Editorial: Apple’s iPad – The Good and The Not So Good

So this morning Apple announced their highly anticipated tablet, The iPad, strangly enough, Apple don’t actually hold any trademarks or domains featuring iPad name, but like the iPhone, which was owned by Cisco, that should change fairly soon. So onto the device, the iPad itself is an extremely polished device in way of design, very much in the Steve Jobs vain, sporting a 9.7″ Multi-Touch, multi angeled IPS LCD screen, 16GB-32GB-64GB variants, WiFi only or WiFi and 3G. It comes in at 9.56 inches (242.8 mm) High, 7.47 inches (189.7 mm) Wide and 0.5 inch (13.4 mm) Thick, which is really amazing considering its power and speed. Under the bonnet of the iPad is the Apple A4, a 1Ghz Samsung made, Apple designed SOC that contains the Processor, Graphics, IO, Memory all on the chip, this allows the iPad to render 720p HD video with ease and also flick through photos, play 3D games and change orentation with breaking a sweat, it’s also extremly low power, giving the iPad 10 hours battery use with 30 days standby. Positioned to take on netbooks head to head, this could speel the end to the netbook category that has helped a number of PC manufacturers capture a significant portion of market share in the portable computing space. Can Apple again dominate a market with it’s first product in a new market? Their track record certainly seems so.

So onto what i believe is the “Good”. With this new entry into portable computing, it brings a whole new world of what can be done and could quite possibly redefine this portable space, just as they did with music and mobile phones. During the keynote many of the big App Store publishers showcased apps they had created with just a short amount of time to really take advantage of the new processing power and screen real estate. with it’s intuitive UI and running a modified version of iPhone OS, namely 3.2, if you have ever used an iPhone this will be no problem, you dont have to learn yet another system, which has been a huge downfall for many manufacturers building tablets of this sort.

Lets look at the UI in a bit more detail. The onscreen keyboard is nice and large, and looks easy enough to type on, much like you would a standard keyboard, and with multi-touch, typing at a fast pace should not be a problem either. The home screen now allows you to use custom backgrounds if you want rather than just on the lock screen like the iPhone. It now also uses “panes” to showcase things, for instance, Email, see a list of emails on the left, touch one and it comes up on the right, similar to outlook and other email programs. One pane for your inbox and another for reading the mail. However this isn’t going to be  and shouldn’t be available to iPhone due to the restriction in the screen size, it just wouldn’t scale correctly.

Now for the “Not So Good”.

1. First cab off the rank, No camera, this was one of the first things that sprung to mind, not that it’s a huge loss, especially for actually taken photos, but for video conferencing or webcam use this is a big drawback for me. Why not put on in for Sykpe calls or if Apple ever bring iChat to the device?
2. The next thing was it’s resolution, the screen is in a 4:3, 1024×768 resolution, so that means, no widescreen, strange considering its target is for comsuming media such as TV and movies.
3. No background processes, say WHAT???? Now again, this may not be needed but sure would have helped. here we have a new processor which is better on battery life, so why not add background apps, the iPhone has never allowed third party apps to run in the background because of battery life issues, well now we have a unit with a much better battery life thanks to this new beaut chip but still no background processing, go figure.
4. Next is the web experience, no Flash!, again no Flash, Steve Jobs said this is the best web experience you can get, huh? say what? you can’t use it to watch flash videos that aren’t via YouTube, and webpages that use Flash or elements of Flash will just give you that lovely blue Lego brick, come on Apple, this is important.
5. Now this is quite possibly the strangest, the iPad will utilise a new GSM Sim format called Micro SIM. Now in the US, AT&T will have it for the iPad’s launch and T-Mobile is also working on the format. Australian networks at this stage have made no announcements in regards to the format that i’m aware of even though they have expressed interest in thedevice. So in regards to Micro SIM, if other networks don’t start to support the format, the iPad will then even though it’s going to be sold unlocked, will still be restricted to a very few networks due to the hardware limitation in regards to the sim used. it has also been reported via Engagdet that O2 and Orange have orders in the pipeline for the new format SIM.
6. The Lock screen. The massive amount of wasted space on that lock screen, why not have some news tickers or a weather app, or some information in regards to calender entries or Twitter and Facebook notifications? Just a big blank screen with a tiny unlock slide. Hmmmmm maybe a software update will change all that.
7. And my last gripe is in regards to design, that bezel, well it seems very big, it seems like a large LCD photo frame, why couldn’t they make it smaller? Manufacturing limitation? who knows?

Now onto pricing and availability. With pricing starting at $499 US for the base Wi-Fi only, 16GB and going all the way up to $829 US for the WiFi + 3G, 64GB model. International pricing is to be announced at a later date and ZDnet has confirmed that the WiFi only model will definitely ship to Australia in March but Apple decline to say if the 3G model would also ship, hopefully it will. All Australian networks have however, expressed interest in bringing the 3G version Down Under.

Time will tell if Apple makes this market it’s own, much like it has with all the other markets it’s entered into. Only 9 years ago Apple introduced the iPod and almost overnight smashed every other competitor in the space and brought hard drive based music players to the front and everyone else was thrown into catch up mode, and many still are to this day. Music however, was an already established market when Apple got into it. Another example was 2007, when Apple entered the Mobile phone market with the iPhone, they revolutised the mobile space, noone had ever seen or used a mobile phone with the sort of capibilites the iPhone had in regards to it’s UI and design. Then along came the App Store, that really changed the way the mobile phone market operated, and again everyone was thrown into catch up mode. But as with music, the mobile space was also, an already established market. Can they bring this same dominatation to the portable computing market? I think they can, they just need to convince people they need one, and with more software updates and added functionality, some things just look a little underdone, feature wise. However I do believe it could be a winner with a little more baking, iPhone OS 4.0 anyone??

So after all that, do I want one? Yes, will I get one? Yes. But the big question is, do I need one? Well the jury is still out, I could definately find a use for it, it would replace my iPhone for alot of the stuff I do on my iPhone before I hit up my PC. Although It still has some ways to go though in my opinion, hopefully those things are answered in the iPhone OS 4.0 release….fingers crossed.