Happy iPad Day.
So. the iPad is announced, and just like so many people, I’m going to toss in my two cents. Because I know you care. A lot.
I’ve seen a lot of lukewarm reception to the announcement today from my friends online as well as some disappointment. I’ll admit that I wasn’t as completely blown away as I thought that I would be, but that’s the thing with the hype machine. Even if Steve Jobs had walked out with a tablet computer that made turkey sandwiches for you while giving pretty serviceable fellatio, there’d be a group of people who would be disappointed that the sandwiches weren’t ham and the suction hole didn’t accommodate the complainer’s unusually small penis.
Let’s run down a few of the niggles that I saw the most on my Twitter stream today and see if you agree or disagree with these things.
The number one complaint/disappointment that I saw was that there was no Flash Player on the iPad. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. The rumor mill was always very certain that what has come to be the iPad would more likely be based on the iPhone OS than OS X. No Flash Player on the iPhone means no Flash on the iPad. Easy assumption.
The gripe is that sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Pandora and the like aren’t useable on the iPad. YouTube, just like on the iPhone, is an included app. Vimeo has a mobile site that works fine on the iPhone, and Pandora has a native iPhone application, which will run perfectly on the iPad. Most sites that serve audio or video via Flash are already working on or have recently released HTML5-based beta versions. Mobile Safari on the iPad will support these.
Would it be easier if the iPad/iPhone OS included Flash Player? Sure. But, it doesn’t. And, it’s going to be a long time (if ever) before it shows up on either device.
Another grumble that I saw was that the new Apple A4 processor is underpowered at 1GHz. It’s a 1GHz chip in a one pound device that gets 10 hours of battery life! How can you not be just a little amazed by that? And besides, how do we know that it’s underpowered? Have we used the device yet?
Which brings me to the part about it being “magical.” I do think Jobs and company threw that word around a bit too much. At first glance the iPad doesn’t seem as magical as it could have been1, however, have any of us actually used the iPad for a decent amount of time? No. And until we can, I don’t think any of us have room to judge how “magical” this thing actually is or isn’t.
Finally, there were the grab bag of problems people saw with the device. There’s no camera built in. There’s no SD card reader built in. There’s no OLED display on the iPad. Put your favorite hardware shortcoming here.
Would a lot of these features have been a good idea to include? Absolutely. The omission of the camera is personally the biggest head scratcher out of the lot, but the rationale for all this is very simple. You could have had all these things but there’d be no way that you’d be paying anywhere near $499 for the 16GB WiFi model. Apple wanted to make a device that would be affordable from the get go. That’s a little bit unlike them, but then again, the iPad is a little bit unlike anything they’ve done, even with the feature parity to the iPhone.
A friend wondered why he would need an iPad if he already had a smartphone and a laptop. He says that for him the iPad replaces absolutely nothing.
He’s right. If your needs are met in the devices you have and the workflow you employ between those devices, you’re probably not going to want an iPad.
But, for others, the iPad makes perfect sense. Robin’s Macbook is getting long in the tooth. It needs another new battery2 and it has served her well for over three years. Based on her usage patterns, the iPad would be a perfect next device for her computing needs because it does very well all the things that she enjoys doing:
- Web surfing (primarily news sites)
- iPhoto
- Blogging on WordPress
- Occasionally email (she uses her Blackberry 90% of the time for that)
- Occasionally writing Word documents (Pages for iPad will save .doc files)
Why get another $999 laptop for those tasks when a $499 iPad will do just as good a job?
For me, the iPad would make a fantastic companion device. When I work with new business teams on presentations, I lose the use of my laptop for whole days at time. This is because we’ll use my laptop to run the Keynote presentation. If I had an iPad, I could keep up with email a little more easily than I do on my iPhone. I could take better notes while the teams practice. And, with Keynote for iPad, I could actually be making changes to a copy of the deck while they work on the one that’s running on my laptop. The prospect of all this leaves me feeling emotionally erect.
Is the iPad perfect? Far from it. The iPad is pretty cool but has lots of room to grow. The first iPhone was the exact same way. An OS upgrade or two coupled with a second generation of hardware will certainly put it closer to earning its “magical” moniker. But, I will reserve true judgment one way or another until I have a chance to actually use one.