There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube

I said that Microsoft’s attempts in this area had met with niche success. Later, we followed up the debate on email:

Ian:

Still not convinced about the Apple tablet — Microsoft’s Tablet PC was a pretty good platform (I know, I know…) but remained very niche because touch screens are so expensive. Their cost increases exponentially by size because the fault ratio on LCD panels is so much higher once you add touch. Also, people don’t like ‘typing’ on touch screens because of the lack of physical feedback.

Malcolm:

I love typing on a touch screen :-)   I hated my Nokia btns.

I think we’ll be surprised at the way a fully-functioning, populist, personalisable, programmable, portable (rather than mobile) entertainment, communications, information carrying, global gps and wireless, device will have infiltrated daily life before we even know it. iPhone is a real trojan horse. I don’t think the Microsoft tablet was any comparison.

IDEO had been saying for years and years that a touch screen device would NEVER be attractive to the public and consequently never be successful. I sure I saw Bill Moggridge say it in another article again at the weekend, despite such recent evidence to the contrary. In my view, iPhone blew that long-held tenet away comprehensively.

IDEO simply came at the issue of the interface design in completely the wrong way. A visual screen needed sophisticated and contextual visual feedback, not tactile as Bill Moggridge and his ilk steadfastly, and failingly, maintained. I believe iPhone proved that. People are ready for things that work in an obvious way, the actual hardware/software ‘concepts’ are lost on them. Only the effects (i.e. practical and usable) mean anything. The touch screen revolution has effectively happened, now the results will begin to inundate us. This is akin to 1998 when the web supposedly broke into the mainstream and ceased to be new or interesting to the cognoscenti. That was wrong then — it was almost ten years more before it really could be described as mainstream.

As ever, we will need to be alive to exactly who are audience is, or should be, and target accordingly.

Ian:

“People are ready for things that work in an obvious way”

completely agreed, but with the caveat “People are ready for things that are better”.

However, touch screens remain extremely niche despite being available for years. The causes for this are:

(a) cost (this can sometimes be offset by versatility/throughput e.g. tube ticket machines).

(b) durability (increasing this increases the cost considerably, only suited for high-volume public terminal-type applications; obviously the durability problem increases exponentially with size of screen).

© user experience.

You believe that © isn’t a factor any more, or can be overcome by great interaction design. You might be right — I disagree. Typing has been perfectly possible on touch screens for a decade. Nobody does it. Why is that? Not just cost and durability. Similarly, voice input. No one does it. Typing at a keyboard isn’t just learned behaviour — it’s incredibly efficient compared to the alternatives.

You think that the iPhone is a game-changer — yet, you struggled to give me Catherine’s contact details. Surely, that’s pretty basic functionality? And you are someone who has followed every innovation in the digital space for 15 years. What chance Joe Normal?

Malcolm:

Actually, I found Catherine’s details right away, much more easily than finding them by any other format I can think of. I struggled to show you the details on my screen as i recall, as i pointed and clicked simultaneously when i didn’t want to — a result of having big clumsy fingers, and being eager to please, and trying to do something that it’s not really designed for, nor intended to be. the iPhone is a personal device not a sharing device.

I appreciate your typing argument. However, my argument is that in the real world most people don’t type. They do text, and lot more than they type, and without a keyboard. it’s the keyboard that has kept the computer firmly perceived as a business machine. My argument actually suggests that because of the success and versatility of the iPhone touch screen many more activities stray away from the need to function with a keyboard at all. I think that is very significant.

My view has always been that the keyboard has restricted broader acceptance and usefulness of computers rather than the other way around. I think this is just the beginning of a new relationship between people and and their little computer pals.  Joe Normal has these little pals all around him as normal. It is we who are more likely out of step, not the young people naturally occupying the digital space that even I’ve struggled with these last 15 years.

That said, I do now make more notes on the move, because it’s easy and convenient to do it on iPhone, and it’s guaranteed to directly transfer into the (currently) more versatile and permanent environment of my laptop. i think the effortless connectivity of iPhone and MacBook is another key to success, and conversely a reason for the failure of Newton, and every other phone I’ve possessed.

Voice activation is not popular because it doesn’t work (still) and is vaguely embarrassing. but so is Skype and that is slowly (quickly?) finding favour. The time may become right for a having a useful conversation with your computer some time in the future. I’m not fully writing that one off just yet.

Don’t let all that poorly designed, poorly functioning, crap hardware of the past cloud your vision for the future. ‘Smartphone’ has always been a misnomer, until now.  yes, people are now ready for things that are better. And working in an obvious way is better.

Ian:

Before you had an iPhone, you had a notebook computer, I guess. And I am also guessing that you still carry that notebook around a lot of the time.

If you need to do serious data-entry, then you need a device that is designed for that – and that’s your laptop (or, to be totally honest, your desktop). Your phone is fine as the equivalent for the back of an envelope, or a filofax. It’s not the same as being at your real computer. And if it can’t really replace your notebook computer, then isn’t it just bling?

The mainstream. Allow me a little diversion. Twitter, for all the chat, has not managed to engage teenagers. Bluetooth has.

You’d kind of think it would be the other way round. Twitter is really easy, while Bluetooth is sort of techy. Why’s that? Because the take-up of a technology is about what people want to do. File sharing is something teens want to do – pictures, music, what-have-you. On the other hand, microblogging to a community of peers? Isn’t that the same as Facebook status messages? The mainstream doesn’t adopt technology on the basis of trendiness, I take from this, but on the basis of functionality and cost. Interestingly and counter-intuitively, convenience seems to be less of a factor.

The world does need personal, personalisable, portable devices for work/comms/entertainment/etc – no-one would be buying any of this stuff otherwise. However, I am dubious about the touch-screen proposition. What does a touch screen add that isn’t better served by keyboard and mouse?

One thing. It (the device, whatever it is, phone/tablet) can be smaller. So it is less useful, less functional, less durable, less usable and more expensive.

But it – whatever *it* is — is smaller. Does this not smack of gadget fetishism rather than a real advantage?

[Malcolm’s response to be posted as received over at Dynamo as well]