The Saintly Soapbox

When the iPhone came out I wanted one straight away. After what seemed an eternity Apple finally released a 3G version in Australia and I had to have it. I still think it is a cool device; sure I am no huge Apple fan, but the product is good deserves much praise. Its operation is smooth and seamless and it makes the smartphone experience so much better than the horrible Windows Mobile experience.

But what were they thinking with the iPad? I suppose the idea sounds great, take iPhone and make it bigger so it is easier to read books and browse the web. But that then introduces some problems.

1. It doesn’t fit in your pocket; the very portability of the iPhone is gone. The iPhone is powerful, multifunctional and small, it is the Swiss Army knife of the phone world. Now the iPad doesn’t fit in a pocket so now I need a bag, to carry it, or a sleeve and then I am always carrying a book. Now if I have to carry a bag why not buy a small notebook or a netbook, with a real keyboard and mouse. Oh I know touch screens are cool and good to use, but the mouse and keyboard on a netbook are more versatile.
2. Where is the USB port? Friends will tire of me saying this but what a stupid omission, what was an annoyance on the iPhone becomes a cardinal sin on the iPad. Wow look at my cool iPad and when someone wants to give you a photo you can’t take it, unless you get it off the web. So to share photos they have to put it on the web first, or let you have a flash drive to put it on your home computer then sync it to the iPad… seriously that is silly.
3. For $600+ dollars for the iPad you can get yourself some really cool Netbooks that catually do more than the iPad can and are smaller. These can run lost more useful software and are actually more portable. But true they don’t have the wow factor of the iPad.

I was excited about the iPad. Stu Hasic on his blog Parallel Divergence called it revolutionary, it may well become that. Apparently the Chinese iPed (running Google Android) is selling like hotcakes, but I digress.

I won’t own an iPad, for that money I will buy a netbook and then put Ubuntu Linux on it. To me the iPad is a show off toy that maybe in future versions will realise a niche, but at the moment it is just a toy for non computer savvy people who want a big hard manilla folder they have to carry everywhere.