Mark Laabs :: The Blog Social enterprise, travel, and a bit of politics

Why we’ll all soon wonder how we lived without a Tablet

Over the years, I have grown to be quite an admirer of Apple.  From a company that seemed to be fighting on the edge of marginalization a decade ago, Apple has, in the relative blink of an eye, been a critical part of revolutionizing not one, not two, but three major industries in the last ten years while pushing several others to raise the levels of their games.  First, they release a neat piece of kit called an Ipod that changed the way the world listened to music.  Then they released iTunes, which changed they way they consumed it (at least legally).  From there they embarked on the iPhone, which has made the consumer smartphone a reality for the first time.  The recent “iDecade” article in BusinessWeek summarizes all of this well.

The next rumored Apple development is the Mac Tablet, described by pundits as a “ten to eleven inch, touch-screen hybrid between the Iphone and a MacBook.”  The timing is right, they argue, with a set of technologies that have been around for a few years but with no product, whether Tablet PC, eReader, or otherwise getting it quite right.  This, they say, is just what Apple is so good at, finding what the consumer wants before they know they want it.

At the same time, they argue, the outcome this time seems less certain.  ”What, really, does a customer need an oversized iPhone for?  It will be too big to carry in your pocket, so you’ll need a bag, and if you need a bag, why not just bring your laptop with you?”

After spending a regrettable amount of the weekend pondering the subject, my answer is that the pundits’ two statements bely the very reason that tablets have failed so far and the reason that Apple, or someone, will make a success of a tablet in the near term.

As I look at the tablet market of the past, it failed for one primary reason: the touch screen was an appendage to a traditional keyboard and mouse system of interaction.  Software run on those same devices assumed keyboards and mice for interaction, so the potential of the touch-screen to enhance their applications lay dormant.  Furthermore, in a single-touch touchscreen environment, the user is really just using their finger as a mouse anyway, and, given that a mouse tends to be more accurate, even that enhancement was really a drawback.

In comes the iPhone, and two things happen.  First, multi-touch goes mainstream.  Pinching, dragging, spinning, flipping.  Virtually endless commands suddenly become possible in a single movement that would have required a number of keystrokes before.  In all honesty, we are just beginning to conceive of the potential applications.  Second, but related to the first, Apps begins to prove that these new modes of user interaction really can outperform the keyboard-and-mouse infrastructure with which we have become familiar.  From “Bump” to Slutterbug, there’s really just too many examples to count.

Now, for a moment, imagine scaling those trends up to a laptop.  Yes, you will still want a keyboard-and-mouse for Microsoft Word and Excel for some time to come.  Writing requires letters, and you won’t beat a keyboard for that for at least two more generations of voice recognition or some kind of mind reading device.  But imagine, for a moment, a fully multi-touch enabled version of the Adobe Creative Suite where one could be shifting a color gradient with one finger while painting with another, or scaling an image while rotating it simultaneously on a shifting axis.  These tasks may sound simple, but they would be dramatically freeing in a creative process that often forces designers to prioritize process over vision.  Alternatively, imagine a DJ software where your screen became a turntable, enabling a dramatically more organic interface for creating and modifying music.

In short, I believe it is the artists who will first show us how a less-encumbered medium of interaction with our computers can lead to exciting results. However, I do not believe it will end there.  Consider our model of media consumption, usually structured in a vertical, prose structure and just now beginning to integrate different media types into the same “feed”.  What if that media looked more like a mind-map where articles and videos were grouped by similarity of topic and sized according to popularity?  It could happen in a keyboard-and-mouse world, but it would be outright painful to interact with.  In the world of a multitouch screen, it really would be almost as natural as the movies have made it seem for years.

The Tablet will not try to couch itself between the iPhone and the MacBook.  It will help the bring the MacBook to the next level of interactivity, leaving us yet one step closer to the way we interface with the real world.  The PC pundits are evaluating the Tablet concept from a worldview where the keyboard-and-mouse interface is the best option whenever available and everything else is second best.  That world is disappeared in 2007.