Don Reisinger states that Apple needs to fix 10 things with the iPad before release.
The iPad is now less than a month away from hitting store shelves, but there are still significant issues with it that Apple hasn’t addressed. Here are some of the issues Apple needs to think about before the iPad hits store shelves in April.
- Where’s the 3G iPad?
- The 3G-pricing conundrum
- We need Flash
- Displaying iPhone apps
- Accessory pricing
- iPhone OS 4.0
- The Kindle competition
- Connectivity
- AT&T’s network
- No camera? Really?
Where’s the 3G iPad?
Journalists are having a field day. Apple claimed they’d ship the WiFi iPad in 60 days. It’s about a week overdue and everyone is crowing about it being late. Honestly. And this fuss about the 3G? More whining. There’s no news here.
The 3G-pricing conundrum
A conundrum is defined as
1. “a riddle, esp one whose answer makes a play on words”
2. “another word for a question used by journalists wanting to sound clever”
There’s no puzzle here. The pricing is one of the cheapest plans on the market in the US. How is this a tricky question?
We need Flash
No, we don’t need Flash. We have done fine over the last three years with the iPhone. Performance is bad on desktop processors, what will it be like on Mobile? (Trick question: it sucks. I have Flash on my N800. Flash sucks).
Displaying iPhone apps
Was this guy even listening – iPhone apps resize to fill the screen at the touch of a virtual button. So there’s 150 000 apps out there that ‘just work’ and there’s people scrabbling to make custom apps for the iPad.
Accessory pricing
Again, do some research. It works fine with a Bluetooth keyboard. It doesn’t need much in the way of accessories. To be honest, people have inflated ideas of what they need. My USB port on my Air got used for two things. The very occasional printer and USB memory sticks. What else would you really use? And it uses the iPod dock port so there’s a shitload of stuff that will, you guessed it, just work.
iPhone OS 4.0
iPhone and iPod touch OS updates will be available for free now that Apple has ditched that stupid accounting method. That’ll also count for the iPad. And this is a journalist not doing any research and commenting on an operating system release that isn’t scheduled or announced.
The Kindle competition
The Kindle is not competition. If people want to read novels. then yes, an eInk screen will likely be a better option. But this is a fraction of what the iPad does whereas working as a eReader is pretty much 100% of what the Kindle does. So, yes, in some micro-percentage, they’re competing but it’s the Kindle percentage which will take the loss. iPad will do well enough even without the Kindle.
Connectivity
If Don had his way, we’d all be using floppy disks to transfer shit everywhere. You’ll use your iPad cable to transfer files (there’s a shared folder) and if you don’t have it, you’ll use this thing called the ‘network’. Duh.
AT&T’s network
So, who’s network would you suggest Don? I’d suggest Apple use the company which recently won the performance study reported by PC World at the end of February. Do your research, Don. It was only reported everywhere in the world.
No camera? Really?
Think about the use case for this. You’re seriously going to use iPad to take snaps. It’s immense. How are you going to hold it with any sensible utility and push the button? I can understand the desire for a front facing camera for videoconferencing and that should have been the point Don was making. But taking pictures of flowers or of funny things at random is just the wrong use case. That’s why we have cameras in our phones.
And there we have it. The big bag of stupid.