Saturday 30 January 2010

second thoughts on the ipad ...

slightly shamefaced about this, but suddenly realised that I'm a content consumer spending around an hour most days reading blogs and online news.

Something like an iPad would of course let me be really sad and do this anywhere within range of our wireless router, making it more like reading newspapers rather than this strange thing I slink off to the study to do, rather as if it was some secret nefarious act.

In effect it socialises the personal consumption of online media. It is easier to pass and share a tablet format screen to one's life companion at breakfast that it is a laptop, that provides a screen to hide behind.

And the device forms part of an ecology, where you use your general purpose computer for writing, you ipod to listen to music or in may case podcasts (spot the talk radio addict), your camera to take pictures, your e-reader for complex documents and recreational reading and the ipad for recreational reading of blogs and online news sources.

And that's the other point - at $500 or so the iPad is not expensive. Given that we pay around $1000 a year for the Canberra Times, the Guardian Weekly, New Scientist and the the weekend Australian, we could buy an ipad and still have $500 left over for content subscriptions.

Maybe Mr Jobs is onto something after all ...

1 comment:

dgm said...

of course, nothing about my use case is unique to the iPad. One could imagine that a similar device from someone else could work just as well. The the joojofor example - save that the project seems in a death spiral ...