So ive been listening to the Apple presentation announcing the iPad.
Simply put, I hate most of what Apple does, for various reasons that we wont get into now. Anyway, I was a bit excited for this one. This excitement was based on one thing: "“Will Be The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done.” - Steve Jobs.
This is a programming blog, not tech so im not going into alot of detail here. But I am REALLY dissapointed.
1) The name. A comment by "poached" on engadget sums this up pretty well: "@Mike yeah. Billions of R&D funding and years of research and all they came up with is, "iPad"?"
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/27/apple.ipad.reaction/index.html?hpt=T2
2) Its just a big iPhone?! Really now, how is that revolutionary?
3) Hardware. Its thin so they cant really be blamed about not having great spec's. BUT Stevie's arrogance is really annoying: "Now some people thought that was a netbook -- the problem is that netbooks aren't better than anything!". Its one thing to say that, but really what backs that up? As of now all they have said is the processor which is a " 1GHz Apple A4 chip" which obviously is uncomparable to anything without more specs, but we can compare speed based on the quality of the games.
Now how are those graphics great at all? Now you may say that its still early days, but why would they promote the iPad with something that didnt use its full ability? Next was NFS:
Now look carefully at the above. Even Apple fanboys wont try tell you that that is great. Now compare that to a netbook which "aren't better than anything!". You can make your own mind up here, but i've played way better looking games on a 1.6 atom with 2GB of RAM.
Lastly Engadget said this about NFS: "Graphics look smooth, fairly fast.". Now engadget is usually rather biased towards Apple stuff, so a comment like that probably means that its not really impressive at all.
4) Price. This is the only positive thing on my mind about this. Its $499 for the 16GB model. Now thats pretty cheap. Especially for an Apple product. Not as cheap as the netbook I was talking about above, but it does have a touchscreen, although doesnt have a 120GB HDD or camera. However this is from twitter: "Books are $14.99 on the iPad, $9.99 on the Kindle".
5) No forethough...Apple doesnt own ibooks.com, i-books.com, ipad.com or i-pad.com. (BTW iBooks was one of their features at the beginning). Whoever owns those domain is about to get very VERY rich ;).
6) No flash. This is probably just on the test device, but what the hell?!
7) Apps. It seems like the only thing they are really pushing here to make people go "WOW" is the apps. Why are we interested in looking at iPhone apps(but bigger)? Everything they've shown has been done before on the iPhone. I keep wondering when they are going to start showing something about the actual iPad...Seems that because its running the iPhone OS, that everythings pretty much the same. Oh well.
8) Where did the "revolutionary" part go?
My final point is that. This is the most hyped about thing since the Olsen twins turned 18. And Stevie seemed pretty amazed by it. But really WHAT about it is revolutionary? Ok, so it a tablet. We have had tablets for ages, they just didnt have multi touch, and had keyboard. Ok, so its got an accelerometer, BT, WIFI, 3G(some models), and a compass. Um...yeah, so do most tablets since ever - besides the compass, which can be overcome with a BT GPS. Also, so far there hasnt been a single mention of GPS on it? Wierd, as its getting pretty standard now days in mobile devices.
I understand that they are going to sell tons of these, but what I cant understand is why people are going crazy over it. It seems to me that nothing is really spectacular about it EXCEPT that they are one of the first to a) make a thin table b) strip the keyboard c) have multitouch.
So say what you will, but compared to the Microsoft Courier(http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet) this seems pretty average.
I will NOT buy an iPad. Period.
Thanks to a comment by Chetjan I found the following video that basically sums up everything perfectly.
UPDATE: Ok, now this is just silly. It has NO MULTITAKING. I am shocked Apple. Its one thing not having multitasking on a smart phone, but a totally different story when its a larger, more laptop-esque product. Then again, you also streatched an iPhone, and called it revolutionary.
UPDATE 2: Site is up http://www.apple.com/ipad. Video requires quicktime. Good luck with that.
DIGG This! http://digg.com/apple/iPad_As_dissapointing_as_the_name_is_funny