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looksideways

Perth boy now in Singapore.

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October 3rd, 6:12am 0 comments

Tablets - great for media consumption, not for creating in the classroom

After Amazon's Jeff Bezos set the stage alight last Wednesday with his new Kindle Fire, there were some very powerful responses raised in the reporting that followed. Distilling most of the thoughts eventuated in what people acknowledged to be the first real competitor to the iPad. Why? Because it's doing what tablets are meant to be doing, and doing it well at a price less than half of the entry-level iPad. What Bezos also established that not only was the tablet market here to stay, but that the tablet in itself has a unique role to play within our digital ecosystems. That role? It is definitely not for traditional content creation.

I am a firm believer of this notion. After owning and using an iPad daily within the first month of hitting the shelves in 2010, you can colour me impressed. The interface is slick and speedy, iOS is extremely stable and like most things from Apple, 'it just works'. Not to mention the fact that it is one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of tech currently on the planet. Yes, I am proud to admit this. Unforunately, iOS is not the most beautiful mobile OS on the market right now. That title goes to Windows Phone 7.

The most amazing thing about the iPad however is the ability to read, watch and play games on the device with minimal effort. I really need to stress that it is built to consume media. Like an empty box waiting to be filled, the iPad begs to be crammed full of mp4s and PDFs. I have dropbox sync everything to GoodReader, so any change to my documents is instantly downloaded, whether I am at school, home, or in a coffee shop. My magazines are found in GoodReader. Books are stored in iBooks and GoodReader. Evernote works, as always. My jazz real books are found in GoodReader too. Comics in ComicZeal4, and movies in CineXPlayer. I now can easily avoid printing like a disease nowadays, as everything I can now keep on my iPad. Why waste a sheet of paper for a plane ticket booking?

However, as useful as it is to review files on the iPad, the one thing that the iPad is not is a traditional content creation device. The thought of churning out a page of notes is dreadful. Annotating on a PDF? Not as intuitive as you might think. With no physical keyboard offering tactile feedback, the concept of touch typing is completely destroyed. While at a pinch I'll take notes from a meeting into Evernote, they are never longer than dot points and single line paragraphs. I would love to say that efficient note taking is possible on the iPad, but after trying and trying, it simply is no-where near as efficient as pen/paper and laptop.

Not only that, but it also is not built for another traditional form of content creation - illustration. When the iPad was first introduced, artists around the world celebrated at the thought of a touch sensitive and thin digital tablet for sketching and illustrating. Unfortunately, there was Jobs' famous "You blew it" comment about a stylus and a tablet, and the only styluses to come along are inadequate and lack touch sensitivity. Currently, the best choice for a Wacom-enabled digital sketchbook is EEE PC's EP121 or the newer Samsung Series 7 Tablet, both of which run a fully fledged Windows 7 OS instead of a mobile Android or iOS build. They are completely different beasts altogether - a PC in a slate form.

The only way that I can see it being used for content creation is within the realm of new media such as digital music. Having a dynamic touch interface means that the iPad can be programmed to interact with music creation software to get producers and DJ's away from their laptops during gigs. That said, as a traditional music creation device.... yeah it doesn't really do much. The two standouts are Pianist Pro which I use for for vocal training on-the-go, and the Korg iMS-20, which is an authentic recreation of the classic MS-20 analog synthesiser.

Also interestingly, Autodesk's 123D Sculpt showed up in the App Store a couple of weeks ago and is another good example of using a touch interface for manipulating blobs of virtual clay in 3D, allowing for some basic 3D modelling. These can be exported into desktop modelling packages. Unfortunately, the advantages of interacting with the clay through your fingers is marred by a lack of touch sensitivity.

Bezos' keynote last Wednesday made very clear his position on the way tablets should be used within our lifestyles. There were no sales pitches about word processors, video editors, or or even the inbuilt email client that arrives on the new flagship tablet. It was all about media, media, and media. Tablets aren't meant to write thesises or take notes in class, because tablets that is not what they were built to do. They are great for reading notes, but not marking them up, let alone writing.

Please don't buy yourself a tablet and believe that you will use it to replace your laptop. I guarantee you that you won't. You'll end up trying to convince yourself that your purchase will not be regretted, and you'll try to fudge convoluted workflows to justify your expense. If you buy a tablet, accept that it is a device built around entertainment and reading. Trying to do classwork on it is like using a tricycle to ride around Australia. It's possible, but there are a million other choices that are better. 

My advice for the classroom? Ye ol' pen and paper for the most part. 50c no-lined exercise book from the concourse stationary shop (the one that plays that dreadful American-daytime-soap music) means you can scribble and mindmap your class. Then use your laptop for hardcore writing and presenting.

Then do your readings on your iPad and stop printing those 20 page HBR reports with 12 pages of appendices.

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