BANGOR, Maine — A few fingerprints were visible on the glassy surface of the dark screen until Luke LaBree hit the “on” button of his new iPad and the screen came to life.
The home screen popped up with a photograph LeBree had snapped in Yellowstone National Park, with a series of icons layered onto it. LaBree began touching the icons, and then handed the iPad over to a visitor on the other side of a conference table in the State Street offices of Sutherland Weston Marketing Communications.
“Touch the picture with your finger and then spread your fingers apart,” LaBree said, instructing the visitor, as Sutherland Weston partner Elizabeth Sutherland watched the process.
New to the concept of touch-screen technology, the visitor watched as dozens of photos appeared on the screen. Another touch enlarged a single photograph.
LaBree demonstrated how to touch the screen so the pictures appeared as pages in a book. The screen was bright and the images were clear. Even a virtual book displayed on the iPad is a lifelike experience, as pages turn with the flick of a finger. And the pages themselves look and turn as if they really are a book.
Back on the home screen a few minutes later, LaBree touched an icon that brought up two weeks’ worth of weather forecasts. He brought up a prototype of Sutherland Weston’s workflow system. LaBree showed off some quick sketches he had made of his dog.
The iPad, Apple Computer’s latest touch-screen device, didn’t take long to make its way to Bangor after its April 3 nationwide release. Although its usage doesn’t appear to be widespread here yet, the machines are starting to appear in different offices around town and on the University of Maine campus in Orono.
It appears the only local stores carrying iPads are the Best Buy on Bangor Mall Boulevard, and the Computer Connection store at UMaine, which is closed to the public except for UM students, staff and faculty. Most of the iPads in those stores are sold out.
Reviews, so far, are glowing if a bit confused. No one seems to be able to put their finger on exactly what the iPad is — one man called it half-computer, half-iPod — and some aren’t sure if it will be useful to them right now.
But most people agreed when asked recently if the iPad is as cool as it looks.
“It’s cooler,” LaBree said. “As much as I had read and prepared and dreamed of the day I’d own one, nothing prepared me. It does kind of blow your mind, how fast it is, how bright it is. The graphics, the ability is just incredible.”
The iWhat?
There are few iPads left in Bangor-area stores. Mike Bartkiewicz, Best Buy’s customer solutions manager, said the Bangor store got in at least 85 in the first shipment, then also sold out of its second shipment, with a third on its way any day now. UMaine’s computer store has sold 35 so far, and has only three left in stock, ac-cording to manager Doug Marchio.
The iPad also can be ordered online, which was how Sutherland Weston purchased some of its machines.
But just what is the iPad? And what isn’t the iPad?
Imagine your laptop without the keyboard, and shrunk down to the screen size of 9.7 inches on the diagonal, with the weight of 1.5 pounds. The iPad is that screen, and that’s all. The user does all the rest by touch.
When you turn it on, as LaBree did for his recent visitor, a group of color icons pops up. Each icon has a function. Touch the mail icon, for example, and you get your e-mail and an on-screen keyboard which isn’t quite full-sized but is adequate enough to respond to a message.
The concept of touching the screen is a huge difference from the desktop or laptop computer as most know it, and LaBree says it creates an entirely different interface with the user. That, he said, combined with the iPad’s speed, intuitive nature, brightness and sharpness of image are what set it apart from other netbooks or tablet devices.
“[Sutherland Weston makes] a very virtual product, and to be able to take that product, hand it to somebody, they view it, it has weight and texture in their hand, they can manipulate it, much like if you’re shopping in a store,” LaBree said. “You can turn it over in your hands. You can touch it and move around, as opposed to the separation created by a mouse and a keyboard. You’re now just that much closer to what you’re using.”
The other standout element of the iPad is its thousands of applications — commonly known as apps — that can be downloaded, some free and some for a cost.
Among the free apps are those allowing the user to watch videos on the popular YouTube Web site, or map out directions for car trips, or iBooks, which stores a user’s favorite books in the iPad.
Some of these apps were written for the smaller iPhone or iPod Touch, so the graphics appear a bit pixilated. Since the iPad’s release, however, thousands of distinctly iPad apps have been offered for sale or converted from iPod to iPad.
The iPad, however, has its limitations.
It doesn’t have a camera, although LaBree and Marchio said they’re certain the next version of the device will have that capability.
The iPad can’t multitask. Want to listen to your music files and check e-mail at the same time? Can’t be done, although LaBree said that likely will change too.
Some bloggers have complained about a thick black border around the iPad screen. LaBree agreed at first, wondering why the designers didn’t offer a full screen, but said he now realizes the border gives the user something to hold on to while using the iPad.
The prices may be a little out of range for some people. The most inexpensive version, with the minimum amount of memory, costs $499. The most expensive version costs $699. A version with the next generation of connectivity will be more expensive when it’s released later this month.
Connectivity problems have arisen since the iPad’s release. Princeton University in New Jersey has blocked iPads from its campus network because of a glitch that causes performance problems on the system, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this week.
iPad users on the Washington, D.C., campus of George Washington University, according to another Chronicle story, were having trouble working the device with the security features on the school’s wireless network.
The University of Maine’s iPad users don’t seem to have any of those problems.
To LaBree, the iPad is worth whatever issues there are with the device.
“Once you hold it,” he said, “the cons go out the window, because what it does do just blows your mind.”
From fools to fans
LaBree had been eagerly awaiting the iPad release since it was announced nearly three months ago, but the device’s introduction into Sutherland Weston’s offices started as an April Fool’s Day joke.
The morning of April 1, Sutherland posted this message on her Facebook page: “Just ordered iPads for each staff member. Am I a cool boss or what?!?”
At least eight of Sutherland’s Facebook connections fell for the statement, until someone pointed out the date and likelihood Sutherland was trying to pull one over on her staff.
She was, although the joke began to spark something unexpected.
“We had been talking about iPads for the office, and how they could be seriously productive for us,” Sutherland said. “[The joke] spurred the conversation in the office to another level where folks here were really disappointed. That afternoon [partner Cary Weston] and I bought three online.”
After the purchase, Weston suggested they buy six more iPads in order to equip the entire office.
“Technology is meant to make your life better and easier,” Sutherland said. “The whole goal is not to have something because it’s cool, but to have something because it will actually work for you in a way that you don’t currently work, in a way that will be better. For us, we’re a technology-open company, so we were able to see the inherent benefits in the concept.”
The company spent around $6,000 for their nine iPads, which includes several of each memory size.
In the days since receiving his iPad, LaBree has discovered dozens of other applications, which could prove immediately helpful to the company. The sketches of his dog LaBree made using the Sketchbook Pro app are cute, but they’ve also allowed him to experiment with the iPad’s graphic design capabilities.
Say, for example, LaBree has an appointment with a client who wants Sutherland Weston to design a new logo for his or her company. LaBree can call up his sketchbook app and draw, with his finger, a series of rough designs.
When LaBree’s hit on something the customer likes, LaBree then can e-mail the image back to the Sutherland Weston offices, where the firm’s graphic design team can work the sketch into something more polished.
By the time LaBree returns to his office, the designers might have a mockup of the new logo, which LaBree can then e-mail to the client.
LaBree also has been working with an app that will allow him to develop a kind of work-flow system for Sutherland Weston. Once it’s up and running, the nine employees will know the status of everybody else’s projects for each client.
The iPad also can access an external hard drive.
“My client folders are on [the hard drive], so I can browse through and see every client I’ve got,” he said. “If we’re doing something for a client, if I was in a meeting and I wanted to preview a commercial that we’re working on for them, I can do that.”
The Sutherland Weston employees are still exploring what the iPad can do for them.
A few days after her April Fool’s message, Sutherland posted another notice to Facebook. This time, it wasn’t a joke.
“We gave the staff all iPads today,” she wrote.
“Needless to say, the Friday-itis started early… .”
‘Pretty sweet’
Not only are local people snapping up the iPads as they are shipped to stores such as Best Buy, but the devices also are eliciting plenty of curiosity.
Kristy Rivers and Dustin Stevens were driving around Bangor Tuesday evening when they decided to make a side trip to Best Buy near the Bangor Mall.
“I wanted to come play with it,” said Rivers, a 22-year-old UMaine student who lives in Old Town. “I said, ‘You want to go play with the iPads?’ And he said ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ They’re pretty sweet.’”
The two friends liked what they saw.
The price, for a college student, is somewhat prohibitive. So is the idea that the iPad could be used for note-taking during lectures — the keyboard, while larger and more comfortable than that of an iPhone, is still a little clumsy because numbers and symbols must be accessed on an alternate screen from the letters.
“I thought I was going to be able to take it to class but it’s more like an iPod keyboard,” said Stevens, a 21-year-old Bradley resident. “I can’t get both hands on it.”
Rivers thought the iBooks app might be useful for a college student who has a lot of textbooks. If a student buys all of his or her books online and downloads them to the iBooks function in the iPad, the student doesn’t have to carry all their textbooks from class to class.
The students spent a few minutes playing with the iPads, as did others who wandered over during their shopping excursions.
Marchio said the Computer Connection has had a steady stream of visitors who want to experiment with the new device. The store’s three demonstration iPads are in use most of the time, he added.
At first, the purchasers were faculty members who want to develop apps. Students, however, have been buying them to create apps of their own.
“There’s a student group on campus that has already developed some apps for it, even in this short period of time,” Marchio said. “People see this as the future, and they’re right. This will eventually be how this software is distributed. Eventually course materials will be available electronically. Once you’ve got an electronic form, there are all kinds of new electronic adventures. It’ll be like a new age of storytelling.”