the iPad in Japan
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I'm not so sure that the iPad's going to be a hit here in Japan.
The iPhone, I think, is something of a bellweather. My Japanese friends are glued to their mobile phones, and very few seem to have switched to iPhones. Unlike my gaijin friends and me, who have all switched. No one wants to give up their phone numbers and messaging/email addresses or their back-catalog of photos.
As for my contacts, they don't view my struggles to hold a phone conversation are not exactly a walking advertisement. Very spotty reception, very poor volume levels, and a return to dropped calls. As a phone, the thing just doesn't match the anonymous Toshiba (I think?) unit I got for free with my old (and much cheaper) AU account. Great tool for email and the map/gps app is borderline "must" for Tokyo's warren of tiny streets. But many phones have a GPS. As a phone I rate the iPhone a flop. And to be honest, it's so expensive that the three of us working at our small firm have gone back to scheduling calls when we're near a desktop phone.
Socially, the iPad is awkward. I've seen people using them on the train and even at a barbeque and the thing is a far more antisocial device than an iPhone. Given that its dimensions are roughly the same as a laptop, the thing has the same effect: when using one you're saying "I'm concentrating on this now, leave me alone." To drive home the point, the fellow at the barbeque was hunched over his unit (blocking the sunlight, perhaps) in a way that made him totally inapproachable.
As for relevancy of the iPad for business. Keynote is the real hit out of the iWorks suite, a brilliant app for many uses other than presentations. We use it to collaboratively mock up changes to our website, for instance. And I can certainly see that as a presentation platform, the iPad and Keynote would work hand in glove. But for preparing documents, I wouldn't expect anybody to mokey around with a touchscreen more than once.
As for Numbers, the sad little half-baked spreadhseet app, it's one strength is in its support for keyboard operation. If anything, adding a keyboard to an iPad seems to underscore that the platform's not .. complete!
Given the vast weight that spreadsheet apps carry for reporting and communication in the corporate world (in a bank you can use a spreadsheet where building a server-side database is impossible due to compliance problems and politics), excel is both a) vastly more effective and b) such a standard that I'd expect it to be the make-or-break app for any challenger to a Wintel PC (sadly). And OpenOffice on the iPad? I don't seriously believe that Apple would approve that?