The Three Most Important Words in the iPad Introduction

Well, here we have Apple's "big iPod Touch" with, so it would seem, a dearth of new, revolutionary features. I mean, the book store is great and all but Apple's pretty late to that party.

But there were still three things that struck me in the keynote as being significant, of being unique to the iPad and therefore being revolutionary, almost as a side effect of the nature of the device. It wasn't so much anything that could appear in a bullet point but rather what you would get for free if you scaled up an iPod Touch.

"Intimacy"

It didn't strike me until Steve Jobs said the word how true it would be for a tablet device such as the iPad. The use of multi-touch on a larger screen gives the media an immediacy and realism computers don't provide. After all, scrolling through a PDF document on a desktop computer has four layers between you and the content - you move the mouse, which moves the mouse cursor, which moves the scroll bar, which moves the document. It's like reading a book with a robot wearing gloves turning the pages for you under remote control.

Multi-touch, however, is direct interaction with realistic physics. There's no tactile feedback but apart from that point, you're touching the content. You're working with something real in a physically convincing manner. There's no abstraction, no layers of meaning and control between you and the content - no windows, icons, files or mouse cursors. You just put a finger down and push what's on the screen.

The iPad is actually unique in this respect as the intimacy isn't there to the same degree on the iPhone. Multi-touch on the iPhone is, to an extent, merely compensating for the problems inherent in the device. The screen is too small to comfortably surf the web or even read what's on a webpage, so you push the page around with your finger until you find the bit you want and then zoom in with a pinch so you can read it. The experience is a little like looking at the world through a hole in a box.

But on the larger screen of the iPad, you can already read the text, so the multi-touch is instead used as part of the reading experience - for nudging the page where you want to go and focusing in on the parts that interest you. The difference may sound like semantics but it's nonetheless important. Far more than with the iPhone, the iPad will have you interacting with media with multi-touch rather than simply finding it.

With the iPhone, the multi-touch helped overcome the limitations of the device. With the tablet, the mutli-touch is free to enhance the use of the device.

Immersion

Actually no one even said that. I thought they did. Nonetheless...

When Need for Speed was demoed, Travis Boatman of EA said that "the field of vision and sensation of speed is just incredible". I don't think that was marketing hyperbole. A screen that size, being held that close to your face, being used as the controller for a car racing game... I can see that being incredibly immersive in a way no other games platform can duplicate. It's probably as close to VR as handheld gaming has ever been.

(As am aside, I suspect the immersion is such a game was a bonus that neither Apple nor EA was really expecting. Apple may be supporting games on their new platforms but I don't think they think in terms of them, whereas EA of course didn't even have the tablet until late.)

"Productivity"

Porting iWork to the iPad shows clearly that Apple does not believe multi-touch is gimmicky UI limited to media consumption, but rather that it's the next great computing paradigm. Apple clearly wants the iPad to be the first multi-touch computer - a real computer, that is, running software like Photoshop and Office (although not necessarily those two). They have a proof of concept, they have UI conventions in place, they have copy and paste perfected, and they have a decently sized device to run it all on.