Disruptive Proactivity

I wandered along to the apple store before work on Friday, queued for half an hour, and wandered out with a 32Gb 3G iPad. 3G because, while I’m often near wifi, I’m away from it often enough that not having it is likely to be an issue at the time that it’s most useful. Orange do a no-contract pay-per-use SIM with £10 of free credit. So far, I’ve used none of it.

It took a few hours to get chance to open the box, and then I left it syncing while I went for lunch. It was still going when I got back, because the “re-encode high-bitrate songs to 128K” button was ticked, and hence it was reencoding about 1800 songs. Very, very slowly. Unticking it, and it went fast. The lovely thing about the iPad, as an iPhone owner, is that it picks up almost all the settings from my iPhone, if you tell it to use your iPhone config as the initial thing to restore from. Some of them are different enough that it does what it thinks is sensible, and you can tweak it later. Some you’ll prefer to change yourself.

Which is possibly the main summary of the iPad. I took a while to realise that there’s a new type of device on my desk, and that it conceptually sits in between my phone and my laptop, and I need to reconsider what I use them all for in order to get them to work for me the most useful way.

Initially, the biggest winner is probably Apple (again), as it’s now far more helpful for a mobileMe membership than previously (I currently have a trial). Docking my iphone is second nature; but docking two devices will be a pain, absent two docks at both home and work. Similarly, iDisk will be useful; although I tend to keep lots of documents in my email and pull them up on my phone in meetings when they’re needed for reference. I wonder how that’ll change. Apple have one well that if you sync both your iPad and iPhone simultaneously, you can make changes on both and they’ll all propagate correctly.

Yesterday was cooking with Food Not Bombs; I usually have my laptop with me because it’s useful for something often enough, that I take it everywhere. But for the vast majority of things in those scenarios, my iPad will actually do the job. Yesterday the laptop stayed at home, and the iPad didn’t come out of my bag as it wasn’t needed. But less weight meant I could take something else. One thing I’d currently miss is that situation would be an iPad version of touchterm SSH. The pixel doubling doesn’t work that well for the iphone version. But it’ll come in time, and it’s an irritation, not a problem. And when cycling long distances (or short ones), I really will not miss the extra weight of my 13″ macbook with me “just in case”.

One thing I have found at home is I’m spending a lot less time reading at my desk, and more time reading on my sofa (which previously I never did), and reading is up overall. iBooks and instapaper are both in my iPad’s dock. And in that respect, it’s like having a second screen for my laptop, which easily allows me to read or refer to Mail, twitter, calendar, while doing “actual work” on my laptop. While I’ve been using it in conjunction with my laptop for well under 10 hours, I’m doing much less multitasking on my laptop, and focussing on single tasks more. I’ve bought/downloaded a load of short papers that have been in my instapaper queue for  a while, and which I’d never got round to reading on my iPhone (too long) or in instapaper on the web (too many distractions), whereas my iPad means I’ll finally get round to reading Civil Disobedience, and have already worked my way through some things that have sat on my shelf in the GUBs pile. Some of this may be the first time experiences of a new gadget, but equally, it’s really quite nice. I will finish writing this post, then go and do something else, on a different machine. It can play songs, it can read (whatever: books, instapaper, mail, web), but it’s not got all the other distractions of my laptop which means I feel like I should be working on the CommentOnThis rewrite, or the many other things that come under the category of “work”. With my feet up on the sofa, that’s not it; but at my desk at work, it was helpful for that. Context, as they say, is everything.

And I think that’s actually the one big thing to take away from the initial experiences of iPad. It is a new style of device, and it allows different things to work well. What those exactly are will be interesting to find over the next few weeks. Thinking of my iPad and laptop as interchangeable is starting to feel like treating a machine gun and a baseball bat as interchangeable; yes, they might both be usable for beating someone to death, but that’s missing the point.

As a final thought, I’m about to wander down the street for Sunday Breakfast at Fuel. But the iPad wont, this week, be coming with me. While I always take a book to read, it’s not something I’m going to use the iPad for. This week at least.