With the iPad well on its way to the 3millionth sale, its worth reflecting at this early stage, where we may be in a few years time as a result of this device. The iPhone made the smart-phone, beautiful, personal, introduced apps to the world, pushed the mobile browsing boundaries and has since prompted competitors to follow suit, or try and excel with Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android all stepping up to the challenge to protect their market shares. So now the device has finally arrived and proved its popularity globally, what next ? what will change ? … who knows but the following look to get interesting over the coming months and in some cases years.
Books & Publishing
iBooks on the iPad, right from the go has a better UI and a store, Kindle like sending you to a browser to purchase a new book where as iBooks has the store built into the app. Both the Kindle and iPad will be pushing the frontier on E-Readers, but the iPad may go further than most. Although as an E-Reader, its performance in terms of battery, rendering and text quality is lacking slightly, the iPad offers publishers colour, video and Audio. Furthermore, you don’t have to release a publication as an item on the book store, you can create your own app and set up in-app purchases. The wired magazine app is a brilliant example of what’s possible ( for now lets forget its poorly coded and takes up 500mb ) and publishers will seriously look at developing digital editions of their books or scrapping paper in some cases. Libraries may no longer exist in a decades time, who knows, but the possibilities are endless and the iPad may have just given the publishing industry something to run with.
Gaming
The iPhone grew from 1% of the gaming market share to 19% in just 3 years. That doesn’t take into account 2010 figures and also doesn’t take into account the 2million plus iPads just sold in the last month. With a bigger screen, a little more processing power and more space to use the UI, games will no doubt be a big feature on the iPad, further eating into the market shares of Sony and Nintendo. Board games are already on the store and a personal favourite of mine, Real Racing HD. If you’ve had the chance to play it, you’ll understand why games like this could further shake up the market.
Real Racing HD on the iPad
Internet browsing
I have to start by voicing my slight frustration of Safari on the iPad. Its a little slow rendering and in some scenarios, you kinda want to pull out the mouse and click links. However, that said, designer and developers are thinking about this and we’ve already started seeing sites optimised for the iPad, and who knows, maybe Mozilla and Opera can follow up on their iPhone offering with iPad versions of their browsers. With some sites pushing for innovation and others making sure HTML5 is up and working, the device could push for a few paradigm shifts in web browsing.
Reuters optimised for iPad
Cloud Computing
I could be pushing this theory too far but here we go anyway. Last week, I used my iPad daily, at work and at home and quickly realised that my laptop wasn’t get much usage, so I left it at home and just used the iPad. It served me well and catered to 70% of my usual usage. Ok it couldn’t run photoshop or COD6 (not yet) but it did pretty much everything else and apart from it seriously lacking multitasking (due in iPhone OS4) , I enjoyed using its.So for 70% of tasks it was fine. The other 30 % ? well we’ve just been talking about games and yes you will still need a decent desktop or laptop to run COD but for software like excell and word, apps have stepped in to offer this. Apps like evernote , spotify have all replaced the desktop equivalents. Running a goo share of these kind of programs on the cloud and developing apps may be a viable way of making them portable with the user, whilst opening up a new market for software companies and push cloud computing further.
That’s it, if I’ve missed anything or just called it entirely wrong, let me know with comments below.
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