I may be the only one who wasn’t full of anticipation for today’s iPad announcement. Not that I didn’t think it had the potential to be mind-blowing (it isn’t), but as a first-generation iPhone owner who is more than ready for a faster, more featured handheld, all I was really hoping for was a new iPhone to show up the Nexus One.
So while I wait for Apple to give me a new phone to buy, here’s my unsolicited thoughts on the iPad.
- It should have been called the Canvas.
- The lack of multitasking is the real deal-breaker on the iPad.
- I suspect AT&T played a role in the iPad not having multitasking capabilities. After all, AT&T charges $60/month for 5 GB of data access, and is charging only $30/month for unlimited data on the iPad. Multitasking would create a much more laptop-like experience. But if they limit the number of apps, they limit how much data can actually be used in one month (i.e. you won’t be streaming Pandora in the background all month).
- That said, the $30/month pricing for data service seems almost revolutionary. If the next iPhone offers that pricing with a data-only plan (it won’t), I’ll drop my voice service, which I barely use as it is.
- Steve Jobs got on stage and said netbooks aren’t better than anything. But netbooks run Flash, so does that make them better than the iPad?
- Said another way, I’m a steadfast supporter of keeping Flash off of smart phones. Flash is a battery killer and I just don’t believe there’s anyway to make most Flash interfaces work on small screens, but on a device with a 1024×768 display, Flash support seems essential.
- Speaking of Adobe, as a web developer, AIR support would have been amazing.
- Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours, but Apple has a history of overmarketing battery life. I wasn’t expecting 122 hours, but 20 would have been nice, even if that resulted in a thicker tablet.
- The memory sizes are too small. 16, 32 and 64 GB? Double those.
- It’s hard to tell, is there only room for four icons on the dock?
- One of my biggest pet peeves on the iPhone is how tabs in Safari often get unloaded and have to be reloaded when you click back to them. Does the iPad have enough RAM to stop that annoying behavior?
- Speaking of Safari…
- How many tabs does it allow? Unlimited?
- What user agent does it report? Will sites try to redirect me to their mobile versions?
- Does it work with standard bookmarklets? (Many don’t work on iPhone.)
- Does it support HTML5 <audio> and play <video> inline?
- Does it support embedded fonts?
- Finally, the cheapest iPad is $499. Compare that to $259 for a Nook or Kindle
, $489 for a Kindle DX
, or $369 for an Eee 1005PE
one of Asus’s top netbooks.
Did I miss anything?