Apple iPad Review – Part 3 – What We Didn’t Get
This has been the article most widely written already, but I figured I’d throw my two cents in as well. While a number of the things that have been left out make sense if you think of them from a business perspective, very few people give a hoot about that. So, they complain. You can’t really fault either side, and it’s the way it’s been since forever. That being said, let’s get to it.
Camera – No front or rear facing camera. I can understand why they’d not put a rear facing camera on this…ever. Who’s going to take a 10″ tablet device anywhere for photo opps? Almost everyone has a cell phone, with a camera, so throwing another on on this device just doesn’t make sense. Now, a front facing camera, I can get behind that. While I personally have only used our Macbook’s built-in camera only a handful of times, I think that one of these days, video calling really will take off. I honestly expect a camera in version 2 with video capabilities.
New input method – I drank some of the Kool-Aid with the blogosphere predictions on a new input method. The one that got a lot of push behind it was the touch sensitive rear panel that would have some super-awesome keyboard that we’d all figure out how to use in a few days. I was also even on board with the split keyboard on the bottom two corners of the screen. But instead, we got a slightly-to-the-left iPhone keyboard. It’s not the worst thing in the world, as this device is not for writing novels, it’s for reading them. But still, they need to slap up a few more patents and seriously think about that for future updates.
Multitasking – Everyone wants it. Apple refuses to give it to us. I’m not sure if they have one major reason why, or several, but they must have A reason. Battery life, processor bottlenecks, something else? Perhaps it’s just something they didn’t want to have for version 3.X of their OS and it’ll be in version 4.0? I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but for now, it’s not here. This doesn’t bother me personally TOO much on my iPhone, but I think it’s pretty necessary for the iPad.
Flash support – Boo freaking hoo, Adobe. Yes, a lot of stuff runs on Flash (to include a lot of annoying ads). Yes, part of the reason is to keep us from watching Hulu. Mostly, it comes down to performance, if I had to guess. Flash is a giant resource hog, and Apple is firmly entrenched in getting HTML5 as the standard. YouTube and Vimeo already support it with a lot of their stuff, so how long do you think it’ll be before other video providers do the same thing? Sorry, I don’t feel bad about this not being there. Yes, it’d be nice if it were, but I see the forest for the trees on this one, and I don’t care there’s no Flash.
I/O options – No HDMI, USB, Firewire, nothing. While I’m sure there are a lot of potential uses for those things, I have to defend Apple again on this one. Very few people are going to plug this into their TV to watch video content. That’s the Apple TV’s job. I think the USB port is a cost saving measure. Sure, it’s only a couple bucks, but if you really need it (and c’mon, who REALLY needs it?), you’ll pay some ridiculous amount of money for the dongle.
Widescreen – At first, I was completely dumbfounded by this. Then it was pointed out to me that if you pay attention to the orientation of the device, it’s meant to spend most of it’s time in portrait mode, hence the location of the dock port and the home button. Now, if you put the device into a 16×9 format and look at it that way, it’s just too skinny. So, while formatting it for widescreen HD video would have been nice, I think video consumption isn’t this baby’s biggest job. I guess we’ll just have to get over the black bars, because I don’t think they’ll be changing it.
Multi-carrier support – Yes, it’s very nice of them an AT&T to offer us no-contract data plans at a very reasonable price. However, it would have been super nice to have the option of a different carrier. This actually isn’t a HUGE deal because you’re not locked into any contract with them. However, if you happen to live in an area with crappy 3G coverage (like most of my family back east), then you’re stuck if you take this thing out of your house.
More new stuff – I was a bit underwhelmed at what Apple had to show us right off the bat. I’m not sure what I wanted to see, but I wanted to see more than what was there. Perhaps agreements in place with various media outlets and running applications to show off what this thing could do. Alas, they were so worried the “secret” was going to get out, they kept everyone away. Now the real work is getting started, hopefully enough so that when they launch in March, there will be some killer apps to convince the masses this device is worth having.
Apple TV integration – For some reason, I thought they would use this device as another screen to view Apple TV content on. After the announcement, I realized that because of how this thing manages media (by syncing through iTunes), you can have all the same content as your Apple TV does. Just not wirelessly. Which leads me to…
Wireless sync – Isn’t it time that Apple got on the stick with wirelessly syncing these devices? If the Apple TV can sync wirelessly, why can’t my iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad? I think it’d be pretty slick to have the latest episode of Caprica that I missed tonight (b/c Time Warner decided that SyFy HD wasn’t going to come in for whatever reason – anger) was available to me first thing tomorrow morning, where I could fire off the download on my PC, and once it was done, turn on my iPad, give it a minute to sync, and watch it in bed. Or on my lunch break. I guess you can still download your season passes more than once if you’ve paid for it (can you?), but if you rent a movie on your PC for later, you have to drag it in there and sync it up to get it loaded.
Love – Very few people are giving this thing any love. I would say that most bloggers, most financial analysts, every competitor, most comedians, and a lot of people in general are hating on this thing. Which leads me to the conclusion of my iPad Review.
Part 4 – Overall Conclusions and Predictions
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