© Apple

Updated with addi­tional commentary.

Originally titled ‘What the iPad really is, what the iPad may become’

In November 2009, I wrote about a unique app that changes the way peo­ple do pho­tog­ra­phy with their iPhone in The Missing App & What Lies Ahead article:

CameraBag might be just the first of a new gen­er­a­tion of imag­ing apps to grace the desk­top space; one that does just one thing and deliv­er­ing it with an upper­cut instead of mul­ti­ple & tir­ing jabs; the desk­top imag­ing space has been any­thing but bloated, com­pli­cated & over­priced, the arrival of such app will open up some new hori­zon of what can be done and how to do it simple.

Apple has raised the bar once again, dubbed as the iPad, the tablet form device is their answer to the NetBook. Sporting the now stan­dard accelerom­e­ter, com­pass & multi-touch screen dis­play, the iPad is a giant iPhone uti­liz­ing a custom-designed, inte­grated, mobile-optimized Apple A4 chip run­ning a slightly mod­i­fied iPhone OS on a 1024-by-768 pix­els with 132ppi pixel density.

The big sur­prise isn’t the long-expected Apple’s own chip, the 10-hr bat­tery nor the gor­geous soft­ware UI, it’s the 4:3 aspect ratio that Apple them­selves killed with their intro­duc­tion of widescreen dis­plays, who’d want 4:3?

Adam Lisagor made an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion; while it is tech­ni­cally log­i­cal & con­ve­nient for Apple or devel­op­ers, it is unin­spir­ing both cre­atively and artistically.

Scientists & math­e­mati­cians have long argued that 3:2 is the golden rule for uni­ver­sal size ratio, visu­ally amus­ing & sci­en­tif­i­cally cor­rect doesn’t mean it’s technically/physically log­i­cal, but unlike a lap­top or TVs, the iPad is designed to be used ver­ti­cally, like most mag­a­zines & paperbacks.

Regardless of the pixel den­sity or size of the dis­play, the iPad is a dig­i­tal can­vas that gives us a touch­able art with its excel­lent multi-touch gestures/accelerometers & the App Store’s 140.000 and count­ing app cat­a­log — given our 10 fin­gers and unlim­ited imag­i­na­tions, the iPad is a magic pad that’ll bring our art to life, instantly!

What the iPhone lacks was a screen size that makes sense, what the desktop/MacBook lacks is multi-touch fullscreen dis­plays that lim­its our live inter­ac­tion with what­ever we are doing, imag­ine, instead of click and drag­ging the mouse while fid­dling with a never-ending list of key­board com­mand, we are actu­ally touch­ing, pinch­ing, swip­ing our sub­ject directly on screen, for the first time ever, we are finally oper­at­ing on our patients with with real clamps & knives like doc­tors have been doing all along. Would you trust a sur­geon doing it via a key­board and a mouse?

Like the iPhone, the iPad is unveil­ing that miss­ing link between us & the dig­i­tal space, and tak­ing it fur­ther for our day-to-day and pro­fes­sional lives. Like the iPhone, it to rev­o­lu­tion­ize per­sonal com­put­ing to the point it makes per­fect sense, those of you who think they’re not pow­er­ful enough, who think that iPhone needs its own finder to play with the file sys­tems, should really have some moments alone and ask this ques­tion: “What is the pur­pose of all this?”.

The rea­son how the iPhone has made Apple a $50 bil­lion com­pany, and the rea­son why mil­lions of peo­ple around the world are crav­ing for it, is the same rea­son why you we all pay a hefty price for a car that actu­ally hurts the envi­ron­ment; there’s a need for it, and all it need is an engine and a set of 4-wheels to make a car; and the iPhone with its gor­geous mul­ti­touch screen dis­play, a home-button, on/off & ringer switch with vol­ume con­trol is what it takes to func­tion as a phone, heck, car keys are almost irrel­e­vant these days, and Apple is lead­ing us to that vision where sim­plic­ity is a bliss.

Even at such a low price (start­ing at $500), Apple is going to have a tougher time sell­ing it to the mass, the iPhone, a pock­etable com­puter that actu­ally does make phone calls and the MacBook & the iMac are proven enti­ties of what peo­ple need computer-wise; pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing or book-reading aren’t as straight­for­ward, down-right-simple as lis­ten­ing to music from your iPod, it takes more than just push­ing the play but­ton for peo­ple to get used to the iPad, but the poten­tial is def­i­nitely there. We just need to grow our imag­i­na­tion, widen our hori­zon and open­ing up to the infi­nite space of pos­si­bil­i­ties… we need to progress and the iPad has now finally came along for a whole new expe­ri­ence of per­sonal computing.

Photography, as Steve Jobs said dur­ing the iPad launch, has never look so beau­ti­ful on any device, ever. His vision, along with the bril­liant minds at Apple is to close the gap between tech­nol­ogy and lib­eral art — when things are so well-thought, well-planned and finely exe­cuted, doesn’t that make it a form of art?

The CameraBag app—being the inspi­ra­tion of the afore­men­tioned piece—is a good illus­tra­tion to what the iPad is capa­ble of, and how visual artists and pho­tog­ra­phers can inte­grated it as their tool-of-the-trade. There are hun­dreds of thoughts and ideas cir­cling around the web on what the iPad can really do, spe­cific to pho­tog­ra­phers, Photojojo posted some ideas on (what I also think) how it can be used by pho­tog­ra­phers, let alone it’s IPS screen designed to con­sis­tently dis­play col­ors and bright­ness from any angle, and a lit­tle bonus of ‘Photo Frame’ mode (the icon next to the unlock slider)… devel­op­ers, cam­era mak­ers, are you imag­in­ing yet?

What a great way to start the new decade.