It's probably inevitable that after a product, any product, gets as much pre-announcement hype as has the Apple iPad, it's only a day or two later that you start reading about what the product doesn't have and why it therefore must fail.
No one knows yet whether the iPad will succeed. But although many of the reasons people give for its inevitable failure are true as facts, they just don't hold water as reasons that people won't buy it.Let's look at a few of these:
No Flash support: Not supporting Adobe Flash video makes the iPad somewhat less capable for Web browsing than a laptop is. I really wish Flash support was included in this device (and on the iPhone, too, for that matter). It would be great to see Hulu and the other video sites. But I doubt many people will reject the iPad just for this reason.
No camera. Again, it would be nice, and the lack of a camera means there's no video chat or video conferencing. But while video chat is neat, it's still just a niche application.
It's not “Full HD." At 1,024-by-768, the iPad screen has the resolution and proportions of an older laptop, not of the newer 16:9 or 16:10 displays, which typically start at 1,280 by 720. That means that HD films will show black borders and that if you were to connect the iPad to your HDTV, you wouldn't get a real HD display either, and certainly not 1080p, as you would get from a Blu-ray player. But on a 9.7-inch screen, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. And if you care about viewing content on an HDTV, you'll be buying a Blu-ray player or a game console.
It's a “walled garden." Apple controls the types of applications written for the iPad; and thus it's much more closed than writing for Macintosh, Windows, or Android. For some people, that's a deal breaker. And while the ePub standard for books is open, odds are that there will be some sort of DRM system that most of the publishers will insist upon. There is a lot to be said for open systems and for open source. But if this was really important to the market, Linux PCs would be much more popular. Besides, Apple has already proven that if people like your product, a closed system won't keep them away--the iPod has about a 70 percent market share.
It doesn't multitask. This one probably bothers me the most, because I'm used to sitting at a laptop with multiple windows open, playing music in the background, looking things up as I write, and so on. And I could imagine a more powerful, multitasking iPad fitting nicely into a keyboard-connecting case, maybe like the one Lenovo is showing with its U1 hydrid tablet. I'd love to be able to run Pandora while browsing other sites, or to keep a Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail feed running down the side of the screen. But that's just not the use Apple has in mind for this machine. The iPad isn't supposed to be a replacement for a netbook or laptop. It's for a different market.
Whether the iPad succeeds or fails is ultimately going to come down to one thing: whether people like it enough to have yet another device on which they will spend lots of time browsing the Web, playing games, and reading. That's why its seven key tasks--browsing, mail, photos, video, music, games, and e-Books--are so important.
No one knows yet whether the iPad will succeed. But although many of the reasons people give for its inevitable failure are true as facts, they just don't hold water as reasons that people won't buy it.Let's look at a few of these:
No Flash support: Not supporting Adobe Flash video makes the iPad somewhat less capable for Web browsing than a laptop is. I really wish Flash support was included in this device (and on the iPhone, too, for that matter). It would be great to see Hulu and the other video sites. But I doubt many people will reject the iPad just for this reason.
No camera. Again, it would be nice, and the lack of a camera means there's no video chat or video conferencing. But while video chat is neat, it's still just a niche application.
It's not “Full HD." At 1,024-by-768, the iPad screen has the resolution and proportions of an older laptop, not of the newer 16:9 or 16:10 displays, which typically start at 1,280 by 720. That means that HD films will show black borders and that if you were to connect the iPad to your HDTV, you wouldn't get a real HD display either, and certainly not 1080p, as you would get from a Blu-ray player. But on a 9.7-inch screen, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. And if you care about viewing content on an HDTV, you'll be buying a Blu-ray player or a game console.
It's a “walled garden." Apple controls the types of applications written for the iPad; and thus it's much more closed than writing for Macintosh, Windows, or Android. For some people, that's a deal breaker. And while the ePub standard for books is open, odds are that there will be some sort of DRM system that most of the publishers will insist upon. There is a lot to be said for open systems and for open source. But if this was really important to the market, Linux PCs would be much more popular. Besides, Apple has already proven that if people like your product, a closed system won't keep them away--the iPod has about a 70 percent market share.
It doesn't multitask. This one probably bothers me the most, because I'm used to sitting at a laptop with multiple windows open, playing music in the background, looking things up as I write, and so on. And I could imagine a more powerful, multitasking iPad fitting nicely into a keyboard-connecting case, maybe like the one Lenovo is showing with its U1 hydrid tablet. I'd love to be able to run Pandora while browsing other sites, or to keep a Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail feed running down the side of the screen. But that's just not the use Apple has in mind for this machine. The iPad isn't supposed to be a replacement for a netbook or laptop. It's for a different market.
Whether the iPad succeeds or fails is ultimately going to come down to one thing: whether people like it enough to have yet another device on which they will spend lots of time browsing the Web, playing games, and reading. That's why its seven key tasks--browsing, mail, photos, video, music, games, and e-Books--are so important.
