I’m planning to give an iPad to my parents specifically because (based on my experiences with the iPhone) the odds of the iPad breaking down / freezing and requiring advanced technical support are much lower than a standard desktop / laptop.

I was thinking about iPhones and iPads the other day and something occurred to me: the iPhone is literally the one electronic device that I have never been asked to fix or support. I’m “that guy” – you know, the son / brother / cousin that’s “good with computers”. The one that everyone calls on when they get a virus, or when they need help installing a driver, etc. (it also doesn’t help that I was a professional system administrator and a physicist – when there’s a family tech problem, I can’t play dumb!) I’ve fixed my family & friends’ PCs, Macs, printers, scanners, joysticks, keyboards, mice, you name it.

Except the iPhone.

Almost everyone I know has one. But nobody has ever called me up to complain that their iPhone was dead, or behaving strangely, etc. The tech just works.

So, given that the iPad is based upon the same operating system, I’m willing to bet it will have the same degree of stability. That’s exactly why I want to give one to my parents, who live 4,500 km away from me.

Why is the iPhone so stable compared to other computing devices? Well why do other computing devices lock up in the first place? Usually, when it comes to desktop PCs, you’re looking at 3 common causes:

Poorly-written applications
Running out of resources due to too many applications running
Bad hardware

Poorly-written applications are handled by Apple’s app store approval process. Yes, it’s true that by buying an iPhone or iPad you are buying into a platform that restricts the software that you can run on it. But it also means that the software is vetted for poor performance and malicious code. As for running out of resources, the iPhone limits multitasking to a select set of Apple applications. You can’t multitask 3rd party apps, which is a deficiency in some regards, but also ensures that each application gets full use of the machine’s resources. (I do hope Apple adds some sort of multitasking support down the road, but it’s not a show-stopper for me).

Finally, if it’s bad hardware, you’ll have to go to a service center anyway.

Now, I can’t claim that a device like an iPhone or iPad will never freeze, but in my experience it happens so rarely that it’s not a concern. In the 2 years that I’ve owned an iPhone, it’s only locked up once, and powering it off and back on fixed the problem (the other thing about the iPhone OS is that applications are separated into “sandboxes” – a poorly behaving app can’t interfere with another app’s files).

If the iPad did for some reason go completely south and needed to be reloaded, then you’d need a PC or Mac running iTunes. The “restore” process is simple and doesn’t require any sort of technical experience – basically just plug the device in, click “Restore” and you’re done.

So to sum it all up, I can’t be 100% certain that the iPad is going to be a rock-solid device – but given what I’ve experienced with my iPhone (and the lack of support calls from my friends and family), it’s my believe that the iPad will be a low-maintenance device that’s suitable for the non-techies among us. Hope that helps.

I don’t think Apple failed to sell it right. They just weren’t selling it to bloggers. Take a look at this week’s MacBreak Weekly podcast (http://www.twit.tv/mbw – ep #177). You’ve got Leo Laporte and a host of other very prominent tech personalities lining up behind the iPad. This might not be the device for the “blogging technorati”, but this is *definitely* a device for the non-techie to get online and surf with.

Look at it this way:

A Kindle DX costs $489. For that, you get a device with a beautiful greyscale eInk display and 4 GB of RAM. It can read books, and that’s pretty much it. But if you’re just looking to read novels, it’s a great device.

However,

For $499, you get an iPad with 4 times the amount of memory, and a color LCD display. Yes, the display is not as easy on the eyes as the Kindle, however the color factor becomes very important if you’re looking at textbooks, reports, business documents, etc – As a physicist, I can tell you that colour is a *very* important way of conveying information in scientific textbooks and documents.

In addition to the ability to read eBooks and PDFs well, the iPad also offers a whole other host of internet connectivity features. Email. Web browsing. Instant messaging. Not to mention complete access to your entire library of existing iTunes music and video content.

Plus, you can still run the Kindle reader *on* the iPad (and I’ll presume that Adobe’s going to be updating it for the larger screen – remember, they’re in the business of selling books, not hardware). So you can still access all your Amazon content too.

Now, if you’re a student or educational institution that is considering an eReader, which one would you buy? And don’t say the regular Kindle – while the price is cheaper ($250), it can’t display textbooks properly at all.

I think the iPad is a no-brainer for the educational market, and that’s just one potential area. I’m planning to buy one for my parents. They’re both 76 years old and not terribly comfortable with technology. But they do want to email their kids & grandkids, and watch videos of their new twin granddaughters. They also like flipping through photos and reading the newspaper online.

For them, an iPad is the perfect device. The screen size is large enough that they won’t have problems making out text. The user interface is intuitive. My father often gets confused when multiple programs are running on his Mac, so the lack of multitasking abilities won’t be a problem for him. On top of it all, because it runs the iPhone OS, I’m going to have to do much less family tech support.

Like I said, bloggers may be disappointed in the device, but that’s not because it isn’t a capable piece of hardware (and dare I say it “a game-changer”). It’s because they’re feeling left out because they aren’t the intended market. Apple has developed a user-friendly technology that literally does put the Internet in your hands, and it’s going to appeal most to people that are otherwise intimidated by technology – that generally doesn’t include bloggers.

I’ve posed your question to Andy Ihnatko, who actually had his hands on the thing & some face-time with Apple reps. I doubt that the info is out there yet, but who knows? He’s going to respond on this blog later today.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by drtablet: New post: Apple Tablet – “text” podcasts, Apple TV revitalization? – http://tinyurl.com/ye96y8q...