I've spent the last few days in Chicago at ABA TECHSHOW 2011, and it was the best of the three TECHSHOWs that I have attended. The speakers were really good this year, there was so much to learn, and (as always) the people there were wonderful and there were lots of opportunities to socialize. I don't know the official attendance numbers, but it looked to be an incredibly large group this year. The keynote presentation alone must have had over 1,500 people in the room, even though I know many people who skipped the Keynote (their loss; Larry Lessig's presentation was amazing). A special thanks to the folks who joined me and Josh Barrett for our iPhone/iPad dinner on Monday night; we had a blast.
Here are a few iPhone/iPad related thoughts from TECHSHOW 2011:
- iPhones were everywhere. To be fair, many of the sessions I attended were perhaps of special interest for people using iPhones (such as some of the cloud computing sessions and the Mac sessions), but it certainly seemed to me that more people were using iPhones than any other smartphone.
- A good example of this: during my Smartphone Shootout session this morning. I defended the iPhone, Alex MacDonald defended Android, and Michael Morse was slated to defend the BlackBerry — but since the time that we scheduled this session, he bought a Verizon iPhone. Indeed, I met a lot of new iPhone users who recently switched over from the BlackBerry, many of whom (like Morse) were waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon.
- iPads were very popular. I was especially surprised to see how many people were using an iPad 2 since they are still so hard to get. There were still more people in the audiences using laptops, but every session had a large number of iPads in use by attorneys in the audiences.
- I used Keynote on an iPad 2 to run both of my presentations, and it worked like a champ. The presentations looked great on the large screens, and even though I had my iPad 2 turned up to full brightness, with the screen on constantly, and used it for about two and a half hours straight, I only used about a third of the battery life. Very impressive. I was using the Apple VGA cable with the iPad. I know that the new HDMI iPad cable has an extra port so that you can charge the iPad at the same time that it is showing a presentation. I'm sure that would be nice to also have on the VGA cable, but as long as your iPad is fully charged when you start, you can give presentations using Keynote for many hours.
- There were lots of iPads in the Expo Hall. Many vendors were touting some iPhone/iPad aspect of their product, and there were quite a few vendors with interesting apps for the iPad. I'll be reviewing some of them in the future. I heard more than one person say that if they had to pick a theme for this year's TECHSHOW, it would be the iPad.
- I got a chance to play with BlackBerry's answer to the iPad, the PlayBook, which goes on sale until April 19. There are some things that I liked about it, including some interesting user interface (UI) features that seem to have been borrowed from the Palm Pre such as putting your finger on the frame of the unit and swiping up to get to the home screen and the ability to flick between cards representing the apps that are running. A lot of the UI was copied from the iPad. But the 7" screen is much smaller than the iPad and the unit is thicker than the iPad 2 (and the iPad 2 feels much thinner because of the tapered edges). I can't imagine any circumstance in which I would prefer that size to the iPad. It's not like it is small enough to fit in your pocket (except perhaps for a large coat pocket.) And the PlayBook only makes sense if you use a BlackBerry becasue it tethers to a nearby BlackBerry to provide e-mail, contacts, etc. I think it is safe to say that while a few BlackBerry users will find the PlayBook to be an interesting choice, Apple has nothing to worry about.
For all of you who took the time to talk with me at TECHSHOW about how you are using your iPhone and iPad, thanks for introducing yourself. I hope that you enjoyed TECHSHOW as much as I did. Mark your calendar now: ABA TECHSHOW 2012 is on March 29-31, 2012. I'm sure that there will be lots of iPhone and iPad topics next year, and indeed the chair of next year's program is Reid Trautz, who for the last two years has been a co-presenter with me on the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes sessions, so you know that he appreciates all that you can do with the iOS devices.