The iPad is Confusing
I might be pulling a Rob Malda here, but…
No USB, no camera, no IR or RF, no multi-tasking, stuck on AT&T. Lame.
In all seriousness, I am at a loss with this product release. It’s not even a larger iPhone, because as we all know, an iPhone has a camera and a GSM chip. The iPad, on the other hand, is just a large iPod Touch.
Firstly, Apple blatantly ripped off Delicious Library with their iBook software. Conveniently, Delicious Library’s iPhone app was rejected from the iTunes store recently…
The unit itself is lousy for an ebook reader, it’s not an e-ink screen, and costs twice as much as a Kindle. The lack of a USB port means you can’t easily hook up normal peripherals, forcing you to buy custom 30-pin dock connector compatible devices, like a camera connection kit. Why couldn’t they just include a USB port?
Any rumors of home automation were obviously false, which is a shame given the potential this could have had. Imagine wall-mounting an iPad into a slick holder, and having it be a digital picture frame. Then, touch it and it’s a jukebox-style controller for your stereo, or your thermostat. Take it down and it can control your entire entertainment center with custom per-device controls. An on-screen wheel for volume, scrubbing controls for playback on your TV…it had such potential. It could have revolutionized every gadget-center living room.
Instead we’re stuck with this odd combination of various devices. It can’t play arbitrary video formats, so you’d have to transcode everything. It doesn’t play flash, so while that’s fine for YouTube, there goes Hulu, The Daily Show, the BBC iPlayer, etc. And while HTML 5 supports native video, Mobile Safari’s implementation leaves much to be desired, not to mention none of the popular streaming sites use it yet. Obviously this is yet another attempt to generate revenue by iTunes store purchases. Pretty lousy for those of us who like to keep their movies in their original format without transcoding.
The most perplexing thing about it is that there’s an available keyboard dock that lets you mount the screen vertically while typing on a keyboard in front of it. You know, like a $#@*$&% laptop! I mean, if that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what does. If Apple’s device was so revolutionary, why would you need a hardware keyboard sitting in front of it in a configuration that’s been around for 20 years?
The consensus seems to be that most of us were expecting an Apple tablet form of a MacBook. Instead, we got a tablet iPod Touch, and no one is really sure what to make of it. To me, this feels like Apple swung and missed, big time. We’ll see in 60 days when it’s finally in the hands of users.
