Most people don’t mind that. People who use computers at work daily may forget that many people, while they also encounter computerized systems on a daily basis, don’t need a computer for work. They want it for fun. They do upload content to sites like YouTube, and Flickr, they click away at their profiles on Facebook and use Twitter, but the kind of production they do on those sites doesn’t require a physical keyboard or an extra large screen. And while there are over 157 million blogs online, the average Joe or Jane who goes online doesn’t engage in serious blogging. The iPad is a casual web browser and social media tool, a video player, possible eBook reader and a casual gaming system, and that’s exactly what most people want.

The only really serious deficiency the first iPad had was the lack of camera, which many of its competitors quickly included, and now the updated iPad 2 comes with two cameras.

Tablets won’t kill laptops, but they, like smartphones, will be much better at introducing people who don’t “need” a personal computer to casual personal computing. The touch screen interface is more intuitive, and once more applications get truly touch optimized, like the iPad version of Apple’s video editing software iMovie, we may see tablet users become somewhat more seriously productive, too.

But Apple will hardly rule the tablet scene alone. Competitors using Android Honeycomb will start gaining more popularity once they catch the attention of bigger masses, and as the tablet market matures, Intel’s Meego, HP’s TouchPad and BlackBerry’s Playbook may all be able to grab a corner of it. Apple has had a head start, its ecosystem is strong and the iPad 2 is a timely update to the original, but the company still has some way to go in refining the iOS. Android, as imperfect as it is in its own ways, has nailed a few interface issues like notifications better, while the iPad forces the user into a do-one-thing-at-a-time mode.

Karri Ojanen

This opportunity was offered to me quite a while ago, and it took some time to make up my mind and then get all the paperwork ready. Though I was a bit sad to leave Toronto, which I had called home for almost three years, everything here feels great so far and I’m happy to have made the move. I’m still pulling things out of boxes at the same time as I’m getting up to speed at work, so it may be a couple more days/weeks until I get to update the blog again, but stay tuned – I’ve been meaning to start writing my UX Lx recap, and have a couple other ideas for posts as well.

Karri Ojanen

Karri Ojanen

Happy New Year! I’ve been tagged by Marta Strickland, who was tagged by Stacy Lukas, who was tagged by Ken Burbary, who was tagged by… (yes, this is a chain letter type of thing) to list seven random things about myself. The way this whole thing works is simple: list seven things about yourself in a blog post, then tag seven new people at the end of the post. Without further ado, here’s my list of seven things, in no particular order:

1. I’m a geography geek. I’m not as good anymore as I was as a 10-year old, but I can still place (almost) any country correctly on the map, remember the names of (almost) all capital cities and love reading about the history of random towns and cities around the world on Wikipedia. I drew a world map from memory some years ago and hung it up on my wall. What’s the capital of Montenegro? Podgorica. Where is Vanuatu? In the South Pacific Ocean, north-east of New Caledonia.

2. I’ve never had any major injuries, broken bones, or operations. I better knock on wood now, but I’ve never suffered any broken bones or been hospitalized since I was born. I played hockey for several years when I was young (now I don’t really care for hockey at all), drove go-karts (now I don’t really like cars) and I was in judo for long enough to earn an orange belt, but I was never a rough kid, and shied away from most tough games other boys played. Maybe that’s why I never really got hurt, and I like to think that my barefoot long-distance running is saving me from a few colds a year.

3. I have a fetish for airports and airlines. Although not as strong anymore as it used to be, mostly due to my environmental concerns and long-distance travel fatigue, I love airports, planes and random facts about different airlines. I used to run an air travel themed record label called Abflug, which is German for (flight) departure.

4. I’m an electronic musician and a deejay. This is not a very unknown, or random, fact about me, but maybe getting a bit weird as I get older? I ran a record store in my original home town, Tampere, in Finland in the 90′s. I’m not one of the brightest stars in the world of minimal techno and house, but I’ve managed to make myself a little bit of a name, toured around Europe, North America and Japan, and released more than a handful tracks on vinyl, CD, and MP3.

5. I’m the only man in my family in my generation. My family isn’t very big, on my mom’s side I’ve got one aunt and uncle and a handful of cousins. My dad had nine siblings, but many of them had no kids, and those who did are/were much older than my father, who’s almost the youngest child in the family. My cousin Kyösti is getting close to 60, and I can say that I’m the only man in my family in my generation.

6. I’m a very bad swimmer. I do dog paddle. I can also swim a bit of breaststroke for very short distances, and awkward front crawl. We had swimming lessons in elementary school, but to me they consisted of kids bullying each other and teachers forcing us to learn quickly or not learn at all. I had no fun.

7. I long for warmer, sunnier climate and think that I was meant to live in Mauritius. Not that I want to speed up the climate change by any means or that I don’t like the infrastructure, services, and quality of living in certain countries in the northern hemisphere, but I’m not a winter person and my skin always suffers from the lack of sunlight and the cold air. When I worked in the United Arab Emirates I seriously enjoyed the days it was 50 degrees (122 Fahrenheit) out. The hotter the better.

Now, here are the rules and the people I pick next (please let me know if you’ve already been tagged, so I can choose a new victim):

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

• Pekka Nikrus
• Craig Ritchie
• Jokko Korhonen
• Matti Keltanen
• Chiva Congelado
• Eero Holmila
• Peter Boersma

Following Musicovery’s idea, I Feel… city guides let users add and recommend places and things to do in a city by mood. Where do people go in New York, when they feel romantic? What about Londoners – what do they do, when they feel hungover? I Feel… which is currently in beta, is now available for New York, London and Toronto.

The site’s based on a pretty simple Google Maps mashup with a cutesey look. But the organization model makes it interesting, and a great exercise in information architecture. What other sites organized by mood or other non-traditional model do you know?

Now I’ve finally taken the time to recreate the blog in WordPress, and get it its own domain, Conceptology.org. I’ll keep the Blogger version up for some time still, but new posts will only be added here, in the new blog. I’ve also moved my RSS/Feedburner feed to the new address. Please let me know if you have any problems connecting to the new blog or the feed, and also feel free to comment on the visual look of the new blog.

The new Joost site is simpler to navigate, too, than the old application solution. But what really matters is content, of course. If Joost doesn’t have programs and channels that people want to watch, then why bother, even if accessing Joost is now as easy as YouTube. I got excited when I heard that Adult Swim (no, it’s not porn, silly) is now on Joost, but soon disappointed, when I discovered that it’s available only in the US, just like Hulu can be viewed only there.