iGlad with your iPad?

The tech world is populated by two sorts of alert individuals along with the lagging majority, that is, the smart and the morons. The former rushed out to buy an iPad the last few days, no questions asked... So far this only happened in the US, where Apple started shipping the iPad last Saturday, right before Easter Sunday... Some non-US residents even found old friends, or friends of a friend who live in the US, and got theirs shipped to them allover the world. Mine was like this too. It is now relaxing at a customs desk in Köln, Germany, as we speak, with the Kraut clerk not sure what to do about it. Keep it for his own use, and claim they had to destroy it because they thought it hid a bomb, or confiscate it because it belonged to a suicidal member of AQ (with my own weirdest name... not a problem), or do his damn job and have it shipped before I pass out waitin'. Better be careful, dude. Every move you make... I'll be watching you! Online with the courier tracking system.

On one hand you have all those iPad smarties, who put a sticker on their foreheads reading: iGlad (that I bought it). On the other hand, bonehead morons keep on moaning: "You know, it's got no USB and no camera, no multitasking (OMG) and it's got no hardware keyboard, and it's got no 3G yet, and on and on and on...", spitting jealousy venom all over the place. Somebody go tell those morons that the iPad was never meant to have these "missing parts". They are not missing! They are out 'by design'! Got it? The reason iPads are gonna be successful is exactly because those plain vanilla PC 'things' are missing! If the iPad had those things, that would make it the Apple version of the netbook, wouldn't it? They haven't been listening to his Jobness again... they never do! Mentally incapable and entirely deaf. Brainwashed by bonehead Monkey-boy! No good! Folks, this is not how Apple works. Capice? How many cycles would it still take for you morons to eventually get it? Jeeeezus!

Remember the days when Microsoft was going to take the smartphone industry by storm and launched their first version of Mobile Windows? I even bought some stock of the f@ckers then, hoping for a blast payback! I wished... A gazillion versions after that and Windows mobile still suckz more than ever before! And, do you know why? Because those Microsoft software designers will never get it. They took Windows, which is basically an OS for developers, and ported it onto the little tiny TFT of a cellphone. They thought the Universe would hail the buggers with 'Hosanna, Praise the Lord!'. Actually, their monumental blunder was to think of a mobile device as another PC form factor! That's exactly how you define arrogance and stupidity. Open Webster's on these two entries and you'll find Ballmer's photograph on either of those! In the meantime, creative hackers found the solution for owners of Mobile Win based phones: install Android instead! True story! Mobile Windows proved a dog, again! Ballmer proved totally incapable of transforming his kinetic energy (monkey jumps) into the proper brain energy! Duh?

When Apple created the iPhone, they considered that, in order to be successful and attract new aficionados to the Apple camp, they had to shift the paradigm. About how people prefer to work with a smartphone and what functions they would like to find on it. After launching the iPhone and iPod Touch, they then observed their own ecosystem around those two products. 75 million units sold since the launch, with 150000 apps available on the App store. Almost 4 billion apps downloaded to-date. That makes a serious sample to draw conclusions about the entire population of their target markets. And then, after they were convinced their approach was just right, they went out to launch the iPad. The way it is. As we saw it demoed last January! Light and stylish and cute and lovable and an extension to a user's body and brains! In the words of Johnny Ive, simply MAGICAL! With no USB, multitasking or external hardware keyboards attached. No strings attached either! How hard is this to grasp, folks?

Just hold on a sec... can you actually 'feel' what 150000 apps really means? I mean, do you have a real sense of the number of apps available on the Store? Say, you need to spend a minute to go thru one app's information page on iTunes. You read the app description, see samples of its screens, maybe read a user review or two, all in 1 minute! Kinda hard, innit? Make it 1.5 min on average, to be on the safe side. Do the math. It'd take you the best part of 160 days (24x7) nonstop to go thru this exercise exhaustively for all of them apps out there. I'm gonna tell you this, then... I tried this insanity for a few hours by checking only a small number of apps available on the iPad. I'm telling you, man, it was baaaad! I got a bursting headache. I don't normally get those... It has been claimed that, right at the launch last Saturday, 'only' a thousand apps were available on the iPad, but to me the experience felt more like ten thousand.

Oh, BTW, do you know how the system works? Suppose, you got an iPhone and you have a number of Apps for it. You upgrade first your iTunes to 9.1 and then you check your apps storage. Most likely, an integer number next to "apps" on the left iTunes pane will tell you how many of your apps need updating. In many among those, (and more are getting added as we speak) the app creators added an iPad version. In that case, each updated app with two devices supported (iPad and iPhone) leaves its original position under the title iPhone apps and moves on a new position at the top, under the title, iPhone and iPad apps! Slick!

So, why do you think entrepreneurial developers keep doing that? Write iPhone apps, I mean... Seems like 21st Century gold-rush. El Dorado all over again! Name any impossible subject, just for kicks, or any buzzword that comes to mind, put it on the iTunes search field, and there must be at least one app about it. Most often however, there are dozens hits. Don't even try generic terms like 'news' and 'sports' or 'science' and 'math' or you'll be flooded! Is it really that simple to develop an iPhone/ iPad app, then? As it appears, well, it is rather simple. Apple took all the measures to meet this objective, both at the development level via a megarich SDK, but also in the logistics and marketing parts of this business. So, all anyone needs to do to get rich, is just think about some sort of an unexplored user need and built an iPhone/iPad/iPodT app about it. You don't even need to be a developer who knows the iPhone SDK or any ObjC for that matter. There's a bunch of China based developer companies who would do the programming and testing for you if you paid them the man-effort. Real cheap! You just have to generate an idea. The rest's been taken care of!

Mossberg said it. The iPad will change the PC world habits for ever. And, the Moss knows. Trust me. The Moss is no moron! The iPad, he sez, is ideal as a tool for media consumption, without the periphery that the so-called negativist 'savvies' want to attach to it. It's also ideal for communications among people. To write mails, publish content, send instant messages. You don't even need the 3G version to do all that. Only a wifi connection. It's true, some app developers went a bridge too far with their fantasies. They forgot that an iPhone only has a rather small screen for serious content consumption. So, they went out to write apps that are naturally made for larger real estates, but their enthusiasm convinced them it was worth the try. Nothing's lost though. They paved the way. For something like the iPad to come along and take the world by a tsunami storm. Wait and see, you whining morons! But don't come begging for your own personal unit later. I'd push it all the way down your arrogant gob if you did...