The Apple iPad has been called a big iPod iTouch – and with good reason. iPad supports a big, full touch screen operations with a high resolution color screen which is readable in ambient light – think outdoors
on a sunny day. The iPad will certainly be a good game machine and a better book reader than Kindle if its oudoor performance and 10 hour battery life stand and deliver. But the iPad, despite all its Jobsian pizzazz, leaves the media and graphics community wanting.
The bulk of Apple’s strength on the PC and notepad computing is among graphic artists and media-savvy people. But here the iPad has some notable missing links. The creative community is going 16:9 and iPad does not quite fit. A small nuisance you say but the IPad omits a camera and SDCard features attractive to media people. Then the iPad sadds to the insult when, in a Jobsian hissy fit, the most popular container for media, Adobe’s Flash is stonewalled again. Woah! Whats going on? And finally, the iPad OS still does not deliver multitasking – so presentations have to be self contained , non-Flash, and without quickly accessible backdrop apps. And if that is not enough, there is no Wifi Direct support for exchanging files in a flash. In fact, with 3G support exclusively given to AT&T [the last of the major US carriers committed to 4G/LTE expansion of network bandwidth], doing online shows will also be at risk.
In sum, iPad is a Kindle killer that can run games and photos/video blazingly fast but even a little short there because of no_Flash and the weak net connections. iPad is also missing no convenient way to quickly transfer media between iPad and notepads, other iPads and other media carriers. Hmmm. Maybe maybe this has been done deliberately by Apple to help make those upcoming MacBooks and other Apple notepads seem to be as loaded as Steve Jobs promised in a post iPad pronouncement – they will need to be.