"Magical, revolutionary"... these are among the many words Steve Jobs and company used to describe the iPad during the device's announcement Jan. 27.
Is it, though? Right now, it kind of looks like a big iPhone or iPod Touch ...
The majority of people I have seen discussing the iPad online or talked to in person about it have a lot of hate for the device. Are these your typical Apple bashers feasting upon the latest fresh meat from Cupertino or are there some valid points among the name-calling and panty liner jokes?
While the iPad is a neat device, many of the naysayers have good points when it comes to what isn't included. I'm not a belittler. I'm looking forward to trying one out and, maybe, buying one if I like it. I thought I'd use this post to bring up some intelligent pros/cons about it. If that doesn't suit you, halt your reading now!
Only one friend I've talked to about the iPad had positive comments about it and looked forward to trying it out. The rest, however, had some of the following to say:
- "I want to show you something, and I'm really excited about this, it's the iPad mini (pulls out his iPhone)."
- "No multitasking, no cameras (front or rear), hideously over-size bezel, no Flash in browser, no input ports of any kind ..."
- "No multitasking, no camera, no HDMI out, no USB without adaptors, no Adobe Flash support, no widescreen, no thanks."
- "It's a netbook without Flash, without a keyboard and a crappy OS laden with DRM. And for only 3x the price of a netbook!"
You get the idea.
I want to touch on a few of these points, of which Apple has missed the mark or deliberately planned, and offer up my opinion, drawing from experiences I've had with the iPhone and other mobile devices I've used, such as netbooks, laptops and tablet PCs.
Cameras:
A lot of people, including myself, expected the iPad to have a user-facing camera for video chat. Apple, after all, has been building cameras into iMacs and Macbooks for a few years now. Why not include a camera in this device? You could be sitting in your favorite easy chair, iChatting with your buddy or grandma. Maybe it has to do with how the iPad will be held? In a desktop or laptop (or netbook), the screen stays in a relatively fixed position when you're using it. The hardware vendor can count on where the position of your face is in relation to the camera, most of the time. If you need to adjust, simply tilt the screen. The iPad, according to Jobs at the Apple announcement event, has no true up or down because it "adapts to the way [you] want to use it." Taking that into account, maybe it is too cumbersome to use for video chat. After all, you'd have to hold it in a fixed position for the entire conversation. The iPad, at 1.5 pounds, isn't that heavy, but I know I'd get annoyed with holding it in a certain way in front of me for more than a few minutes. Excluding a camera is not a deal breaker for me. I don't video chat now, nor do I know anyone who currently does. For those who do, it would have been nice to include in the iPad, especially when it's seated in the optional dock.
Fantasy time. A really neat innovation would be to somehow have the camera behind/inside the middle of the screen instead of in the bezel. Being able to video chat while looking directly at the screen would make the act of video chatting practical, or at least more personal. Now, when you video chat, the image of the person you're chatting with shows them not looking directly at you, but looking at their screen (looking at you looking at your screen). With the way video chat works now, it's like you're standing face to face talking to someone, except you're looking at each other's chins instead of looking at the eyes. Before this gets too crazy, though, let's consider this could be a pretty creepy device. If you want to block the webcam in your monitor now, black electrical tape works great. An in-screen camera would raise a whole new line of privacy concerns.
As far as having a camera on the back, just get a real camera! Laptops and netbooks don't implement rear facing cameras, so I don't know why anyone would expect the iPad to.
Flash:
I'm not surprised about the exclusion of Adobe Flash support on the iPad. Apple, with many revisions of the iPhone OS, has had plenty of chances to include it. You've probably already read the back and forth between Apple and Adobe regarding Flash. Interactive Flash content on the iPhone would be hard to use and I don't find myself missing it. However, full Flash video support would be nice and I do miss that. Flash on the iPad should be a standard feature and it detracts from that "wonderful experience" we're being promised. I was surprised to see Jobs browsing pages in the iPad demo that would show the big, ugly "missing plug-in" graphic. Didn't they check that out before the show?
The deeper question to ask is why is Apple (namely, Steve) being so critical of Adobe? I believe Adobe was largely responsible for making Apple products a success for many years. How many graphic-artsy, video-centric folks do you know that use Apple products for their trade? Adobe, after all, could just decide to no longer produce Apple software. Do you think Adobe or Apple would suffer more for this? Adobe already offers most, if not all, of their products for Windows. Apple, on the other hand, has no Photoshop replacement waiting in the wings. I think Tim Gunnneeds to bring Apple and Adobe into the same room and give them a good "make it work" talking to. Heck, I guess they could go Silverlight. Oh, wait, maybe they are?
GPS:
The details on GPS are a letdown. The WiFi + 3G version will have AGPS (Assisted GPS). With all that room inside of the iPad, Apple couldn't fit a true GPS? If full GPS capability isn't included in all the models, it will cripple the usefulness of many of the available apps when taken from the iPhone to the iPad. WiFi-only customers seem to be out of luck if you're somewhere without a signal. Maybe Apple doesn't want you to file a lawsuit against them, because you, being so smart, decided to mount your iPad on your car's dash or windshield in order to have the baddest-ass navigation display on the planet.
Aspect Ratio:
I don't work for Apple, but if I had to guess, the decision to stick with 4:3 at 1024 x 768 came down to a decision having to do with compatibility and cost. Compatibility in the sense that going with a 16:9 ratio may have too greatly skewed non-iPad optimized apps running on the device. True, the pixel-doubled iPhone and iPod Touch apps in Apple's videos don't fill the iPad's screen entirely, but they do appear to fit nicely. Browsing the Web in portrait mode on a 9.7 inch 16:9 screen would probably not be pleasant, either. If you have a 19 inch wide-screen LCD monitor, for instance, try putting it into portrait mode and do some browsing. Chances are you'll be doing some side scrolling (a true Web browsing annoyance on any platform), because most Web content is too wide to fit in a narrower presentation mode. True, Apple could do some things, such as make it 16:10 or increase the resolution, but that brings in the cost factor. I think high-end screen features like HD and widescreen were first on the chopping block when Apple set their price goals for the iPad to be below $1,000.
HDMI:
I'm not surprised that HDMI was excluded. Apple's look and feel in all their devices is all about clean lines. I have no doubts about their new A4 processor having the capability to pump out 1080p HD video, but putting a port on the device would be design blasphemy as it's seen by Apple. You'd think there would at least be a 30 pin-to-HDMI cable. Apple's agenda could include other reasons for limiting the external display output, though. Consider the Apple TV. Having a fully HD-capable iPad has the possibility of cutting into the Apple TV's space. This is kind of a long shot, because you get a device like Apple TV so you can leave it attached to your entertainment system all the time. The iPad could breathe new life into Apple TV by working with it as you watch your content via Apple TV on your television. Not that I'm an Apple TV fan. In fact, I've never used one. Apple has to be cooking up something. Picture this: You could be watching your TV show/movie on your Apple TV while the iPad displays information, extras and all kinds of other information about what you're viewing at your fingertips. Using a movie's menu system on an iPad could eliminate the clunky, remote control-driven experience we're used to on DVD and Blu-Ray discs today. Let's not forget that if you have to stop watching on Apple TV, you can take your iPad with you and pick up where you left off.
USB:
Another missing feature that wasn't a surprise, but definitely a letdown. As an amateur photographer, I'd rather plug my camera or SD card directly into the iPad rather than use their camera kit. I think USB is excluded for two main reasons. One of them, again, is Apple's clean-line design. They could put one port on it, sure, but then people would just want more from there. No way is Apple going to make their new golden boy gaudy by sticking USB ports on all sides. The second – and principal – reason is expandability. Apple charges an extra $100 to double the storage capacity from one model to the next. Including USB ports would open the floodgates to a new generation of jail breakers and cut into sales of the higher-capacity, more expensive models. With USB flash drives getting so tiny, I have no doubt this was part of Apple's consideration when it came to leaving off USB. True, the camera kit will give you USB and SD and I have no doubt jail breakers will find a way to use these for storage expansion. The fact that they stick out of the iPad's 30-pin connector all of the time, though, will make using them as a permanent storage expansion solution kind of cumbersome. Speaking of the 30-pin connector, if it weren't for all of the accessories that require it out there, I think Apple would have eliminated that, too. Charging could be adapted to the MagSafe connector, like what is found on Macbooks. Syncing to iTunes could be done over WiFi or Bluetooth. I predict the 30-pin connector will be history within the next four years.
Micro SIM:
WTF is a micro SIM, anyway? Many people had similar reactions after the Jan. 27 announcement. It's a form factor that has been around awhile, just not widely used. It's obvious this is just a strong-arm tactic by AT&T to prevent anyone from using their existing service on the iPad. I'd love to know the insider secrets that keep Apple and AT&T married so tightly together in the U.S., especially after so much customer dissatisfaction when it comes to AT&T in general. If I were to buy an iPad and had a choice of carriers, I'd get a Verizon iPad over AT&T, just to stick it to them.
Multitasking:
Before I got my iPhone, I had an HTC TyTn (Cingular 8525) that ran Windows Mobile 6. It was absolutely horrible at multitasking. The experience was awful. True, it was probably just a terrible piece of hardware to begin with, but I did not miss multitasking when I switched to the iPhone. Background apps on my 8525 would constantly crash or require killing via a task manager and the battery would drain significantly if I didn't bother to kill them. I pulled the battery on that phone quite often. Task notifications, such as for a new instant message, also were bad about robbing the focus away from your current application no matter what you were doing. Yes, I'm sure it's gotten better on mobile phones since then, maybe even on Windows Mobile (or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days). I'd really like to see how Android handles it. Anyway, we're talking about the iPad here. Getting away without multitasking on the iPhone has been acceptable for me so far, but the iPad should include it. Task switching on a device with more screen real-estate is a more realistic option on the iPad. Because it runs the iPhone OS, though, I don't see the iPad featuring multitasking until they branch the OS into something more iPad specific. A drawback about having such a vastly popular catalog of iPhone and iPod Touch apps that run on the iPad is how to effectively and design a task-switching and notification interface that will be compatible with them while they still maintain compatibility with the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's not like the iPhone OS doesn't run background apps. It runs plenty of them, such as e-mail, SMS, iTunes ... only the things Apple directly controls, of course. As competition among iPad-like devices heats up, Apple will eventually have to cave on multitasking.
Software:
The iPad's applications are going to be what makes this device popular. Love or hate the iPhone, there's no denying that many of the applications that have been created for it changed people's expectations for smart phones. Re-watch the beginning of the iPad's announcement event if you still don't believe that. One question on my mind, and on the minds of many, is am I going to have to re-purchase the apps on my iPhone to be able to use them on the iPad? Chances are likely not for this one, which is a good thing. I've read that you can transfer iPhone apps to an iPod Touch. I'd assume you can transfer to an iPad as one of your five eligible devices that content can be transferred to. I am positive that developers will charge a premium for iPad apps and will have different prices for buying apps that are either iPhone or iPad optimized. Maintaining the code differences for the two form factors does take extra time. As a software developer, wouldn't you?
Conclusion:
So, after all this, will I anxiously await online for the iPad pre-ordering system to launch? That's a tough call. I've had a drink of the Apple Kool-Aid several times and it tastes good, my friend. As I try to keep myself focused, though, I would like to hold it in my hands a use it a bit before making an impulse buy online. Despite the obvious pitfalls, the iPad has potential to become very successful, just like the iPhone did, over the next few years. Will other manufacturers sit by in the face of Apple's latest innovation this time? I doubt it. Will this be the end of the netbook? Not yet. Will there continue to be plenty of iPad skepticism and nay-saying? Yes. Will they be as wrong as they were about the success of the iPhone? Maybe.