What the iPad is not quite doing (yet)

Every designer I work with seems to think that the iPad is ubiquitous. It's not. No one in my neighborhood has one. My doctor does, but they keep it at home, as the living room convenience device. Of course, something like half the people in the department I work in (as well as my previous co-workers, who I still keep in touch with) have an iPad, Galaxy Tab and/or eReader. Traveling through airports and spending time on planes, I see a lot more of them. And I've started seeing trends.
When the iPad was first rumored in it's final guise, there were numerous comparisons to the Star Trek PADD, or Alan Kay's Dynabook for the more learned and differently-nerdy. These comparisons seemed apt at the time, and I still see them. But watching the use of the various tablety devices, Media Tablets and especially the iPad is not a paper notepad replacement. And it's not apparently even about to be.
Earlier last week, I was in an all hands meeting. About 200 people (and seriously at least 50 have tablets of some sort). Those that were even brought, were in bags, or under chairs. They were with the laptops, as something unsuitable to be used in a meeting. And don't think this means that everyone was paying attention. Most people took notes. They just did it by pulling out a paper notebook or notepad, and writing with pen and paper. Over the rest of the week I kept my head up more, and looked for other behaviors. Indeed, tablets are used in spare moments alone, or in small rooms. They are used a bit as ambient devices, are used to consume content or look things up when the main computer is occupied. A few people here use them as their primary email computer when they come to visit our team room. But they are never kept out during a meeting when the laptops go away. I asked a few people why. Frankly, most of these people are /huge/ Apple fanbois. You can't ask them anything about the device and get a useful response. The first good one was from the person on our team with a Galaxy Tab. She was using it in the meeting... and she was just doing email. She said that typing with the virtual keyboard is too slow to take notes. I reluctantly got a few iPad owners to say the same thing. I had been pulled into that meeting with minimal warning, so didn't have my tablet, or even a notepad. So I took notes on my phone. The hardware keyboard was the killer app here; I have failed to use my previous mobile handset, with an on-screen-only keyboard to do this. But in other meetings I have used my clunky tablet PC to great effect. Handwriting recognition is approaching handwriting speeds, and if you don't live-convert, it's even faster. There's no page flipping, etc. and you just write and draw what you want.
Apple might agree with this assessment. Over the weekend, a patent was found for a stylus for iPads and presumably other capacitive devices they come out with. I think the implementation looks dumb, and maybe is just to get the patent fairy on their side; an inductive tablet pickup (from Wacom could be easily fit behind the screen, and add pressure sensitivity to boot. But I digress. Even Apple has, at least in the back of their head, a concern that the iPad can reach a broader customer base, and be a creation tool, not just the oft-argued consumption tool it seems to be, despite arguments to the contrary.
There also seems to be something about the size and glowing-ness of the iPad that discourages use as attention of the outside world goes up. A fun observation I've made is waiting to board the airplane. There are a lot of people for any single flight, and pretty much all of them have computers, and a lot have tablets. What I'm seeing is:

Condition	In use or in-hand
No employees at the gate	Headsets	Laptop	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Gate agent arrives	-	Laptop	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Gate agent announces boarding soon	-	-	iPad	eReader	Mobile	-
Previous flight is unloading	-	-	-	eReader	Mobile	-
Waiting for your zone	-	-	-	-	Mobile	Boarding pass
Waiting to get your boarding pass scanned	-	-	-	-	-	Boarding pass

No. No one uses paper books or magazines, except on the plane itself. Anyway, there seems to be a general worry that the iPad is too distracting, and too fragile. It gets put away not much after laptops. The relatively fewer Galaxy Tabs and Archos things I see are not much better. They last only another minute and a half. There also /seems/ to be something about the standby nature of eReaders. I never see the idle screens on those; they are pulled out of bags with a page displayed, the people read them, flip pages, continue reading and just shove them away. Not enough data here, but I suspect there's something to be learned with this as well.
So, lest you say I am just anti-Apple (and I do get accused of that when I ask these question), I am not really. I just don't think that any device is perfect, cannot be improved upon, and cannot be competed with. Were I hired to build a media tablet, or software for one, my competition would be Moleskine, and other trendy notebooks. Everything else is converging into mobile devices, one way or another, so I find it hard to believe that paper is not on our near horizon. The iPad, or Playbook or Xoom or anything else that's not just me-too can easily do a lot of this. I eagerly away the near future.

Why are aircards so hard to use?

Aircards is my vernacular at least for a "cellular modem." A data connection device that uses a mobile phone network to connect to. Usually, you plug them into laptops. For a long time, they were in the PCMCIA format, and some are now in Express Card or whatever that is called, but increasing numbers of cardless laptops (like mine) mean people are using lots of USB aircards now. But despite the cable nightmare, that's not the issue. Hell, I used one that required a dongle to go from USB to serial, and the adapter cable was 6 ft long! That was sub-optimal, but it's not the problem. The problem is drivers. They are harrowing. Terribly difficult to install, often requiring multiple restarts. Arbitrary support of different platforms. Setup is basically impossible unless you already know what you are doing. They are too feature packed, so try to take over your WiFi and other connections that work fine. And often, they just don't work. Is it the driver, the hardware, the account? No one can tell. And the best part is that I have a solution. I cannot implement it as I do not have a giant electronics factory. But anyone who does is free to fix it. Here it is: make it an ethernet bridge. I might have used the wrong term. What I mean is, you plug the card into an ethernet port. No drivers at all. It says "I am an ethernet cable attached to a DHCP server, attached to the internet. Anyone care?" The computer sees... a wired ethernet connection. These exist in some forms; I use a wifi ethernet bridge to get an iMac Rev D (driver issues, with WiFi this time) onto the network from the second floor. Yes, you'd need to be able to set it up. Easy. Just make it like your router, and talk to it on a specific IP address. And it cannot charge over ethernet. So? Put a battery in it, which some aircards already have, and charge over USB. Leave it plugged into USB if you want. Cannot be a lot more expensive, if ANY more expensive, than the current hardware, plus driver development costs run to zero. Fire 90% of those guys tomorrow (gotta keep supporting old products). The issues I pointed out above are killing this market. There is no one I know who has seen it (even "I'll never carry a cellphone" types) who is not totally impressed. At least a dozen people I don't know at all have approached me to ask what it is (on the bus, in airports) and apparently are so interested they might have bought one. Etc. Embedding, which they are working on, is plausible but the driver and setup issues make them so hard to use that I cannot see them going really mass market till that's fixed.

Ubiquity may never get here

And its not the technology. Really, 1980s computing and networks could get halfway there. Its us. The people who specify, design and develop software and systems. To be clear, ubicomp -- to me -- is not just the state (which we're already in) of computers embedded in every device, or the almost-there step of them talking to each other all the time and being aware of their surroundings, but when the communication and awareness with which each device or process is endowed can work to actively help us out. Us, as in "the humans." Lets take the dead-simple, totally mobile-free example that spurred this post. I copy a link from Safari (apple product). I immediately go into Mail.app (apple product), type a short message, maybe even with the word "link" in it, then fail to activate the "paste" function before I send it. Why, oh why doesn't the system ask me if I forgot something? It doesn't even have to be interruptive, just disruptive; a status message blinks next to the send button, reminding me. Or, maybe a prominent paste button conditionally appears next to the send button. Or... whatever. This is the core of my issue. Software from all one vendor, one one machine, cannot work together to solve (much less /prevent/) something that has happened to everyone I know, dozens of times. What hope is there for a sea of mobiles, or PAN-connected peripherals to help you accomplish your daily tasks? Unless we all apply ourselves to the problem, and think of users, usefulness and usability, instead of making users bend to the will of the systems.