The Gap
Posted: January 28th, 2010This is my obligatory iPad post. All throughout the many years since we began hearing Apple Tablet rumors every time an Apple announcement/conference was imminent I’ve have constantly been against it. I don’t like tablets and I thought (and still think) that the introduction of one by Apple would stop them from making other, better products to prevent cannibalization of their tablet.
Obviously, Apple can’t make a netbook. It would be just as unreasonable to expect Ferrari to introduce an actual Ferrari-branded car below the $2000 price line. But Apple could’ve made an ultra portable – think 10-11″ Macbook Air. Now I doubt that will happen.
There is certainly a product gap between the phone and the laptop but neither the netbook or this ipad are going to fully fill it in my opinion.
From an OS perspective, the iPhone OS was the natural choice and the only one that made any sense. The lack of Multitasking in non-native apps is not the biggest limitation of the OS currently. In fact, that’s mostly a non-issue. It’s also temporary. The original iPhones, before the 3GS, simply didn’t have the power to handle multitasking properly so Apple disabled it. They will no doubt enable it in a year or so. For now it’s not a priority (since it is a MINOR issue) and they probably don’t want to anger everyone that doesn’t own a 3GS yet. I would like to see Multitasking in an instant messaging app. The hack that apps like IM+ use (having the connection to IM networks established in their servers) is nice but it’s slightly inconvenient since it takes some time to “restore” the connection to the iphone.
I’d also rather see them overhaul the terrible notification system which is far inferior to Android’s notification system.
The biggest problem however comes from the fact that it so heavily sandboxed/compartmentalized. As a use case example, you can’t easily expect to browse the piratebay in safari download a .torrent, add it to the bittorrent client, pass the resulting downloaded file to the zip extractor app and proceed to add the resulting music folder to the ipod app music library.
And You can’t easily add a video to the iPad (or the iPhone) without having to go through iTunes. Or dealing with format conversion in (too) many cases.
As for Flash support, I finally understand how Zararthustra felt when he came down from the mountain and realized that people didn’t know god was dead. Flash is dead.
The three most positive surprises were the ePub format support, the ability to run the iPhone apps you already purchased for your iPhone and the 500USD price point. I have no interest in 3G since I already have it on my iPhone and I’m not going to pay for two data plans.
Unfortunately there were also three rather negative surprises: the non-widescreen non-720p display and the lack of a front camera (or any camera for that matter) and the low storage of the entry model (16GB, seriously?).
In conclusion, inadequate video support, lack of a front camera, the inability for apps to truly cooperate in a PC/Mac fashion, a bad notification system, a poor display and low storage in the entry model – all problems present in the iPhone but somehow made much more significant in a tablet make the iPad rather unappealing. The potential is there but will Apple be able to exploit it or will the iPad be another Apple TV? Only time will tell but I think at least some of these problems will remain for the foreseeable future.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Related posts: