The Blog of Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

The first ten chapters of the book are now available on the Apress Alpha program.  This is a program whereby you commit to buying the ebook at the normal price, but you receive PDFs of each of the chapters as they become available.  It’s good for readers as it gives you access to the material before the book is committed to press.  It’s good for me and Apress because it allows us to get great feedback on the book, again before it’s committed to press.  The book can be found here: http://www.apress.com/book/view/143023198x.

I’m writing is on my iPad, which I have had for a couple of days and I can confidently say that it is a *fantastic* piece of kit. I bought if off the back of an independent survey that came out with the result that only a tiny percentage (1.5%) of people regretted buying one and I can really see why.

People have been asking me how I would describe it, and on the way to work this morning I thought of one way to describe it. I think the iPad is to traditional computing devices what the mobile phone is to telephony.

The iPad brings your data one degree closer to you than is possible with traditional computing devices. Just like the mobile phone changed interpersonal communications by decreasing the virtual distance between you and people who wanted to communciate with you, the iPad (and the devices that come after them) decreases the virtual distance between you and what you own and what you want to have access to in the cloud.

Importantly, the iPad is not a big mobile phone and it’s not a small laptop – it’s a new thing that as yet doesn’t have a name.

In ten years time we’ll look back at the age before we had iPad-class devices and think “how did we manage without these” just as we wonder what we ever did before mobile phones.