Well, there we have it. The Apple iPad is officially no longer just a rumour. It’s a lovely new shiny device. There’s a lot right with it; go to the Apple website to see about that. However, there’s also a lot wrong with it. Three key things really disappoint me.
Firstly, in spite of the misleading name, this is not a ‘pad’. You cannot write on it. There is no handwriting recognition, no stylus. Surely one of the key functions of a tablet should be that you can write notes on it and do away with paper pads? A cleverly-designed operating system would help no end in managing pages and pages of scrawled notes by making them searchable, date-stamping them and adding other meta-data. OK, handwriting recognition is still a technology that has a long way to go but Apple didn’t even try to address this.
Apple’s second failing is around synchronisation. Here we are being enticed to buy yet another device to add to our collections of desktops, laptops and smart-phones, yet the iPad lacks any means of synchronising our vast media libraries of photos, videos and music between devices (maybe Apple wants us instead to buy additional copies of our files from the iTunes store?).
Without synchronisation, the user is left scrabbling around with wires, connectors and external hard drives moving Gigabytes of files from one machine to another. It’s all very dull and very frustrating. My wife won’t be happy: she always shouts at me when I spend a Saturday morning copying files.
My third gripe is to do with connectivity. Apple’s days of being the hero underdog are well gone. It is now in the business of abusing its faithful followers by trying to fleece them as much as possible from their hard-earned cash. Selling them expensive Apple branded accessories and clutter so that they can perform simple operations such as attaching a digital camera is the order of the day. Surely a USB attachment would have been a smarter choice than Apple’s proprietary 30-pin adapter?
Let’s hope Google and Dell bring out something that addresses these issues with their new joint venture to build a tablet. My hunch is that they will. Although Google is certainly more evil than it used to be, it’s no match to greedy Apple.
I don’t think the Ipad will be as successfull as the iphone, as it is not as knew and revolutionary.
Thanks for your comments Chris. I hadn’t realised that that was the reason for no flash support on iPad and iPhone. I thought it was just a general feud between Apple and Adobe. Apparently Steve Jobs recently slagged off Adobe at an internal staff meeting calling them a “lazy company”.
Lack of Flash support is nothing new. Adobe have been waiting for Flash support on the iPhone since 2007! Apple say that Flash performance on their mobile OS is so poor (due to inherently flawed logic in Adobe’s code) that they have chosen not to include it. Adobe have a whole team working on improving Flash support for mobile devices now though – it’s looking good on Android. They are saying that they can’t gain access to the right Apple hardware APIs to significantly improve performance on the iPhone/iPad, which could be grounds for anticompetitive behaviour surely..? In my opinion this is a short term issue; in 2 years everyone will have migrated to HTML5 which the iPad does support!
And what do physicians and healthcare companies think of it? Some interesting feedback here: http://www.worldofdtcmarketing.com/files/076425d0dccd87a878a6127c7d289978-961.html
Hmm. Getting the impression that it’s just a big-print iPhone.
And yet I still want one, because it’s shiny.
Just read about two further major issues: there’s no multi-tasking. Forget listening to Spotify whilst you read a book or write an email. Also, there is no support for flash. This means many websites will simply not work on this device. Come on Apple. Sort it out! This is basic stuff…