It has been a week since the formal announcement of the Apple iPad and now that I’ve watched the keynote video a couple of times, read many blog posts and commentaries, shared some thoughts with my friends and fellow ACN’s, I thought I would share my thoughts and feelings about the iPad.
First, as I mentioned in a previous post, hardware specifications hold my interest a lot less than software and what the device can do. If I have one complaint, one small disappointment, it is with the lack of a front facing camera that would support video chat. While I almost never use this feature on any other device I own, largely because my friends and peers rarely use this feature either so I have no one to video chat with, having it in the iPad might have lead me and by extension others in my circle to start. It’s a small quibble for me. It might be a larger issue for someone else. What does seem to be apparent, based on some “take apart” articles of the iPad that are just now starting to appear on the web, is that the space is there for a web cam and that Apple, for whatever reason, choose not to install it in this version of the iPad. That last bit is important. “In this version…” Like the iPod and iPhone before it, this is a new product line, evolving over the months and years, to include new hardware features that a version 1 model doesn’t currently support. I fully expect a front facing webcam to be included in some version of the iPad in the next 12-18 months. When that happens, I’ll reevaluate how important I still think a webcam is for me, take a look at solutions other than video chat, and make a buying decision then. Because it’s me, I’ll probably get it anyway.
Next, multitasking. I really thought that out of the gate the iPad would support multitasking and that Apple would announce multitasking support in the iPhone 4.0 software at the keynote. And then I thought a lot more about all the things I thought Apple could announce and that I wrote about and realized that when Apple has a keynote, they usually spend one or two hours on the announcement and really only focus on one thing. Like the iPhone or Macs. An iLife/iWork/iPhone software update would be more appropriate for a separate announcement. The focus on this keynote was the iPad, what it would do and some of the software that will run on the Pad. Like iWork for iPad. Multitasking is a function and feature of the operating system. The operating system is software and software gets updated. It is entirely possible that this feature will come to the iPad when, and if, it comes to the iPhone. It’s even possible that if may be a feature, in some implementation, when the iPad actually ships in March or April (but I doubt that). As it is, the iPhone OS and by extension the iPad OS both support a limited form of multitasking now. I can still listen to iTunes while I search the web, add a todo, use my contacts list, etc. I wish I could use other apps like Pandora or NPR the same way but I can certainly understand and would definitely want Apple to provide a very, very good way to do this without killing battery life or more importantly, crashing my phone. I’d really hate to inadvertently leave a webcam, audio or video app running without me knowing about it. Leaving applications up and running inadvertently in the background is something I see every single day with the clients I train as a Macintosh consultant. There must be a better way to interface with the user to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
In another post, I’ll get back to what multitasking means for me and how I use it.
I’ll write about the things I could use an iPad for, why I am really excited about getting one and my thoughts on the future of this device in my next post.
