The main reason why you should get an Ipad and/or an iPhone

…or iPhone 4.0 versus the JooJoo pad

• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362393,00.asp
• http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/09/ensos-zenpad-is-vaporware-get-refunds-while-they-last/

Here’s the thing about Apple. They understand that just like you use your car to get to work, your kitchen appliances to make food, and your tv for entertainment, your computer is there for a reason.

That’s not to say that they can’t be expensive and elegant. You can get in your car on the weekend and just drive for the pleasure of driving. Or you may wash your toaster just because you like to see it shine.

But when the tv goes on the fritz right when you favorite show comes on, you don’t get any enjoyment out of flipping through channels of snow, just because you have 500 channels. Much less are you even going to pry the back off the thing to fix it, just because it has screws.

The fact that the Apple mobile OS is tightly controlled and carefully limited, compared to Android or Windows Mobile, is by design. They see that while that thing is a computer, it’s also an electronic appliance like a car or a toaster or a tv, and you didn’t buy it so you could tap on it, you bought it so you could do something with it.

What I’m trying to get at is philosophical. For 99% of the human population, a computer is not it’s own reason for being. Sure us geek developers love open platforms. But they are a horrible user experience.

The iPad, and the iPhone before it, exist totally in a class by themselves. They do what they effortlessly and smoothly. All of the gimmicky animations are actually calculated to make the user feel confident about what is happening. It’s a feedback loop. Yes they don’t deliver multitasking until the 4th gen. But everything they did deliver worked like butter.

Compare the iPad to the two tablets above, in terms of polish and finish. These things matter folks, because they help your computer feel like the stereo or the microwave. You may love your microwave, but you don’t want to program on it in Pascal, you want to heat something. You don’t expect your oven to come missing two out of four burners.

And that’s one thing I saw in the iPhone OS 4.0 preview that everyone seems to be missing. Touches like the utter simplicity of the taskbar for running programs. My grandmother could figure that out in two seconds. The amazingly-focused animations for the folder functionality. Clearly they spent a lot of time and money getting that just right so that anybody can see what is happening when they create a folder, and when they open a folder. The visuals are somehow an analog to what we do with physical objects like paper folders in the real world, not an exact duplication, but you feel like you clicked in a button or turned the page of a paper.

If you are complaining about this or that missing feature still, or if you don’t understand why they implemented background apps the way they did, then the iPhone and the iPad are not for you. Go ahead and get a half-broken open platform device. I’m no Apple devotee, but I applaud them for their priorities.