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iPad and the amazing Apple PR machine

So the Apple tablet is finally out and it is called the iPad, to the amusement of most females who think they should have been consulted on the name.  I have been following the rumours and hype surrounding the lead up to the announcement and I was having a tough time thinking of another product announcement that had generated as much excitement.  Even the Wall Street Journal joked that “the last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”

Apple is unique in the business world in being able to generate this much excitement without really doing anything.  I don’t know if that says as much about Apple as it does about us, but their ability to keep a lid on information prior to a product announcement seems to set our imaginations on fire.  We can all thus speculate freely about our dream feature set for the product as if we are being consulted for it.  And speculate the world did.  The imagination run wild.  Knowing that Apple dares to challenge convention and deliver on bold new features, pontificators came up with an unbelievable machine that is fast, with amazing screen technology, multi-touch display, camera, all kinds of connectivity options, amazing revamp of the OS, new communication applications and on and on.  Perhaps it was only inevitable that Apple will disappoint with the announcement of the actual device.  No matter what though, it is undeniable that Apple is king of PR and many companies can learn something from the magic that they seem to be able to create around their products.  Their approach to clean design with a philosophy of “less is more” seems to carry them far when applied to PR as well.

Before I give my quick impression on the device I wanted to briefly marvel at the collective consciousness that was the iPad announcement event.  Like myriad others I decided to follow the events via a live blog, in my case Engadget’s.  Engadget’s servers were struggling to keep up with the traffic as thousands of people were refreshing their screens to keep up with the event minute-by-minute.  Midway through the event, Steve Jobs mentioned that the device had an IPS  display.   I had never heard of an IPS display so I quickly Googled it and clicked on the first search result which was a Wikipedia entry for Liquid Crystal Display.  In the table of contents, I found IPS as a subcategory of liquid crystal displays and clicked on it to go to that part of the article.  I proceed to read a brief paragraph explaining what In-Plane Switching (or IPS display) stands for and I get to the end of the paragraph that reads: “as found in the latest product from Apple, the iPad.”   Let’s step back for a second and think about this.  Within the 2-3 minutes of Steve Jobs announcing what kind of display the iPad would have, someone felt it was important to quickly go and add this little bit of information to the Wikipedia entry for that technology.  Simply amazing!   Before the announcement event was over, I was already getting emails from two of my companies about what the iPad implications to their business.  It just felt like the whole world was watching.

Now; when it comes to the product itself, my opinion pretty much lines up with the consensus.  It is a good device but very much short of what it could have been.  My first impression was that this was a larger screen iPhone:

• The good:  long battery life, fast processor, compatibility with existing iphone apps, the iBooks application, revamped email app, large onscreen keyboard, $30 unlimited 3G data plan.
• The bad: no multi-tasking, no camera for video-conferencing, no USB, no SD slot.

The one area where Apple exceeded expectations was its aggressive pricing of $499 starting price for a basic iPad (expectations were hovering around $1000).

The above combination sets the stage for a the iPad clone wars.  Apple has proved that they can create a whole new category of products with fast followers.  As my partner Scott has argued in a prior post, a fourth screen device could have myriad little uses around the home.  Many other manufacturers have already entered the tablet game, and it is bound to get more competitive.  There is a lot of space to innovate based on the iPad’s unimaginative feature set, but their aggressive pricing means that this will be a brutal game.  Apple has an additional advantage with the thousands of app developers that already develop for the iPhone.  With incremental effort, they can unleash their creativity on the larger screen real estate of the iPad.  That perhaps is what in the end makes the iPad a trully innovative weapon: its community of thousands of developers.

One area we are interested in tracking is the response of the Android universe to this trend.  Android is quickly becoming the second largest universe of mobile apps.  And it could form the basis for a quick response by other OEMs/ODMs/device retailers/carriers to the iPad challenge.