Friday, January 29, 2010

iPad Misses

If the iPad is the best Internet device (as claimed by Apple), then why won't it have Flash?  Why doesn't it have a camera?  Why won't it multitask?  I don't know about you, but running Skype and other IM clients (such as Fring) on an iPhone is almost good - as soon as a phone call comes in, these connections are dropped as the phone call takes priority due to the ridiculous decision by Apple not to allow 3rd party applications to multitask.  Even WinMo can handle this - one of its very, very few wins over the iPhone.

How annoying is it that when you receive a phone call, your iPhone GPS exits and when the phone call is completed, you have to rerun the GPS application and then make your way back to where you were supposed to be because due to Apple closing your GPS application down, you didn't go where you should have?

And no camera?  I mean, really?  On a device today that's being touted as being the best Internet usage device?  OK.  Interesting omission there...

And the lack of Flash for the iPhone is simply annoying.  The lack of Flash for the iPad will make it simply unusable on a great many websites.  So how's that the best Internet experience available today?

It seems - and this is the first time I've been honestly able to say this - that Apple doesn't understand how their users use the technology they are targetting.  Over the years, Apple's limited user base has meant that they can target its limited understanding of computers and get away with it.  Even the iPod was OK as it was (originally) just a music player.  Over the years even the iPod gained Wi-Fi, web browsing and camera capabilities - Apple moved with the times.

Then came the iPhone.  The first one worked on only one carrier and was CDMA, meaning that places like Australia couldn't use it at all and a great many people couldn't even use it in America.  The iPhone 3GS is available on multiple carriers and is a 3G/HSDPA device, meaning it is a useful device (except for lacking Flash, multitasking and a few other things).

Now, because of the iPod's and then the iPhone's success in taking market share from Microsoft, and because Apple's desktop share, thanks almost exclusively to Windows Vista, has more than doubled since before Vista was released, Apple has a much larger target audience.  They don't understand how this audience works.  I don't want a device that will close my IM chats when it wants to.  I don't want a tablet device that I can't draw on with a pen/stylus and bring those drawings into a client OneNote document (or Evernote document, but Evernote definitely isn't OneNote yet).  I don't want a web browser that can't run Flash (or can't access RWW, for that matter).  I don't want a tablet device like this that fails to include a camera for conferencing.  I want a tablet device I can use, and unfortunately, at this point in time, Apple hasn't made any revolutionary, magical not even truly useful technology available in a tablet format.

One revolutionary thing is that they aren't charging 3-4 times what it is actually worth, like they do with their Mac computer releases.  The iPad is priced right about where it should be, well, where it should be if it was actually going to be a useful device.  Maybe iPad 2.0 will have these functions after an OS upgrade to allow multitasking and hardware refresh to add back the camera they forgot...

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although many of the features mentioned in this article would be nice, I think the author is being over critical. The original ipod only connected to a mac and the original iphone didn't have copy and paste, so before people respond so harshly to this device which has only been out for one day they should give it a chance to live up to what its said to be.

Hilton Travis said...

Anonymous - you're missing the point. As I said, back in the day, Apple had a small target audience they could tell how to use their devices. That's not the case today.

Apple doesn't seem to understand how the wider community uses technology, just how the "Church of Apple" users do - and there's a much bigger market out there now who are looking at Apple - but Apple needs to recognise this and realise that they cannot cripple this big an audience into their small minded ways like they could years ago.

The issue is that this device isn't targeted at the wider audience, it is targeted to an audience who can't understand multitasking, who has never seen Flash and who doesn't find a camera on a portable device useful. Hhmmm, I wonder how many people that *actually* is (and not the people who say "I'll buy as I know Apple will overcome the multitasking and Flash in an OS update, but I'll have to live without a camera"). I bet its not many!

Lachlan McIntosh said...

@Anonymous - What iApple iInspired iFanBoi iLab are you from? The iPad nothing more than an "iBig iPhone".

Oh with no phone, and no camera, and no multitasking, and a battery life measured in hours instead of weeks, that you can't read outside, and that has a big Apple logo on the back, that you can't even get until March or April, if you can get it outside the USA at all...

Harsh??!? I don't think the criticism has even begun yet.....