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.