PC Magazine’s Tim Gideon likes the iPad’s keyboard, and even wrote his entire review on it:

First, a word about the on-screen keyboard, since the lack of a physical keyboard is probably the biggest difference between the iPad and, say, a laptop or a netbook (aside from those missing USB ports). As someone who’s all thumbs when it comes to iPhone’s tiny on-screen keyboard, I wondered if the iPad’s larger keyboard would help me master this touch screen typing thing. In a word: Yes. I’m writing this review on the iPad’s horizontal keyboard, in which the keys are large and nicely spaced. (The vertical keyboard is a little tighter, but still definitely useable.) If it weren’t comfortable, I would have abandoned the iPad for my laptop 1,000 words ago.

David Pogue on the iPad:

The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.

The only question is: Do you like the concept?

He also describes the keyboard as “barely usable.”

Walt Mossberg, in his iPad review:

I found email easy and productive to use, and had no trouble typing accurately and quickly on the iPad’s wide on-screen keyboard. In fact, I found the iPad virtual keyboard more comfortable and accurate to use than the cramped keyboards and touchpads on many netbooks, though some fast touch typists might disagree.

Good news. I’m more skeptical about the iPad’s keyboard than I was the iPhone’s.

Marco Arment previewed Instapaper for iPad, and why he designed it that way.

Instapaper alone is going to make the iPad a great device.

Nathan Bowers:

Have you ever noticed that when you sit down at a computer to write something, it’s hard to start and hard to maintain momentum? Meanwhile, you get in the shower and it’s like the hot water unclogs your brain and you need a soap crayon so you don’t lose any ideas.

I’ve come to believe that the root of all creativity is improvisational: noodling, doodling, broad strokes… the surfacing of ideas. The best tools for this are tangible: index cards, whiteboards, spiral bound notebooks, weathered guitars, and long walks with a tape recorder.

(Via Harold Emsheimer.)

James Surowiecki on Apple and the iPad:

But it’s also a more fundamental gamble; namely, that people will pay for quality. Starting at five hundred dollars, the iPad is significantly more expensive than its competitors. But Apple’s assumption is that, if the iPad is also significantly better, people will happily shell out for it (as they already do for iPods, iPhones, and Macs). That’s why when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPad he said that, if a product wasn’t “far better” than what was already out there, it had “no reason for being.”

That’s the only kind of company I give a damn about. Unless a company’s goal is to make something amazing, and that motivation to do so is a deeply emotional one, I couldn’t care less what they’re doing.

Sophia Teutschler (who makes the Groceries iPhone application) has released a beautiful new application called Articles for browsing Wikipedia.

It looks fantastic.

Mike Elgan:

This strikes some as Orwellian doublespeak: “War is peace.” “Freedom is slavery.” “Less is more.”

But the truth is that people don’t buy consumer electronics for the quantity of features. They buy it for the quality of experience.

Since Apple released the iPod, mobile has been an important part of Apple’s business. The iPhone, for perspective, accounted for a third of Apple’s revenue in the first quarter of 2010. While mobile devices have played an increasingly important role in Apple’s business, the Mac was still integral to it all. The iPod and iPhone are all “satellite” devices–that is, they rely on Macs (or PCs) to sync content to them. The Mac is the hub.

The iPad changes that.

Apple’s Hub Strategy

At Macworld in 2001, Steve Jobs announced a new strategy for the Mac. Jobs saw the Mac as the hub for people’s “digital lifestyle”–their music, video, movies, and personal data. The Mac would work with their MP3 players, digital cameras, video cameras, PDAs, and phones, and make each of these devices more powerful than they are on their own.

This strategy defined Apple’s products for the entire decade. Apple developed iLife, which allowed users to manage their photo and music libraries, edit video, burn DVDs, and even create music. They created the iPod, so users could listen to their music while away from the desktop.

This treats all mobile devices as “satellite” devices. They have defined functionality (e.g., they take photos, or play music), and that’s it. They depend upon the Mac for syncing media, buying new music, and turning photos or video taken into a usable product. They depend upon the Mac.

The iPhone still followed this strategy, even with its wide range of functionality. The iPhone depends on the Mac in that the iPhone is primarily a consumption device. Users listen to music, watch movies, browse the web, read and make short replies to email, and almost anything else you can think of. But for any kind of work (creating rather than consuming), a Mac is still required because of the iPhone’s small size.

The iPhone pushed the definition of “satellite device,” but it was much closer on the continuum of “satellite” and “standalone” to the iPod than the Mac.

The same isn’t true for the iPad.

iPad Will Stand Alone

This seems a little hard to believe considering at present, the iPad still relies on the Mac to sync media and update its operating system.¹

The correct criterion for deciding whether it is standalone or not, though, isn’t whether it will need to be plugged in to a Mac or not at some point; it’s how the device can be used. The iPhone, whether they want to or not, cannot be used by even basic users for serious productivity work. The screen is simply too small to do more than minor editing on documents, spreadsheets or presentations.

The iPad doesn’t have this limitation. For most users, the iPad more than fills their needs. It browses the web as well as the desktop, it plays music and movies (and users can purchase more), it plays games, it has the power to edit photos (and I suspect we’ll see an application for this soon), it has excellent address book and calendar applications, it has iWork, and it has the App Store.

Users can do all of these things without ever connecting the iPad to a desktop. For most users, this functionality is more than sufficient. They will rarely need to use a desktop computer. For them, the iPad can replace the desktop.

The iPad, even more powerfully, is better than a desktop or notebook in many ways. The iPad is a much more elegant device to browse the web on, watch video, or read a book or article. It replaces the desktop for a basic user’s productivity needs, and allows them to do many additional things that a desktop or notebook isn’t very good at.

Mobile Company

There currently are limitations, of course. Users cannot edit photos on the device, for example. But these limitations are, for most users, not inherent limitations of the device (due to its screen size and input mechanism), but rather software limitations that can be fixed.

The iPad introduction in January made clear that Apple intends the device to be seen much more as a standalone device. Before unveiling the iPad, Jobs declared Apple the “biggest” mobile devices company in the world. The iPad demo spent a large amount of time showing iWork in action on the iPad, and their goal was obvious: to show that serious work is not only possible, but easy, on the iPad. Then, after the demo, Jobs encouraged Walt Mossberg to write his iPad review on the device itself.

Apple is, if anything, a strategy-driven company, and chooses its marketing messages very carefully. These aren’t things a company says of a dependent device.

After Apple announced the iPhone 3G, I wrote:

I think what this means is Apple not only still believes in software-hardware integration, and selling devices with high-profit margins, but that Apple’s long-term strategy is to dominate the post-PC market. The “post-PC” is a mobile device that, in Apple’s vision, complements a desktop PC, and is specific in function.

The iPad and iPhone are the first two devices of Apple’s strategy for the next decade–building post-PC devices. Apple knows the PC has peaked; they can’t gain new customers from market growth (they can only gain customers by taking them from their competitors), and the PC’s basic use won’t change. We will still require the desktop for serious work (heavy video and photo editing, for example), but the PC market has reached its apogee. It’s a staid market, both in growth and innovation potential.

We are using the desktop for less as time passes, and are increasingly using mobile devices. Apple recognizes this. The future, as they see it, is mobile devices–the phone, and now the tablet. Apple’s goal is to control this market.

Their pricing strategy for the iPhone and iPad make this clear. Apple’s goal with the Mac isn’t to control a large share of the PC market; if it happens, great, but their goal is to make strong profit from a small percentage of the market. The iPhone, however, was aggressively priced since fall 2007, and especially since summer 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G². The iPad has a very low price-point, too, starting at just $499.

Apple is seeking to define these new devices for the future, if not to dominate the market. The former is the most important to them, because a controlling proportion of the market alone isn’t an end–it doesn’t do anything for Apple (and, in some ways, is harmful). What’s important is that these devices, the future of computers, are molded in Apple’s image. This allows them to innovate and create new devices in the future without constraints. Unlike in the PC market, they define the terms.

The importance of defining these devices is already apparent with the smart phone. Just three years after Apple announced the iPhone, nearly all new smart phones are molded around a large touch screen, browse the web, play media, and have an application store. Apple has defined what the smart phone is, and now every other maker has to base their devices on the iPhone. They can try to improve on it, but to do anything inherently different than the basic iPhone model is suicide.

That’s an incredibly good position to be in. Because the market responds to Apple, rather than vice versa, Apple is free to re-define it as they please. Apple, then, is positioned to be the post-PC’s main innovator, the company that will continually re-think it and push the devices forward. As a result, if Apple’s changes are good ones, they can be the sole recipients of the higher profit margins innovating companies can charge before their competitors catch up.

There’s good reason for Apple switching to mobile devices as their primary source of growth. The PC market is a dead-end for the future. Apple will continue to see growth in this market, due to PC users switching to the Mac, but it cannot be their primary means of company growth, because growth potential is limited. Moreover, the developing world isn’t as interested in PCs–they’re buying mobile devices. They’re cheaper and more useful. So mobile devices have the greatest potential for growth, because the market for them both in the developed and developing world aren’t saturated.

Apple is positioning itself for the future, which is coming quickly. We will still use desktops, but only for specific tasks, like editing video, but for everything else–browsing the web, reading, consuming media, the things we do all of the time–we’ll use a mobile device, because they’re much better at doing these things than a computer.

The iPad, then, isn’t just a big iPhone. It’s a new way of computing, one that will enable new applications of computers we haven’t seen, and that could become even more ubiquitous than the PC is today. In a few years, we might not be able to go to the doctor’s office, school, or coffee shop without seeing one.

Or at least that’s what Apple is betting.

1. I think this will change rather quickly. Using home sharing, the iPad (and iPhone) could update their media libraries whenever the host Mac gets new media, and vice versa. With this arrangement, the iPad wouldn’t be any more of a satellite device than the Mac itself would be. [↩]
2. Interestingly, when Apple first released the iPhone, they seemed to be using the same strategy as the Mac: sell less, but make more through a higher profit margin. This changed in September 2007, when Apple dropped the 8GB model to $399, and changed even more dramatically with the iPhone 3G, which launched at $199. [↩]

Apple’s released new details about the iPad, including that iTunes will sync other ePub books to your iPad so you can read them in the iBooks application. Macworld has the details, and other new information.

Marco Arment writes that realism shouldn’t be overdone in UIs:

DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.

It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.

And Neven Mrgan argues that limitations caused by realistic UIs may be worth the benefits:

After you’ve read your twelfth ebook, you don’t need the candy anymore. Ideally, the candy isn’t so distracting that you hate it, and what was once cute (swiping to flip the page!) turns into sheer utility (tapping to turn the page, which I have to believe will also be possible in iBooks.)

But that flip matters because it gets you going. And it gets going everyone who sees you reading your twelfth book in iBooks. How will you demo it to them? Will you tap or will you slowly turn the page? If your booklist was also available as a boring (and useful) black-and-white table, would that be the screen you’d show your friends?

Both posts are fantastic.

Matt Gemmell on the iPad:

There is something intrinsically “right” about seeing the iPad as a technological successor to, or version of, these physical objects. We’re immediately ready to accept the one as a substitute or enhancement for the other. This is a powerful, and novel, position for the iPad software developer.

It wasn’t true with the iPhone or iPod Touch; the devices are too physically small. The “Notes” app on the iPhone will forever be a simulation of a legal pad; the similar app on the iPad is a legal pad (to your user). It’s an incredibly important distinction in terms of how it influences our design.

Penguin showed off their iPad book concepts.

Jump to the two minute mark, and watch the travel book and the sky viewing application. Both are fantastic concepts.

In the process of requesting iPad application startups, Y Combinator made an interesting argument as to why the iPad is important:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Programmers may never want a computer they don’t control, but ordinary people just want something cheap that works. And that’s how the iPad will seem to them. Many will never make a conscious decision to switch. They’ll get an iPad as well, then find they use their Windows machine less and less. When it dies they won’t replace it.

That’s right, or at least that’s Apple’s longterm strategy with these post-PC devices. Jobs believes that the future is in mobile, non-PC computing devices, and Apple wants to own this market. The PC’s reign is over.

That’s why Apple has been so aggressive with iPhone and iPad prices. Unlike the PC market, where Apple only seeks to dominate small parts of the market (creative professionals and students primarily),¹ Apple wants to control the post-PC market. And they’re doing this by selling the iPhone and iPad for low prices.

Apple has ceded the PC market to Microsoft and the commodity-PC manufactures. They want to dominate the next twenty years. That’s Jobs’s legacy.

1. As a result, they seek higher profit margins, rather than market share. [↩]

Marco Arment just released Instapaper Pro 2.2.

It brings pagination (!), in-app browser, and a built-in dictionary.

Instapaper is easily my favorite iPhone application.