Apple’s new iPad seems to have been pretty heavily bagged since the announcement earlier this week. The commentary I’ve read primarily focuses on the lack of support for having multiple applications open, the name, the relatively high cost of the 3G-enabled version.

Over the jump I outline a few of the reasons why I think the iPad will do just fine in a commercial sense.

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Fast Company points to this Engadget post on Layar – a new “augmented reality” application for mobile devices running Google’s Android operating system.

There seems to be a lot happening in this space of late, one of the more impressive demos being MIT’s “Sixth Sense” concept, which was presented at TED earlier in the year. Enkin is another Android-based concept that I came across late last year.

In relation to Layar, Fast Company notes:

And that’s interesting because augmented reality devices on a smartphone are particularly well suited for businesses that need to attract customers to their locations. Imagine a future when instead of picking up a restaurant guide for a city you’re visiting you simply dial up your fave AR app, and filter through its results. Restaurants that don’t have a Web presence in one or many different formats, will simply not get a look-in.

I agree – it won’t be long before small businesses, used to more traditional methods of advertising (Yellow Pages, local papers etc.) will have to also start engaging with social media and networking tools to support such applications. (I would argue they can use these tools for other purposes too.)

But there are other things to consider with such “location aware” services and applications, as (somewhat humourously) highlighted by Mathew Honan in his article for Wired I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle.

In recent workshops I’ve been highlighting the impact of the iPhone (~20% market share but 80% internet usage) and Android on the importance of mobile device support and considering how the rapidly evolving location-aware service space will impact not only traditional web applications, but also social media and networking services.

Given how fast this space seems to be moving, perhaps we’ll need to focus on them sooner than I thought…

(My colleague Jax Wechsler has been following the whole augmented reality meme on her blog – worth checking out if you’re interested in this space. Also worth mentioning for readers in Sydney is Mobile Monday, a monthly event focused on the mobile internet industry.)

P.S. sorry for the silence here of late – with the recent beta launch of the Australian ReachOut.com site and a workshop series for VicRoads I’ve been rather stretched…

The other day I rocked up to Greater Union on George street with some friends to catch a movie. Forgetting it was “tight-ass Tuesday” there was a long line, so I thought “I’ll jump into OneTap Movies and see if I can buy tickets” – then I could jump the queue using their pre-purchased tickets line.

OneTap Movies is an iPhone application that uses GPS to find the nearest cinema, and then allows you to browse the movies and times for that cinema. You can even preview some movies and see ratings.

It’s a great little app, but it’s missing the killer feature: you can’t buy tickets – as I found out that night. (Certainly this is the case for my local cinemas.)

So I thought “I have a fully working browser on my phone, I’ll have a crack at the Greater Union site”. I quietly hoped they had taken the initiative to develop an iPhone specific interface, but I wasn’t banking on it.

I got to the Greater Union site and waited for the ~500k worth of media to slooooowwwly stream down (the home page rates an F using YSlow). The site also uses tables, which meant that the key interface component didn’t display until the entire page had downloaded.

I then started to use their JavaScript enabled interface, only to find that it failed at the first step – choosing a cinema.

So we waited in line, and by the time we got to the desk the session we were after had sold out.

A couple of things struck me in considering this short, but sad, tale:

1. If the Greater Union site used web standards more efficiently I probably would have been able to complete my purchase in a fraction of the time.
2. Buying movie tickets is the ideal application for an iPhone or mobile specific site. Greater Union, and other cinema chains, should be seriously considering a more tightly focused mobile-oriented site for this purpose, ideally targeting devices like the iPhone (but not restricting it to only work on the iPhone).
3. If Greater Union had a web-services API for purchasing tickets (with a revenue sharing model for extra incentive for third-party integrators), then I suspect OneTap would have full purchasing capabilities built-in. This would mean referral revenue for Greater Union from applications they don’t have to build, as well as a better user experience.

Such an approach fulfils a couple of the key principles I outlined in my recent CPA presentation:

• Leveraging the network: OneTap Movies includes user-generated ratings – but the personal utility (finding what’s on) is the primary focus of the app.
• APIs: providing an API would potentially expand Greater Union’s market significantly through third-party applications. (This also relates to the “because” effect.)
• Clip of sale: by revenue sharing Greater Union make more money, through increased referrals, while encouraging third-party developers to leverage the API.
• Embraces mobile and geo-targeting: two concepts I mentioned as playing a significant role in future online apps.
• User-centered, contextual design: mobile access to decide on movie attendance and purchasing tickets fits strongly with user motivations and wants.

So how about it Greater Union?

I just attended the Web Standards Group Sydney meetup and saw another set of great presentations. The two on mobile development were of particular interest, though – a) because I’m presenting at Web Directions South in the same session time as Tim and Pete’s ‘Developing for the iPhone’ presentation (of which tonight’s was a preview); and b) because I’m interested in developing for the new breed of browsers coming on the market.

Ever since the iPhone was released my interest has focused around how the change in context will impact behaviour and usage of such a device (Tim and Pete’s presentation had some interesting stats on this front – tease). The iPhone is not just a phone – and it’s the context of use of having a usable, internet enabled device with a well designed and innovative interface (the multi-touch screen) that I’m really keen to both experience and design/develop for.

Tim, Pete and the team at news.com.au have done a great job with the iPhone specific UI for News Limited – I really appreciate the iterative approach they outlined and how that has resulted in quite a nice interpretation.

During both mobile related presentations tonight the idea of developing a UI for a specific device was raised as both essential – to leverage the capabilities native to the device, such as the multi-touch screen and click to call in the iPhone’s case – and problematic – from the standpoint of standards-based development and the overhead of developing for multiple platforms.

I think that the news.com.au experience demonstrates that standards will still play an important role – peeking under the hood of the iPhone version still shows an awful lot of standards-savvy markup, and from the sound of things it should be possible to “port” the iPhone version to other enhanced mobile browsers in due course.

But I suspect it will be some time before mobile-oriented development will standardise to the point of traditional web browsers. With a PC/Mac/Linux etc. there’s a core, dominant interaction paradigm in place – a mouse, a window, a browser, common UI elements. With mobile devices, that completely changes. The interaction paradigms are quite different between platforms – using a joystick vs. buttons vs. a numeric keypad vs. a QWERTY keyboard vs. a touch-screen etc.

Some level of customisation will be required to make the user experience a positive one on different classes of devices. Hopefully, though, these different classes will start to consolidate fairly quickly, so we can target groups of devices – i.e. multi-touch (see the Nokia iPhone for example) vs. QWERTY vs. tradition – rather than having to support each individual device from each manufacturer.