More Scary Robots

Excellent post by Matt Gemmell detaining everything Apple’s competitors need to understand about the iPad. Seriously, anyone trying to take on Apple, please listen to this guy, not the usual industry pundits:

It’s difficult to get our heads around the fact that these non-technologically-savvy users can suddenly constitute a core market for a device, yet that’s the case here. Nintendo saw it, and Apple sees it too. It’s an uncomfortable realisation since these people are so unfamiliar to people like you, as hardware manufacturers, and me as a software engineer. This discomfort leads to a kind of understandable blindness, and more importantly can make us leave money on the table. The relative sales and demand figures for Wii vs PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 over the last several Christmases are indicative of that.

When competing with iPad, you have to realise that, to your new core market, tablets are not computers. There’s no such thing (to your customer) as a “tablet computer”; the very name reduces the likelihood they’ll buy it. The potential of the tablet is that it’s not even seen as a computing device. This is an incredible opportunity to expand into a new market, if you’ll only commit to that mindset.

Read the whole thing. Of course I’m entirely certain that most — quite likely all — iPad competitors will make essentially every mistake Matt warns against. There are very few tech companies that have Apple’s understanding of what really matters to end-users. Maybe Nintendo should do a tablet.

Go here.

Particularly notable:

I can’t really make much of a pronouncement about these apps but I was struck by the amount of restraint the apps’ designers used. A bigger screen increases the temptation to just keep adding interface elements. And yet it’s remarkably uncluttered. All of the features of a “real” spreadsheet are there, but there are appear to be fewer buttons and controls here than what you’d find on a typical Android tip-calculator app.

And:

Fast. Fast, fast, fast. I did absurd things, like zoom in and out of webpages with fast twitches of my finger tips. The iPad kept right up with me, millisecond by millisecond. When you drag something, you feel like you’re physically sliding a photo across a surface; no need to wait for the OS to catch up with you. When you turn the iPad, the screen switches display modes almost instantly.

This sort of responsiveness enhances the whole experience. In so many touch-based systems — yes, I’m flashing an impatient glance at Android devices — the interaction feels like “I have made an input gesture; the ebook reader app has received the ‘turn to the next page’ command; the computer is now rendering and displaying an animation of a page turning in this ebook.” On the iPad, it feels as though you put your finger on the bottom-right corner of the page and dragged that corner towards the spine of the book until it flipped over.

That’s the “magic” right there — put these factors together, and using the device feels like interacting with data with your fingers, rather than issuing commands though an abstract software interface.