.Dust

Dur­ing the recent Acad­emy Awards Oscar Night Apple broad­casted a com­mer­cial on the upcom­ing iPad.

The first thing that you will notice in the video is that the device and the User inter­face looks great. You will see some nice activ­ity per­formed by those guys and you may def­i­nitely fall in love with the device itself, just like I did.

I would now sug­gest to you to look at video again and focus not on the device but on the sur­round­ings. Just look at how peo­ple is using the device, their pos­ture, their hands, fur­ni­tures, etc. etc.

Here is the video:

When I saw the video I noticed that some of my con­cerns about tablets usabil­ity are def­i­nitely true.

The com­mer­cial lasts 30 sec­onds and show a few peo­ple per­form­ing dif­fer­ent actions on the iPad.

Ok, now, I sug­gest to you to go back to the video and look how these guys are hold­ing the device. I did a very basic and fast count and I can see the device being hold in one hand 5 times and sit­ting on their laps 15 times.

It seems that the best acces­sory for your next tablet are you laps. The good news is that nobody is going to charge for that acces­sory. The bad news is that you will have to buy that desk where your feet will rest on.

I think there are def­i­nitely some usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions to do here.

Let’s have a look at the iPad vir­tual key­board. (I am using the iPad as an exam­ple since it is the only prod­uct of which we already know some­thing or, at least, that I can talk of based on pub­lic informations).

As you can the key­board will take the whole screen width and if you want to effi­cient you will have to user both hands to write on it. That basi­cally means that you will need to keep the iPad on your laps or on another sur­face. Inter­est­ing to notice that both iPad acces­sories shown in the pic­ture are inclined toward the user to make read­ing eas­ier. And that’s not casual.

In the past we have all appre­ci­ated Apple choice of mate­ri­als, col­ors and fin­ish­ing on their prod­uct. I still love my uni­body alu­minum Mac­Book Pro so much for that. Is alu­minum body a good choice for the iPad? I do not think so. If you are going to put your iPad on your laps how big are the chances that it will slip because of the mod­est grip?

This is not an iPad only issue. All of these range of device will suf­fer from usabil­ity problems.

We are all very excited about the avail­abil­ity of these kind of prod­ucts on the mar­ket. I have already seen and tried a cou­ple of devices that I would def­i­nitely buy, but I think they will not be as usable as we think, at least for some tasks.

For this rea­son I do not really think that these range of devices will be able to replace net­books in the whole mar­ket. Maybe net­books will dis­ap­pear leav­ing space to bet­ter, cheaper and opti­mized note­books, but there will be always some space for those kind of devices.

Related posts:

1. Ride The Tablet Way
2. The Smart Blocks
3. Device mor­ph­ing
4. Android, Still A Missed Opportunity
5. Toshiba TG01. A Quan­tum Leap In Mobile Design (Thanks To Qualcomm)