Let me just say: I hate the name of the thing. Secondly I hate apple’s habit of crippling their devices to force you to put up with the technological capabilities of a brain dead carrot. Thirdly: support flash you iStore money grabbing pricks, it’d mean the device would be infinitely more accessible to content creators. Fourthly: I just know your battery life is going to suck and this device will be (like the iPhone) chained to a charger most of its life. Fifth: I think it’ll be too heavy to hold with one hand for any longer than a minute.
BUT, let’s assume someone else brings out a device like the iPad, but with a name that at least appears to have had a woman on the marketing panel and with ability to do more than just suck down overpriced useless apps.. well, here’s some ideas on how to present the magazine.
MartView
I’ll start with the one that’s not vapourware;this actually exists and has been around for some time.
But it isn’t really anything more than an e-book reader for magazines. That’s because it hasn’t got content that has been purpose built to take advantage of the interactive nature.
So that’s the base line. Let’s see what else there is out there.
Sports Illustrated
Aah, sports illustrated. I once had a girlfriend who kept a copy of the swimsuit edition handy under the bed (beats Cleo or Woman’s weekly right?). So I know at least one person who likes the content in the magazine in paper form. So, let’s take a look at their idea for a tablet based magazine:
Here’s a new user getting a walk through to prove it is at least partially hacked up:
Bonnier Research & Development
Another mob have mocked up their vision for content on a tablet device.
Their idea is complete mock up at this stage by the looks of it.
Guinness World Records
More of an annual publication, here’s a look at Guinness’ tablet version:
IKEA Catalogue
I guess this’ll be the next thing we see popping up in stores: tablet devices for searching through the store without having to walk around much. I suspect there’d be a need to try and really direct the “related” stuff in order to get the impulse/proximal buying that current store layouts work so hard to achieve.
The Sun Newspaper
Expect a lot of this in the future, the “I’m low tech so screw you techno hippies”.
They do raise some good points however: things that companies like apple make a pain in the arse. Stuff like sharing content (oh sorry, the DRM doesn’t even cope with one person having 5 devices let alone 5 friends with 1 device), problems with getting a display big enough etc. All things these companies could fix if they weren’t so damned short sighted about extracting maximum dollar even at the expense of end user convenience.
Or perhaps the idea of having computers we carry around is going about it the wrong way. Imagine this concept on steroids:
