Utah, Behind the Zion Curtain (GlossyNews) — The iPad sucks. Whew, there, I said it, let the games begin. The iPad – single tasking handheld tablet computer that has the ability to enter local area networks and the internet, along with the inability to process at least one of the most popular multimedia data formats on the network — even though it has exceptional graphics. It does not offer stylus or pen computing or any handwriting capability (although, that may be a plus).
maXiPad? So what is it? It isn’t new, that’s for sure. It isn’t the first tablet and it isn’t even Apple’s first tablet. The Newton holds that place. In the meantime, over the last 10 to 15 years, a number of tablets and slates have come out from such fine companies as Fujitsu, Panasonic, View Sonic, and FrontPath, to name a few. But they never really caught on.
Tablets had two, maybe three problems – they were too big (that’s right), the handwriting recognition was just not quite good enough and what you were left with for virtual keyboards, etc (with a stylus) wasn’t quite good enough, either. Too big, and not quite good enough.
Too big you say? Well, you have to understand that this was at the time when right sizing meant ‘palmsizing’. We were on our way down. We were on the lookout for the perfect Pocket PC.
All this was also before the real texting and twittering boom (at least in the US). Before people realized that they could send a lot of information with just two fingers on a tiny keyboard on a poorly lit tiny display.
Before the iPhone.
The iPhone (again, not the actual iPhone as a product, but the whole family of smart phones) and, before that, the Crackberry ™ made all that handwriting stuff moot. People were sick of trying to teach the device to learn their writing style. (This really meant the person slowly learned the machine’s expectations – the machine didn’t learn shit). People began to be more enamored with the CONNECTIVITY and the POWER (read applications – apps) of the device than get hung up over the shitty input requirements.
Slowly, over the years, we fell in love with these little devices that could not only communicate, they were a wellspring of applications that could do things people didn’t even know they needed to do. (I recently downloaded a program to turn my 300 dollar phone into a 59 cent bubble level).
Then came the ebooks. We could download them and have hundreds of books with us to read at any time from our phones. But after a while, we thirsted for something just a little bit, errr, bigger.
We’ve outgrown our phones. At least, that is what Steve Jobs is banking on. He just might be right.
(Re) Enter the Tablet. Embodied this time in a new Apple “gotta-have-it-gadget”. Suddenly we set computing back 10 years and introduced something totally new (?). But it isn’t just a tablet, it is a BIGGER iPhone. All those really cool things we controlled with our fingertips while squinting, we could now do a little more comfortably — without the burden of a laptop (how passe?).
So the (iPad) tablet now has lots of established apps. Except, again, for the second or third time in a generation, Jobs missed the boat. He always forgets you can sell more stuff by making the software and the architecture OPEN. From here Android and various flavors of Linux will eventually cream Apple, which will garner market share strictly through name association and geek loyalty.
And what about all that handwriting stuff? Well, sorry, Charlie, we really never needed it. Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get it, but just like voice recognition, it has its limitations. We figured out we are pretty good at typing, and, soon, we’ll be fingerpainting on our iPads as well. If Apple would have included handwriting input, the iPad would have failed miserably — because no one can meet the expectations of the promises of handwriting recognition. It’s best to just pretend you never heard of it.
But Flash? That may be another story. Apple is banking on the entire InterWebs changing what has become a defacto standard. Like all standards, we hate it, but it works. Apple, you might have screwed the pooch on this one. Although, the failure of any other (Flash capable) tablets to appear quickly in the marketplace to fill the void, may drive all those instant gratifyers over to Apple, even if they don’t like Apple, or try to believe they don’t need Flash, or fall victim to the empty promise of ‘Flash someday’ on the iPax.
The Fujitsu tablets – I have one somewhere – worked great and had a couple USB ports. Tablets really only need 3 things to connect to the world, besides touch screens – usb ports, wifi and 3g capability. Jobs gets 1 ½ out of three on that – Hey, he’s batting 500. USB is the standard you nut, but of course, you want them to have to buy it all from you. And SIM cards used to be standardized, but again, you want them in a closed system so they can’t just throw any old service in there….
So here we go right sizing again, it is a never ending process. We’ll never be completely right, I am afraid. And while Jobs may get extra points for the balls to be first, he still never quite gets it right, and because of that, the iPad sucks. Hope mine gets here today.