iPad
January 27, 2010
I just read Isaac Garcia’s reaction to the iPad as a collaboration tool, and I thought I’d respond.
First, let me say that I agree with Mr. Garcia’s analysis on what the iPad is:
So, based on what I’ve “seen” it appears that the iPad is a great way to pass time when I’m on an airplane, waiting at the airport, sitting on my sofa (because walking 3 feet to my computer is too hard), lying in bed with my wife (because I’ve got nothing else to do?), riding the BART from SFO to downtown San Francisco.
The iPad is a consumer product, from a consumer electronics manufacturer. It does everything my iPod Touch (or as someone more witty than I dubbed it today, my iPad Nano) can do, but on a larger screen. And my iPad Nano can email. And access Central Desktop. And chat/talk via Skype. That’s collaboration. It’s a really crappy, inefficient way to collaborate, but it’s collaboration. Then again, I don’t drag my laptop with me to provide a little workout music when I go running, either.
But the iPad is just a device. Its the medium, not the message. The platform is the message, and Central Desktop puts collaboration in the cloud, where it’s accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection. Their software makes the hardware less critical. The hardware becomes a means to access the service, not the service itself.
So the iPad isn’t the next leap forward in collaboration. That’s fine by me, I wasn’t looking at it from a collaboration point of view. But I definitely see the iPad as a jump-off point for ‘the next big thing.’ Look at the specs on the tablet: 10 inch screen, .5 inches thin, 1.5 pounds all with a 10 hour battery. That’s a great start. And it means that those Avatar, 3D interactive displays are a little closer than before.
For me, it’s the platform, not the device that drives collaboration. And Central Desktop has a great platform. Am I going to buy an iPad? Probably not. But if I did, you can bet I’d use it to at least check off tasks and get project reports from Central Desktop.
And, like Garcia, I look forward to a similar device tailored to a collaboration centric crowd. For now, I’ll just use my laptop.
January 28, 2010 at 2:42 pm
>>>It does everything my iPod Touch (or as someone more witty than I dubbed it today, my iPad Nano) can do, but on a larger screen. And my iPad Nano can email. And access Central Desktop. And chat/talk via Skype.
But you can’t do any of these “at the same time” on your iPad Nano.
January 28, 2010 at 3:18 pm
True. I just think we went into it with different expectations. I don’t really view Apple as a company that produces broad spectrum business products. Their ‘professional’ products are made for niche markets (photography, video, etc.), and the rest of their line is consumer oriented.
But the point that I was (poorly) making in my post was that a great collaboration software can be OS agnostic. I’ve very successfully used Central Desktop on Windows (XP, Vista and 7), Mac OSX and Linux.
To me, the ability to access even a small subset of the features of CD on a mobile device (not a laptop) is a bonus, not a requirement.