the onda

Too many bytes being wasted on iPad reviews/impressions/complaints, so I am going to be brief and specific to people who care about the industries I've worked in. Just three simple initial observations:

First, it is a beautiful piece of hardware with amazing software, but my first impression upon holding it (and one which has just gotten more acute after a day of using it) was: man, this thing is heavy!

This almost doesn't bear mentioning, but it is nice to see that even Apple can not escape the laws of the physical world. If I had to guess, I'd say 40% of the weight is the battery, and an additional 30% is glass, which gives you an idea of what can come out of it in future versions (and what won't). And the weight is going to affect it negatively in two key ways: it won't be a device people can hold up over their heads lying down easily at all, and more importantly, it won't be a particularly rugged device, especially when dropped face down.

(Right now there is a very happy team at my former employer who couldn't for the life of them figure out how Apple might escape physics but were taken in enough by the Reality Distortion Field to believe they might have).

Second, I had written about how much I wanted the web browser to be first class, and it most certainly is. For some web pages it is as fast as anything on the desktop (which speaks to the fact that we're just about as there as we can be without more fiber when it comes to webpages and speed). But more importantly, the pinch and zoom is an absolute delight. And best of all, just about everything that doesn't rely on Flash or complex onDrag event handlers works. Yay open web!

Finally, and this will only be relevant to people in the photo space: photo sharing is about to change forever.

When I say photo sharing, I don't mean an online photo repository like Facebook's that just a feature of a bigger social app; I mean the full ecosystem in which the traditional photo sharing folks have existed. And what is key about this ecosystem is that output has proven to be the only scalable business model, be it the 4x6 prints of yesteryear or the photo books of today.

All of that revenue died today. Not in the going away immediately kind of dead, but in the Lotus Notes kind of way. There will be a generation of folks who will print photos and books for a little while longer, but for the bulk of people that have seen the power of a live slideshow on a bright IPS LED display of the iPad's size— one that can be passed around a living room or left rotating on a particular event— will never go back to keeping anything with ink and paper.

If I were still in that space, I'd be looking hard at the few players who have figured out how to make money with virtual-only products (which is really hard), because that is the only place where there is likely to be any significant growth.

Another way to put it: RIP photo book. You were awesome while you lasted and I'm sorry you never became truly mass market (only about 11% of the US population had made one last I checked), but there are just better ways to tell stories with pictures in a portable and human-scale way out there now.

More later after I work up the muscles to hold up the iPad better.