The Land of WII's

My mom is 71 years old and she wants to have a computer. Because—according to her – “I will have a dictionary (she is trying to learn some English), a phone (I showed her how convenient to make oversea long distance calls with Skype), and a movie player all integrated into one device”.

So, I let my mom play with my laptop while I was at work. The result was a disaster. Even though Windows 7 (I have Chinese version installed) is the most user-friendly OS in Microsoft’s history. It is still way beyond what my mom’s reach with minimum training (I spent about 2 hours explaining how things work before I left home). There are so many little glitches everywhere that we learnt to quickly go around them without noticing they are there. But for someone like my mom they are disasters. So, I gave up the thought of buying a laptop for her and decided she was better off with the traditional devices.

I was never an apple fan because of their pricing strategies. Paying 200 dollars more for a computer/phone just because it has an apple logo was never my thing. In the morning of May 28th, after come back home from a grave yard shift, I found myself surrounded by the news of IPad reaching Canada. I needed a reading device, so I decided to give apple a try. I ended up to be one of the first Canadian customers of IPad (the third in queue in front of Bestbuy located at Kingsway).

I wouldn’t say that IPad gave me 100 percent satisfaction. After paying 600+ bucks of my hard-earned money, I don’t even get a file management system? I can’t make a pdf file with my laptop and drag it to my IPad so that I can view it later? Don’t even mention that there are no usb port at all. Well, it felt like you are a PRISONER of the device. I was enraged.

Since 600 dollars is a lot of money and I didn’t feel like to return the device I got after standing in line for 2+ hours. I calm down myself and baby-stepped to explore the evil toy. I wouldn’t yap about the experience (which was painful for first-time apple users like me) of eventually get my pdf book showing with iBook. But the result was surprisingly good. The iBook software is so well made that using it is like reading a real book, but with a dictionary on top of my figuretips (literally). And as I played with different applications, I found myself spending more time on IPad than on my laptop. This device gradually grew from an e-reader to a PIM system and a personal financial management system. I still don’t have the freedom I anticipated when buying this device, but I am a much happier prisoner now. The only complaint I still hold strong is the wireless connection issue.

I let my mom played with the IPad after downloading a Chinese book from iBook store. She just opened the book and started reading. She asked much less “where is …” questions than she was playing with my laptop. Things seem to be at where there are supposed to be and no need for learning.

I used to think the overpriced Apple products were only targeted for younger generation because of their “cool” look. But my mom’s experience told me that Mr Jobs must has done something right to bring his company to today’s success. While my mom still doesn’t have her precious Chinese-English dictionary IPad, I almost have the urge to throw another 1500+ hard earned dollars to buy a mac to develop one just for her. This is just a crazy thought. But who knows, I may become an Apple developer one day if the motivation is strong enough.