the experience remained static.

You simply can't compare the experience of using the iPad to other computers you've used before. You might then say, it uses the iPhone OS and I've used an iPhone before so it's the same thing except larger. This too is simply untrue. Perhaps my favorite, are the talking heads who state, never having used the device mind you, that while the device may be good at consuming content, it's terrible at creating it. We will deal with that one a bit later. Now that we've mentioned the common fallacies, what makes the iPad different? Why should I care? To get to the root of what makes the iPad a game changer, we have to start with the word I.

The iPad is a deeply personal experience. It is easily tailored to your needs and desires. Despite what people say about all the apps and the iWork suite, the iPad will be defined by what you decide to do with it. Yes, it is an ebook reader and an iPod and a word processor. However, like the preverbal tree in the woods, if you don't set it up that way, no one will hear it. In the end, it is very much like a computer in this regard.

Going back to the specs for a moment, the one stat that certainly matters is the battery life. Apple rated it at ten hours. I used my iPad nonstop for almost fourteen hours and still, had twenty-two percent left. You will easily be able to get a few real days of use out of it on a single change. A quick note on speed. Despite the specs mentioned earlier, the iPad is lightning fast. It performs all tasks with ease and never feels "bogged down" as computers sometimes feel. The other big knock is on multitasking. This unfortunately is rather true to an extent. You can have email fetching and music playing while performing any other task. In fact I have Bon Jovi blaring as I write this. However it would be nice to have IM running in the background while doing something different or streaming music while reading a magazine.

One minor issue with the word processor. There is no tab button on the keyboard. You need to turn the iPad vertically and pull tab out of a menu. It is surprisingly annoying. This issue can be mitigated with any Bluetooth keyboard. In general there are good work arounds for most issues and the issues it has can all be addressed later with software updates.

Almost ten years ago when wifi was becoming available to the general public, I boldly predicted that computers were going to be moving away from self contained modules and would become thin clients. This has basically come true. Our content is now stored in the "cloud" and we can now access it from multiple devices from anywhere. The iPad isn't the first device to do this but is the first device to take on the traditional PC. To address the content creation issue, this entire review was written on the iPad's virtual keyboard at roughly the same pace as a normal one. There are also apps that mimic a piano or give you an entire sketchbook. One last thing, the iPad can actually be used as a prayerbook and it may surprise you to learn that the most popular type of app in the store continues to be the Bible.

-Lance Murdock