What's Missing from the Apple iPad 1 | Invent Partners Wakefield

What's Missing from the Apple iPad?

So. Here we are again. Another Apple product which some claim is a game changer.

Well maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. For sure, the concept of friendly, convenient consumer oriented content consumption devices in the home is a market which many are trying to crack. It looks to me like this is Apple's first try. For sure, they've got lots right. But I think there's one or two things missing:

No Adobe Flash Support

I keep banging on about this to anybody who will listen. Flash content is ubiquitous, and whilst we can live with not getting Flash content on our mobiles (just), the idea of a home internet appliance that doesn't do Flash content will have customers returning their iPads to the shop in their droves.

I fully expect the iPad OS will get native Flash support in the next 12 months.

No Optical Drive

On a video and music appliance of this size, the lack of DVD / CD drive is a major omission. Keeping the optical drive out of the device itself for the sake of portabiity is good, but I'd expect to see a wireless (Bluetooth or WiFi) optical drive peripheral for this anytime soon. When that arrives, iPad becomes genuinely versatile and portable.

No Camera Connector

One of the iPad's primary functions is for viewing photos and video, right?

Enough said.

No Time Machine

The iPad is essentially a device for consuming downloaded and often paid content (apps, iTunes music, film & books), yet it has no removable media / USB connector for backing up your precious paid content. The iPad should be backing up data wirelessly to a home time capsule or other network drive. Without this, users are going to be very angry with Apple when their shiny Apple device fails and nukes all their expensive purchases.

Streaming Media from other network devices?

Unless Apple have added features for accessing network volumes to the iPhone based OS used in the iPad, it won't be able to stream music and video from external drives. The Microsoft tablet is able to do this, and others will be along shortly.

What's right about the iPad

Once again, Apple is showing the way in reducing a device down to its simplest possible form, providing engineering elegance and UI simplicity. It is a certainty that the internet will be accessed by an ever widening diversity of devices and platforms, making it ubiquitous in the living room, the bus and liberating it from the desk or study.

The iPad also reveals that users will be viewing the internet through differently shaped windows.The iPad and iPhone reveal that an increasing number of users will be viewing the web in portrait, with the iPad scaling pages down to its native 768px width. With many web designers, developers and owner optimising their site for a landscape oriented space of between 4:3 / 16:9 with a pixel width of 1024 pixels or higher, this presents a new way of looking at things. For one thing, website owners need to stop worrying about "the fold".

All of which reveals that the internet and home computing has been, and will continue to, change over the next few years in response to devices just like this one.

However in the iPad, I don't think Apple have delivered the standard setting device this time. Yet.

What's Missing from the Apple iPad 1 - Invent Partners