Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

iPad – iDisappointed

I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

It might not have mattered so much if the iPad had some compelling use cases. As it were, the hour odd demonstration of the iPad during the media event yesterday must have been, at least for some significant part, very boring for the attendees. The things that were demonstrated with the iPad were things you’d have expected to be there. It even felt painful watching Steve Jobs and other executives trying to show excitement and enthusiasm about mediocre features.

Are our expectations too high?

The greatest difficulty I have is understanding how the iPad is going to be used. If you carry around a notebook, surely, you do not want to be also carrying around an iPad. Would you consider the iPad an alternative to a notebook? Not for me.

When I don’t carry around a notebook (e.g. weekends, not working), I can’t carry an iPad anyway because it is too big to fit into a pocket, and I don’t carry a bag to stuff the iPad into. Perhaps ladies could stuff the iPad into their handbag, although I imagine the iPad would be somewhat oversized. There’s a huge black border around the viewable display on the iPad currently. Maybe in future generations, the frame of the device can be shrunk to the edge of the viewable display. That will make it slightly more compact, look a lot nicer, but I’m still not sure how it helps with portability. Maybe, while riding on the bus, or other tight seating space, it will be easier to interact with a tablet than a notebook with a real physical keyboard. Maybe it will be easier to interact with a tablet while walking around. I don’t know if these are good enough reasons though.

There are also a bunch of things that are “wrong” with the iPad. The biggest thing to me is the lack of multitasking. This is the age of multitasking. The iPhone did not multitask because, so we are to be told, of performance and battery life considerations. The iPad so much more powerful, so much “newer generation”. Yet, here we have gone back to the world of MS-DOS?

iDisappointed.

2 thoughts on “iPad – iDisappointed

    1. Which part of what I said? You’re asking about a post over 2 years old. You probably know how netbooks are a flop now, that tablets will soon outsell PCs, etc. There are certainly some good use cases for the iPad, but it is not a runaway winner. Today, we have so many choices, and the “other” tablets, at least collectively, are doing pretty well too. I had expected, two years ago, the iPad to be much more than what it turned out to be.

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