My thoughts on the iPad
Let me start by saying that this isn’t a positive post. I’m an Apple fan like the next geek, and I generally love their products. I’ve owned Macbooks, iPods and iPhones, but the iPad is one product that I don’t envisage myself buying, and here’s why…
Weirdly spaced icons
What’s that all about? When I saw the home screen, I wondered if it was accidentally set to ‘visually impaired mode’. And then I realised that this was what Apple intended. You know, in case you’re wearing gloves or something. I guess this is because the apps are from the iPhone App store, and if they were any larger, they’d look all pixilated and horrible.
Multitasking
You can’t multitask on it (at least not until it’s inevitably jailbroken). Steve Jobs remarked that netbooks are just inferior laptops. I won’t give him a lot of argument there, but at least I can watch a movie and tweet about it to FilmReviewFriday at the same time on a netbook. I know the iPhone doesn’t have multitasking, and even that’s getting tiring, but on what should be a fully blown OS is just unacceptable. Instead they opted for an operating system that’s better suited for phones and games consoles. The iPhone OS is a pretty good OS, there’s no doubt about it. It’s pretty stable, but then, everything’s sandboxed, so there’s no reason to suggest it wouldn’t be. But it’s not fit for purpose on devices that are meant to function in the way that iPads are supposed to. The iPhone OS is very similar to Android OS, but I can’t imagine anyone rushing out to the shops to buy a computer than can only run Android.
iPhone app look awful
Who at Apple thought that the solution to this would be either blowing everything up to epic proportions would be the way to go? Even worse, lets have it the same size as it is on the iPhone. So you end up with this giant area of black surrounding it. Which brings me onto my next point.
Massive bezel
The bezel would be the HUGE ass area surrounding the screen itself. Do I really need all that space? Do they expect that all their users have inflamed thumbs and therefore they need that so that they don’t inadvertantly press something while they rest the iPad awkwardly on their lap and type on that shitty keyboard.
It looks like a giant iPhone
I can’t imagine what Apple was thinking. What on Earth made them decide that scaling up the form factor was going to make it visually attractive to customers? On the plus side, now I can know how my boss feels when she holds her iPhone. Not that I’d want to.
Widescreen video
I think even Steve Jobs was ashamed of this feature when he showed a video of Star Trek in widescreen. The aspect ratio of the iPad is closer to 4:3 (ie, old-style televisions), than the 16:9 ratio that the iPhone offers.
No Camera
Why the hell not? You’ve got this machine that has WiFi and 3G (optional!) capabilities, and yet, if you want to video chat, or record something to upload to YouTube, you’re fucked. You need to use a regular computer for that. But don’t worry, at least you can work on your presentation in iWork, explaining to the board why your department spent a huge chunk of the budget on tampons for guys.
The criticism I don’t buy into:
I don’t believe that everything thrown at the iPad is valid. Some people clearly expect too much of it. It is, after all, only a giant iPhone.
No ability to do software/web development
Come on! Was that seriously the going through your mind when you saw the announcement? “Shit, I can’t create awesome websites and applications on it.” If you have a netbook, I would say that it’s pretty darn likely that you own at least one other machine. One that holds all your games, maybe some *ahem* porn, and your dev tools. If you don’t own more than one other machine, and you’re intending to do your development work on a netbook/tablet, then I suggest you getting something better than an iPad, but also an actual machine with some real oomph under the bonnet.
No flash
I’m conflicted about this because I see the argument of both sides. Flash is ubiquitous. If you watch video online, or play Farmville (like my wife) or whatever awesomeness is cooking over at Adult Swim. That said, the web is moving forward, and as part of that, online video outlets are starting to use HTML 5 to offer its content. YouTube recently announced that it too would be supporting this, and you now have an option to view their videos this way. As Joe Hewitt has said:
The thing that bugs me about Flash is it only exists because of IE’s shittiness. If Firefox/WebKit were at 100%, nobody would author Flash.
And he’s right. There’s not a lot keeping Flash on people’s machines, apart from Internet Explorer, that is. But what about those games? Well, there’s still room for Flash, just not the plugin. Enter Gordon! Gordon is “An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript with SVG”. And it works on the iPhone too! It’s still in the early stages of implementation (it’s literally only two weeks old!), but it has a great future ahead of it, and definitely serves to free us from that restraint.
Summary
So, at the end of the day, I don’t like the iPad. Sure, it’s only v1, and Apple tend to churn out product refreshes about every 12-18 months, but if this is only the starting point, I don’t hold out much hope for it’s future.
I guess it just goes to show that not everything Jonathan Ive shits is worth its weight in gold.
last.fm
