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iPad Reactions

PhreePhly said:
Not to pile on, as i am a bit late in responding, but there already exists this niche market
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And, like I said before, I never claimed that there wasn't. All they need to do is to have people develop specific, highly specialised apps for this market, and the iPad has a market. It may even be better at doing some things than regular tablets that use generic, off-the-shelf software to to tasks that don't really need all of the features of a Word or an Excel.

Your data-collectors that use Excel to record data. Do they really need pivot tables, complex macros and formulas? Or are they just entering data into a table? With a little bit of effort you could have an app that just records the data you want it to record and nothing else. You could hire someone to write an app that suits your needs exactly, because there's absolutely no need for it to suit anyone else's. People already do that for the iPhone. They could do it for the iPad just as easily.

There's no way I'm getting one, by the way. I have no need for such a device, and many better things to be spending my money on.
 
daSkeptic, before you read further, I urge you to read my longer post on the iPad in particular and my guesses at how things are likely to go. I stand by those impressions. I'm neither an Apple-hater nor drinking the Kool-Aid, and while I do own a snazzy MBP I also use a Win 7 desktop and adore my Linux smartphone. I actually prefer a heterogeneous computing environment, as it spurs competition and innovation, as well as providing IT generalist consultants like myself with continued job security. I'm asking you to refresh on what I pointed out earlier because I want to make clear that I'm not trying to actively hate the iPad.

Now, that said:
daSkeptic said:
Given two devices that both meet a person's functional needs, the $500 unit they can actually use is a much better deal to them than the $300 unit they can't figure out.
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Lucky for many folks, there will be $300 units that are plenty easy to understand, at least as easy as the iPad, since such devices had already been announced more than a month in advance of Apple's new device.

daSkeptic said:
Improving market share is not necessarily the top priority for all businesses. Just as consumers have differing values, so too do companies.
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Make no mistake, Apple's goal is market share. They just have a different market share than some of the companies they are competing against, because their market is mainly in digital lifestyle appliances, not software solutions or computing hardware. It's a niche market, and Apple tends to dominate the digital lifestyle niche-- it has for the past decade. But make no mistake here: Apple isn't innovating or breaking new ground with this device. Much like the $300 smartpad I mentioned above, there are what is going to be considered "hybrid" devices (like the Lenovo ideapad mentioned earlier) that plan on cashing in on this market as well, and this is an idea that has been public since last summer with some demos (and possibly even earlier than that). It's not just the new hardware that's derivative, it's software like the new iBooks app as well.

That isn't to say that Apple's business is so reinvent the wheel and call it new-- that's just marketing and businesses playing hardball. Apple's business is, quite simply, to make stuff that people want to buy. And while there's the breakthrough that is the iPhone, there's also the dud that is AppleTV. For every well-thought-out execution like iTunes, there's a short-sighted mistake like clinging to Firewire over USB2. But you're not going to get admissions from Jobs or Apple that the mistakes were mistakes, because Apple's business is to sell stuff, and Jobs' business is to make sure Apple continues selling stuff.

And the iPad will sell, of that I have little doubt. The 2010 sales numbers for the iPad should be respectable at the very least. But that's a short-term assessment, and I tend to like to look at what this is going to mean long-term. In the long term I don't think the iPad stands a chance, because this time there are already several companies out there ready to compete on price and hardware, and the software is already out there being used and getting polished constantly. Games and quirky lifestyle apps made the iPhone the hit that it is, but is that going to maintain dominance on the slate device market that's coming? It's sure to be a profitable chunk, to be sure, but whether it holds out for the iPad is currently uncertain. What is certain, however, is that the Android OS is branching out, and is going to be doing so at a very fast rate over the coming year, which boils down to Apple not being able to rest on its laurels with the iPhone OS (at least, not for long). But that's not to say that Android is what Apple needs to be worried about-- maybe ChromeOS is going to make some breakthroughs, or perhaps Microsoft is going to release a Snapdragon-friendly build of Windows (or the Zune environment) to go on some MS-friendly equipment. When the iPhone released, the market was stale and the choices fairly heavily limited; in the slate market, the field of choice is going to become crowded very quickly. Microsoft has a distinct advantage-- if they decide to jump into this race-- by having a great deal of other market share to carry them to fight through attrition (think XBox). And despite what Jobs may personally think of Google, they're nothing if not quick learners. On the hardware side of things, it isn't just little guys or stale older companies planning on competing with Apple this time around, either-- HTC is established now, Lenovo has taken the baton IBM passed to them and is racing hard, and then there are the stale big guys like HP and Dell or the little guys like Notion Ink (linked above) or Always Innovating who aren't well-known. This isn't counting Asus and other netbook builders who may have something in the pipe they're waiting on before bringing to market. Regardless of who the biggest competition is going to come from, it's safe to say that this already-developing market segment is going to become more contentious than the smartphone market ever was, and if Apple (and Jobs) aren't prepared for that then they're going to have a lot of disappointed fans on their hands.

It's clear that Jobs didn't deliver a slam-dunk with his debut of the iPad, but it's not clear that he delivered a failure either. Apple doesn't have to dominate this market for the iPad device to be profitable, but the device does have to be profitable or else it's going to disappear. I think Jobs knows this, which is why he's beefing up the rhetoric. We should have a better idea of what the ecology of this market is going to look like by this autumn at the soonest, by next January at the latest. And for that reason I'd suggest to anyone who isn't sure about whether this is what they need/want to hold off until at least after the summer-- there's no malice in my assessment. This is a market segment that has been emerging for the last year as far as capable devices go, and the desire for devices capable of meeting market demands has been around for longer than that. The market I would compare this slate computing market to would be the mp3-player market-- not the smartphone one-- and the main game difference here is that the iPod came into an already-saturated market of not-good-enoughs and provided something better than good enough for many. This time the release times and market availability is going to be about the same for multiple devices, of which the iPad is only one. Apple has a strong handicap in their favor with the App Store on this, but handicaps in the computing world tend to shift quickly and with little warning (due to fickle consumers). Apple is about middle-of-the-road in terms of timing for laying its product on the table, and we're going to see whether this is going to work out in Apple's favor.

And for those who are interested here's a primer on HTML5 video that has some plus and minor factors regarding what video moving to the young standard will be like on the back-end. A summary assessment for the tl;dr crowd: the new standard will require coding for multiple codecs to play video properly, and developers are going to have to be extra-redundant when embedding video in HTML5 so that it plays across the board, as well as requiring various video producers/makers to use movie formats that more people can watch without problem. This has good aspects and bad aspects to it, and the main determining factor (for those relying on Flash video) is whether this standard sees wide adoption very quickly. What this doesn't cover is whether that means the end of Flash, because that's a development discussion all its own-- in other words, anyone parroting Jobs' comments on the matter are ill-informed and could very well be incorrect.
 
arthwollipot said:
And, like I said before, I never claimed that there wasn't. All they need to do is to have people develop specific, highly specialised apps for this market, and the iPad has a market. It may even be better at doing some things than regular tablets that use generic, off-the-shelf software to to tasks that don't really need all of the features of a Word or an Excel.

Your data-collectors that use Excel to record data. Do they really need pivot tables, complex macros and formulas? Or are they just entering data into a table? With a little bit of effort you could have an app that just records the data you want it to record and nothing else. You could hire someone to write an app that suits your needs exactly, because there's absolutely no need for it to suit anyone else's. People already do that for the iPhone. They could do it for the iPad just as easily.
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And people already do that for real computers too. How is this a benefit of the Ipad?
 
quadraginta said:
I don't dispute this in a sense of looking forward. What I was trying to stress was that in (for example) the hospital environment you had brought up they are not going to be breaking new ground. They are going to be playing against an established, entrenched, mature tablet market with expectations which will compare this new offering to existing and quite well received competition that is itself constantly innovating and improving, and doing so on a foundation of experience, selling to loyal customers.

You had brought up the "potential application" of the iPad as a tablet in hospitals in a way which seemed to suggest such application was largely unexplored. I'm just saying that it isn't, it is more of a "been there, done that" situation, and from what I've read here the iPad would be going into such an environment with a lot less ammunition than the troops already in place.

Scout around this link to get an idea of some of what is already in place. Just in healthcare, and just with this one tablet offering. Here's an example of some of the other players already pursuing this market in applications, and taking specific advantage of tablet form technology. This is all just from the Motion people, and they're only one of the established tablet manufacturers out there.

I think that the general public perception of the tablet format has been that it is somewhat 'geeky', as well as 'not as good as a laptop', and the relatively widespread use in vertical market industrial applications (including healthcare) has been largely unnoticed. I don't think Apple is going to break down any doors with revolutionary new uses. I think it's way too late. I see Apple (hopefully) as mainstreaming a product concept which has been hidden in vertical market niches. It looks like they are doing it with their usual stumbles.
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There is no entrenched tablet market in Hospitals. The tablets you linked to are not used by many hospitals. I was part of a testing project for those, one of only 6 hospitals, this was a few years ago. They were heavy, needed recharging every 3 hours so you would need two per doctor and alternately charge them and they are too complex. They are also over $3000 each. You don't need full version of windows to replace a paper chart for rounding. You just need a report you can drill down. Far more widely used are PDA apps. But they are a little small. Just about every large EMR vendor has iPhone apps already, which shows there is a market there.
 
I was in the airport and a older guy who was serving in the bar said he was going to buy one to read books and “learn languages”. Turns out he didn’t even know for sure you could learn languages on it, I assured he there was “an app for that”. Maybe the poster on page one has hit something, I think there may be a market for people who don’t want a full blow P.C, but want to check email and read books. It’s all anecdotal as they are not even on sale yet, but so far I am seeing this play pretty well with the baby boomers and horribly badly with anybody under 30.
 
back2basics said:
There is no entrenched tablet market in Hospitals. The tablets you linked to are not used by many hospitals. I was part of a testing project for those, one of only 6 hospitals, this was a few years ago. They were heavy, needed recharging every 3 hours so you would need two per doctor and alternately charge them and they are too complex. They are also over $3000 each. You don't need full version of windows to replace a paper chart for rounding. You just need a report you can drill down. Far more widely used are PDA apps. But they are a little small. Just about every large EMR vendor has iPhone apps already, which shows there is a market there.
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The thing is netbook based changes are getting into that part of the market as well. Getting 6-8 hours out of a netbook charge is nothing, and there are more touch screen convertable netbooks.

This is not an industrial work product but a lifestyle product. Some people might use software for it, but it is not going to be widely used as data collection, there is just too many compeating devices that will do the same job and more already on the market.
 
ponderingturtle said:
The thing is netbook based changes are getting into that part of the market as well. Getting 6-8 hours out of a netbook charge is nothing, and there are more touch screen convertable netbooks.

This is not an industrial work product but a lifestyle product. Some people might use software for it, but it is not going to be widely used as data collection, there is just too many compeating devices that will do the same job and more already on the market.
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I am not suggesting data collection. I am talking about rounding, specifically. With maybe the ability to enter orders. You don't need anything sophisticated to do this. Go take a look what’s available in the iPhone store for Healthcare. EPIC Systems (the leader in EMR) have had a rounding tool for the iPhone for some time, that’s going to work on the iPad of course. But I am 100% confident we will see an app taking use of the bigger screen. I am already hearing Physicians talking about getting them to run this software on.

I really don't see netbooks in hospitals at all yet. Not for rounding. They just don't sit comfortably in a hand, without a table. Computers On Wheels are cumbersome, many Physicians want a small product to have basic access to the patients chart. Maybe we deal with different types of hospitals. I mainly work in large 400+ bed organizations and I see a bright future for it in Healthcare.
 
HarryKeogh said:
No. Any reason why you'd need it in a device with a keyboard? (honest question).
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I have a Tablet type device, a Samsung Q1 Ultra. It has a thumb keyboard, AND handwriting recognition. The reason to have the handwriting is so you can hold the device in one hand, and write easily with the other, no need to prop it up, rest it against something to type with both hands. Its faster in my experience.
 
back2basics said:
I am not suggesting data collection. I am talking about rounding, specifically. With maybe the ability to enter orders. You don't need anything sophisticated to do this. Go take a look what’s available in the iPhone store for Healthcare. EPIC Systems (the leader in EMR) have had a rounding tool for the iPhone for some time, that’s going to work on the iPad of course. But I am 100% confident we will see an app taking use of the bigger screen. I am already hearing Physicians talking about getting them to run this software on.

I really don't see netbooks in hospitals at all yet. Not for rounding. They just don't sit comfortably in a hand, without a table. Computers On Wheels are cumbersome, many Physicians want a small product to have basic access to the patients chart. Maybe we deal with different types of hospitals. I mainly work in large 400+ bed organizations and I see a bright future for it in Healthcare.
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I was mentioning tablet netbooks, not basic netbooks.
 
arthwollipot said:
And, like I said before, I never claimed that there wasn't. All they need to do is to have people develop specific, highly specialised apps for this market, and the iPad has a market. It may even be better at doing some things than regular tablets that use generic, off-the-shelf software to to tasks that don't really need all of the features of a Word or an Excel.

Your data-collectors that use Excel to record data. Do they really need pivot tables, complex macros and formulas? Or are they just entering data into a table? With a little bit of effort you could have an app that just records the data you want it to record and nothing else. You could hire someone to write an app that suits your needs exactly, because there's absolutely no need for it to suit anyone else's. People already do that for the iPhone. They could do it for the iPad just as easily.

There's no way I'm getting one, by the way. I have no need for such a device, and many better things to be spending my money on.
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Do we need excel, no, we could write an app to do the conversions we want in the field, but Excel has that functionality built-in. My techs aren't just doing data collection, but analyzing system ops. In order to do this, we have a number of functions that convert pressure to flow, temp differentials to mass removal numbers. The tech needs these to be available, and Excel makes that easy. Yes, I could develop specific apps to do this, but a single spread sheet does this well. On top of that, as stated previously, the handwriting recognition is invaluable.

Also, when the techs are done in the field, they can come back to the office, plug into the docking station and use the tablet for normal work. All of our standard apps run on the tablet, as it is an XP machine. I'm hoping to upgrade to Win 7, as the touch/multi-touch capabilities are better integrated.

What Apple does well is design a form factor. The iPad form factor, is pretty nice. I can imagine Asus, MSI or Dell coming out with a similiar sized piece of hardware tat runs Win 7. That will not be an iPad killer. The problem with Win 7 or OSX for that matter, is that these OS's are not designed for touch exclusively. Apple was smart to develop the iPhone OS, it is touch-centric, but lacking as a full fledged OS. It is perfect for a phone/iTouch format.

MS needs to incorporate the Zune software as the main tablet interface, but keep the underlying OS intact, as to give the ability to run full apps. That would be a killer Tablet.

PhreePhly
 
I was just looking round to some reactions in the healthcare field. It does look like an area they are wanting to get in to if their trip to Cedars-Sinai is anything to go by.

http://www.healthwatchcenter.com/2010/01/its-official-its-the-ipad-and-healthcare-to-be-key-market/

"Workflow is the key to adoption and utilization in healthcare. I think the iPad will be a catalyst,” said Tom Herzog, VP IT and Medical Device Technologies.
“iPad will push healthcare away from the medical office and away from the desktop,” said Ted Eytan, Kaiser Permanente.
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http://scienceroll.com/2010/01/31/apple-ipad-in-healthcare-pros-and-cons/

ablet solutions have a clear future (pdf) but as Apple tablet representatives were spotted at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a few weeks ago, it seems iPad might have a shot in healthcare as well.

[snip]

I think iPad has the potential to become the No.1 healthcare tablet, but it has to go through plenty of changes and innovations in order to become a serious competitor in this race.
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http://geekdoctor.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-and-healthcare.html

My general impression is that it is not perfect for healthcare, but it is closer than other devices I've tried.
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back2basics, the problem with the iPad in healthcare is that it would never, ever pass the muster for meeting HIPAA requirements.

I agree with the guy in the link, Tom Herzog, who says that this will provide a catalyst. The iPad won't be the thing they need, but something with an open, administer-able operating system will be perfect. The likely operating systems are going to be Windows, Linux, or possibly a more open BSD variant.
 
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