The iPad Identity

It's been a little over a week since the iPad was announced and immediately I knew that something was wrong. This was a device that gadget freaks and mac heads had been anticipating for years and I had been saving for for nearly nine months ( which is much longer than I needed.) The iPads problem, besides the fact that it's not nearly as pretty as it should be, is that it doesn't have a tablet operating system, it has a phone operating system. It runs on the iPhone OS 3.2 which makes it essentially a larger iPhone. Many would have preferred the OS X operating system and I probably would have preferred that as well, but I think the problem lies much deeper than the iPhone OS vs. OS X argument.

With all the time leading up to the release of the "iPad" apple should have made an operating system that fits a tablet computer and not adapted a phone interface. Here is a video of what the iTablet interface should have looked like:
(Thanks Gizmodo)
It's quite brief but shows a system that is meant to be used with your fingers and takes advantage of the larger screen. I have an iPhone and it does everything I need it to, so I don't need another device that does the same things. I need a tablet, something in between a smart phone and a laptop, you know, the sort of device Steve Jobs was talking about right before he showed us the new iPhone Jumbo!

Some more specific quibbles I have are that 1) at this point in time you need to have flash on a tablet, I don't really miss it on my iphone because I accept it's limitations and the screen is small enough to make me forgive such an omission, but HTML 5 is not widespread enough yet to get away with no flash, I want to watch Hulu on my tablet. 2) No multitasking, something I have been dying for my iPhone to do! This REALLY hurts the tablet and proves that it is NOT a computer, computers can multi task and most phones don't. 3) Steve Jobs made preposterous claims that iBooks was an improvement on the kindle. It's not! The back lighting alone makes that a fact, sure the way your books are presented and the cool page turning graphic is neat, but are only gimmicks and wont impress hardcore readers who want to look at a screen reminiscent of a book and not a computer.

I love Apple and will keep buying there products, but I'm not getting a first gen iPad, I'll either wait for apples next line of tablets that have fewer limitations and are more reminiscent of a computer, or I'll just get a courier or whatever tablet gets the closest to being what it should be. I'd love to see Google enter the tablet market since they have a lot of the infrastructure that is necessary already there. Oh and one more gripe with the iPad is the terrible name, sure the iPod might have sounded weird and we got used to it, but you don't use any sort of pod to soak up your period blood! And on that note adue.