Even though Steve Ballmer famously suggested that there is “no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share” every new smart phone is measured against the almost messianic term “iPhone killer”. Will this one be able to compete with the unstoppable force that is Steve Jobs’ almost blasphemously divine creation? This, of course, holds even more true for every new tablet on the market, which is consistently described as trying to catch up with the undisputed market leader, the iPad.
Which device will be able to taint their glory and thus earn the killer status remains to be seen. I do feel, however, that the double divinity have somewhat of a killing capacity themselves. Two weeks ago, I inherited my mother’s iPad 1. She had bought it as an interesting toy but, as sometimes happens with interesting toys, she never really transformed the initial fantasy of owning the thing into an actual practice.
So, for two weeks I have been the lucky and happy owner of an iPad and it is killing me. The permissiveness of the ipad’s lavish array of possibilities functions as superego enjoining me to enjoy. A hedonistic microcosm has installed itself in the incessant feedback loop between me and my precious tablet. Of course there are prohibitions. I am a serious man and not about to play Angry Birds or engage in any such foolishness. No, I am enjoined to desire the optimisation of my own work routines and the salvation of human kind. This is serious business, it does anything you could possibly want, it gives you access to anything anywhere at any time, all that is lacking for the ultimate completion of every thinkable potential is to incorporate this thing appropriately in noble pursuits. Desire can finally be fulfilled.
This optimisation of work as a process is a stressful occupation. I have installed Instapaper to profit from the superior experience of reading web content. I have installed Reeder to have optimal conditions for the perusal of my rss subscriptions. I have bought Goodreader allowing me to read and annotate my extensive collection of PDF articles as found in my Dropbox. I have downloaded the Kindle app in order to explore the reading efficiencies of ebooks. Of course I also have the Twitter app to keep me up to date on different news and research areas. That is a lot of reading!
And then comes the organisation of time and knowledge. Of course I have the standard calendar but I also got Omnifocus to remind me what I should actually do with my time. And of course the Omnifocus user experience is so nice that I light up the iPad to change the due date of a task even though I have the Mac edition right in front of me. I have Evernote to store God knows what. I am still not sure whether Evernote on the iPad beats Evernote on the MacBook as a note taking tool during conferences, but the iPad superego enjoins me to enjoy, to fulfil its potential and my own along with it.
I am a bit tired. The last thing I do before falling asleep is read on the iPad. I wake up to the sound of TuneIn Radio Pro playing France Culture. I have the iPad alight next to my computer while I work so that I may use it as an extra screen, use it to display the text I am translating instead of printing it, use it to display my to-dos in Omnifocus so that I will never forget what is to be done.
When I am not sure what to do I look for new ways to use the iPad. And when I can’t think of any new ways and I feel all worn out, I use it to write a blog post about my iPad and how it is killing me.
