Today I have heard many a lamentation about the iPad from my more tech- savvy comrades. "It is an elongation of the cold hand of DRM to a more sophisticated device", and "It doesn't fill any of my needs" is another. The first one I wouldn't refute, allthought I can understand Apple's need to take away some degree of controll to make the user experience better, there is no scalability in the device.
But for the second complaint I believe I have an eloquent retort. When Apple created the iPad they amed at a very spesific market in which they see huge potential. The media consumers. At their list of what the iPad had to excell in, work wasn't mentioned at all. To their own admittion, they had first decided to create the tablet, then gone over to their iWork team to see if there could be any meaningful way to work on the thing. The answer was an obvious; yes you can, BUT you'll be limited.
The complaint of my friends are not warranted because they demand things of the tablet that does not lie withing the structural constrains of the tablet to do. No, it won't do for heavy duty text editing, programming or image editing because it doesn't have two sceens, a keyboard or a heavy duty processor.
It is essentially a media streaming device. It streams your meadia to you. My complaint (soon to come) is also a structural one, but one I feel they have failed to address. The tablet is interactive and open towards the web, but it isn't open to you sharing needs in your vicinity. I'm sorry if I word this complaint in a confusing way, but the issue is actually broader then one might think. Sharing fotos is all well and good if you want to share them with the whole world, but how about letting us effortlessly transfer pictures from pad to pad, or pad to computer? Could you in a cool manner youst sweep them over?
Further, what If you want to bring some work, media, to someone in your vicinity?. The iPad doesn't have an HDMI port, so a projector won't be able to show my content, and there is no inbulidt pico projector. The whole user experience is either within the pad, or in the interaction between pad and net - but mostly for consuming, because any real work can't be done on it. So what have we got? I'd say a "Fun way to store your media while your not by a real computer"
The problem is that this is too close to the iPhone, the only real advantage being more screen real- estate.
I'd say that they way forward for Apple would be to truly identify what function the iPad serves, and extend it in that direction. That means firstly a good output method locally for media, I reccomend HDMI, then pico projector. Then I believe that extending the number of ways to get the media into the pad would also serve a good purpose. For instance if adding a good camera to photograph documensts with, and possibly adding an SD card slot, so that it can be used as an extended storage unit for your photos when you're on vacation.
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Update:
It has just been revealed that you cannot tether you iPhone to the pad for internet through the G3 network. Is there even a possibility to share photoes and music between the devices?
