Apple’s new iPad an enlarged iPhone
January 31, 2010 by WESLEY FENLON
Filed under Columns, Opinions
Steve Jobs almost got me this time.
When Apple recently unveiled its long-rumored iPad tablet, I was afraid the technology was going to be irresistible.
A device that blurs the line between a smartphone and a laptop is more than a little tantalizing for a tech geek like me.
But my wallet can breathe a sigh of relief for now.
FENLON
Apple’s iPad may look sleek, but it’s missing the most compelling parts of portable phones and powerful laptops.
We see Apple products all over campus — if you’re in a public place, take a quick glance around. I bet you’ll spot at least one person with an iPhone, iPod or MacBook in hand.
They’re popular, and for good reason: Apple has shrewdly married solid technology with slim, sexy exteriors.
Motorola, Dell and all the rest are still playing catch-up to match the narrow profiles of the iPhone and silver unibody MacBook laptops.
Steve Jobs and company have applied the same concept to the new iPad, a brand new tablet computer running on the iPhone’s operating system. A gorgeous 10-inch screen, 10 hours of battery life and a powerful new processor makes the $499 iPad a souped-up, oversized iPhone.
Sure, it sounds pretty awesome. But I’m far from sold.
Everywhere I go, I carry my netbook (that’s geek speak for a small, cheap laptop) with me, and I use it every single day.
It has a real keyboard, a 10-inch screen, and can run any program I choose to install on it.
It’s not very powerful, but it still has no problem running Photoshop, a Web browser and Microsoft Word at the same time. Quite handy for a $400 device.
That’s where I run into a problem with the iPad. My netbook offers the functionality of a computer; the iPad offers the functionality of a big, pretty smartphone. Let’s break it down:
— The only apps the iPad can run come from the iTunes App Store or from Apple itself. That means it can’t run any software designed for computer operating systems.
— Like the iPhone, the iPad can’t run applications in the background — this may be the most discouraging fact about Apple’s tablet, because it means multitasking is pretty much a no-go.
— The iPad doesn’t support Flash. Like the iPhone, it supports YouTube, but anything else on the Internet that uses Flash is out. No Hulu and no FarmVille on Facebook. Ouch.
— There are no USB ports. Better get used to syncing everything through iTunes.
— Unlike the iPhone, the iPad won’t fit in your pocket, and it doesn’t have a camera or a webcam for video conferences.
Not everything about the iPad is negative. There are about 140,000 apps in the App Store now, according to Apple — and the iPad can run all of them out of the box.
Unfortunately, they’re designed for the iPhone’s much smaller screen, and it will be awhile before iPad-specific apps really take off.
No doubt the iPad will sell in the millions, anyway. The new iBook Store is a powerful threat to Amazon’s Kindle.
Apple may well change the way e-books are sold and read, just like they upended the music world with iTunes.
It’s just a shame they missed out on the convergence that made the iPhone such a revolution: it combined a camera, Internet and e-mail functionality and an MP3 player into a phone better than anything else on the market.
The iPad offers less versatility than my netbook, so it’s not going to replace anything I carry around on a daily basis — even if Steve Jobs loves to call it “the ultimate browsing experience.”
It’s a cool device, just not a very necessary one.
Sorry, Steve. I think I’ll wait for the iPad 2.
— Wesley Fenlon is a senior from Clarkesville majoring in magazines
