iPad surprises and revelations

It seems the iPad came before the iPhone - one among a series of revelations from Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a recent lengthy interview he did with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal's D8 technology conference in the States.

I remember hearing rumours of tablet prototypes at Apple nearly a decade ago, so it's not that surprising to me. At the same time there were rumours of Macs sitting there running Windows. This was a project called 'Marklar' after the cartoon series South Park.

But Apple was most likely working on phones alongside slate computers (and who knows what Apple's working on for years ahead right now?).

I say this because even the Newton, Apple's sorta-failed decade-too-early little 'Portable Digital Assistant' (PDA) had a mic and a speaker where you'd expect them to be if it was enabled as a phone, just sitting there all plumbed in, doing nothing.

Not only that, but there used to be a website you could go and marvel at - when you got there, it was just Apple's main site mirrored. But the web address you typed in was the significant part - it was something like 'www.applephone.com' (except I can't remember exactly - a reader might know). And this was also around a decade ago, too.

Anyway, back to the iPad/iPhone. The story goes that an Apple designer at Cupertino (the Californian HQ of Apple) turned up to show Steve Jobs an early version of an Apple tablet, and Jobs realised straight away (as he recounts it, anyway) "My God, we can build a phone with this". So the tablet was put aside and the iPhone was developed.

Jobs initially had the idea of a glass display permitting people to type with their fingers. Within six months, Apple engineers created that display.

I guess it's ironic that the iPad outsold the iPhone on debut. After Apple's iPad was introduced in April this year in the US, Apple sold a million in just 28 days, a milestone the iPhone took 74 days to reach. Actually, by 60 days and just after it went on sale in Australia and a few other countries, iPad sales hit two million.

There were other revelations in the interview, which is available in video form or transcribed into text by Engadget (be warned, the interview runs backwards - it starts at the bottom with some Aussie called Rupert).

There have been other iPad surprises. These are unrelated to the interview which produced a few more: how about that Apple was 90 days away from filing bankruptcy when Jobs returned to save it? Wow.

But in another iPad revelation that surfaced, it's not just gaming apps that are being bought and installed by the truckload on iPads around the world. Half of the top-ten paid iPad apps are productivity tools - these are apps that grown-ups use for work, if you like.

According to Distimo, a start-up that analyses app stats, the top-two paid iPad apps in April were Apple's iPad word processor 'Pages' (which has a Mac equivalent as part of the iWork suite), and Goodreader, a large-file PDF enabler.

But the top free iPad apps also include some work-friendlies - iBooks was number one, Sundry Notes Pro was number six and Calculator XL was number nine.

In the Apple App Store, when only the iPhone was the target, the majority of paid applications in the Top 100 Overall during the entire period of November 2009 until April 2010 fell into the Games and Entertainment categories, Distimo reported.

This is a shift, and totally against a tendency to try and dismiss the iPad as either a toy or as a not-serious contender in the netbook market.

Wrong! Even Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, fell for that one recently, declaring that PCs were not going to disappear and instead said they would 'evolve' into smaller designs, some of which would be tablet designs.

In other words, that everyone was going to try and copy the iPad. No surprises there. (Ballmer's pronouncement was in direct response to Jobs' comments at D8.)

I have absolute faith in Ballmer's predictions, going by his stellar record: I have faith he'll be 100 per cent wrong. It's turned out to be quite a sound way to pick tech trends.

But in yet another surprise, AdMob (which is now owned by Google) has discovered that about 38 per cent of iPads sold in May were used in other countries.

The international launch triggered the spike in the last three days of the month, but whoa, what a spike! And Chinese use has always been relatively high while it hasn't even had an official launch.

That'll be the Foxconn owners and managers and their ilk, I guess.

Japan's very high demand led the international sales at 5 per cent, but China and the UK (where it did go on sale officially on the 28th) were tied at 4 per cent. Canada, despite its proximity to the US, showed up 3 per cent of iPad traffic.

Along with the iPad statistics, AdMob is launching its own iPad SDK for advertisers. The format provides both ads for landscape ads with a side navigation bar as well as horizontal banners optimised to work no matter how an iPad is tilted, writes Electronista. This is apparently in direct response to Apple's iAds initiative.

Finally, Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer criticised for miserable conditions in its factories which has contributed to a very-bad-for-PR jump in worker suicides, just raised wages of all workers by thirty per cent. Thank goodness. Apple claimed to be keeping a close eye on Foxconn, concerned both at the allegations of misery and the bad press, no doubt.

And before you jump up and down about Apple's Chinese workers, Foxconn is a contract builder among several that Apple uses. The very same contentious plant was outputting products for Sony, Dell, Motorola and HP, among others.

If Apple, as rumoured, intends to double iPad production plus release a brand new version of the iPhone on June 7th, you'd want those busy workers to be happy.

Well, I do.


- Mark Webster mac-nz.com