I was excited for today. I nearly took the day off so that I could get into the excitement around what was expected to be the iSlate or iTablet but instead was shown the iPad.
Here’s what I like about it:
- The form factor is good. It’s light and thin.
- It seems to be a pretty powerful ‘near-mobile’ device
- The price is a LOT better than what I thought it would be
Here’s what I don’t like about it:
- It doesn’t support flash
- It doesn’t have a camera
- It doesn’t take an SD Card and doesn’t seem to have any USB plugins
Here’s the problem with all this. The device they debuted today is no longer an actual mobile device to me anymore. You can’t put it in your pocket or a purse. This puts it in my ‘near-mobile’ category.
What do the other ‘near-mobile’ devices have? USB ports, media card slots, a camera [some], upgradeable battery, and Flash capability. I’m sorry, but even though your app store has 140k apps it doesn’t mean that I want to depend on the Youtube application every time I want to watch a video someone put up. If they uploaded via Vimeo or a thousand other flash players you’re just plain out of luck.
They brought the iPhone into another market. It’s not a phone and it’s not a netbook. However if they want it to be more than just another media device it needs more capabilities.
Yes, the newspaper and print media industry may benefit from having this device as an option for content, but they will have specific apps designed for use on the platform. I won’t be able to go to New York Times’ website and view videos that appear on the pages. Instead I’ll be forced to use an app.
This guy’s not buying (and I was considering it).
–dez
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
The deal breaker for me? No multi-tasking. With the most powerful processor Apple has ever put out, why wouldn’t I want to listen to Pandora and surf the web at the same time?
I will buy generation 2 (or 3 or 4).
I’m betting it does multitask (and perhaps more) but he’s waiting to tell us… waiting for an as-of-yet unannounced iPhone announcement.
I had no opportunity to download the sdk last night, so perhaps there are clues in there (that I wouldn’t be able to talk about anyway because of the NDA), but the iPad looks to run a superset of the iPhone OS, right? Is it a stretch to think these “missing” features will trickle down then?
Jobs couldn’t talk about anything iPhone because that would have detracted from the iPad and he needed that device to take all te glory (he barely even mentioned past successes to build up to the iPad).
I dunno… silly pre-coffee banter perhaps.
I also didn’t watch the video (what kind of geek am I??), was the NYT a new singular app (as opposed to an Apple app that displayed NYT content and formatting) or was it a website (saved as a Homescreen icon)?
Actually from the hands-on responses from the people at the event they did say that it did not handle Multi-tasking. However I read a few reports later about the possible timing of shipping the units coinciding with the SDK event. Maybe iPhone OS 4.0 will have some multi-tasking stuff associated with the iPad. Right now it looks like the SDK has some iPad only stuff like pop-overs.