The long rumored tablet PC from Apple has turned out to be, for all intents and purposes, a sleek looking, (much) larger, faster iPod Touch, called the iPad. We won’t re-iterate all of the features and specs here, since they are already nicely available on Apple’s own website. We will say that we were very impressed and excited by today’s announcement, but are not quite ready to drop five bills on an iPad just yet. Instead, we want to focus on what was either not mentioned or glossed over.
Where is Adobe Flash support?
How does Apple expect the iPad to be the ultimate web tablet and ebook/magazine reader without this? Sure, with the low-end model having a price tag virtually identical to that of Amazon’s Kindle DX, this could very well be the Kindle killer, but more and more web sites are using Adobe Flash, (almost exclusively). This means more and more sites will be unsurfable on your brand new iPad, something that a cheap little netbook will handle with ease!
What about multitasking?
We heard nothing regarding any sort of multi-tasking support on the iPad. One shortcoming of both the iPhone and iPod Touch is the way they restrict users from running multiple apps at the same time, allowing for quicker switching between apps. Jailbreakers have proven that this is possible, so why does Apple continue to stifle this from becoming a reality? Early hands-on reports are unanimously saything that this new iPad is lightning fast, so maybe the time spent switching between apps will be less painful than on apple’s previous devices, but this still doesn’t exempt apple from finally addressing this issue and offering a true multi-tasking environment. This still means you would not be able to do something like listen to Pandora, while surfing the web!
Will App Sizes Get Bigger?
What does the higher resolution apps supported by the iPad mean for iPhone users? Will developers be creating a single version of their apps that will have both the high and low res versions, or will there be two separate apps? If it’s all in a single release, then apps will unnecessarily take up more space on user’s iPhones, further taxing both the limited storage, as well as the 10MB file limit for 3GS users.
Now where did I put that camera?
Come on apple, even a $300 netbook has a camera! The iPad could be a great Skype or web chat device, but now users will have to hope for a 3rd party peripheral to do this.
So where does this leave us?
Well…frankly it makes us a bit concerned for what may or may not be missing from the next gen iPhone! Hopefully some answers will come once details of the iPhone OS 4.0 are finally revealed, but until then, we’ll be keeping our money in our wallets and fingers crossed.
