The iPad is a major disappointment for me, both in its naming and its specifications. For a device which was hyped for months as the gadget to change the world and Steve’s ‘next big thing’ it fails to deliver the goods.
Some of the rumours had me genuinely excited. The device was to have cameras front and back that would open the doors to augmented video conferencing able to build up a composite of the speaker’s surroundings and use GPS to correctly place the speakers’ in 3D space.
There was the rumour that the device would capitalise on the technological and miniaturisation advances of the last few years to finally make this form factor a reality. Running the latest hardened Snow Leopard, consumers and business users would use the applications they were familiar with in an easily portable form factor. Photographers could carry their portfolio and make changes and adjustments on the fly. Software profits of native Mac iWork suite would finally get corporate prime time rather than meekly handing the baton to browser based tools like Google applications. And then there was the rumour that Apple had solved the problem of pressure sensitivity on the screen would have made every graphic designer in the world sit down and have a quiet private moment.
So what did we get?
Not wishing to detract from the whole by examining the sum of the parts lets look at the base model.
$500US buys you a pitiful 16Gb device that sounds like a sanitary pad commercial with no 3g and iPhone OS.
*Queue crickets*
Let’s have a think about the types of applications that run on the iPhone for a minute. You have 25 000 light weight rather insubstantial applications, a veritable cornucopia of Twitter clients, but I have yet to find a RSS client that doesn’t crumble under the weight of a hundred feeds. Photoshop for iPhone as an example of a photo editor is an absolute joke.
So you splash out and get yourself a 64Gig model with 3g. You are now squarely in Macbook territory and maybe this is the reason for the iPhone OS choice in the first place. Product lines which eat other product lines for breakfast are bad for business.
The other thing people are going to love is the giant kindergarten virtual keyboard that devours half your screen realestate every time you need to use it. Sure posting a comment to Facebook or sending an email and it’s not a big deal but try and do real world things like edit a video or work on a spreadsheet and and I’ll guarantee it quickly becomes a throbbing haemorrhoid of frustration. How would this keyboard scale for tools like Photoshop or Excel or Video editors which try to maximise user workspace? Toolbars are bad enough for developers trying to read as many lines of source code as they can fit into a Courier 8 font without the Marshmallow man of keyboards getting in the way.
So for a base model with no 3g you essentially have a neutered device which is blind. 2009 paved the way for augmented reality applications that use location awareness, either through GPS or video, to provide rich local content and pundits are touting this as an avenue that will explode with growth in 2010. The iPad will not be in a position to benefit from this.
Are there any pros then in this rather bleak landscape. Book and print media content will look very good on the iPad and students with spinal deformations from heavy book bags will rejoice, but how many books or Kindles do you have to buy to get a return on investment for splashing out on an iPad?
For me, sadly, what all the hype actually boils down to is an iPod Touch for giants which adds up to a whole lot of fail in my book.
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