iPad SchmiPad I'm Slate'd

Yea, so it’s here. It’s cool and all, but it doesn’t cure cancer or bring world peace. It won’t solve the problems with the Red Sox blowing leads late in games nor will it help the Cubs win a World Series. Now I’m not an Apple H8T3r, nor am I an Apple fanboy salivating at every utterance and release from Cupertino. That being said, I wouldn’t refuse an iPad if someone chose to give me one.

You know all the cool stuff – you’ve seen the videos and fondled the device longingly in the Apple store, but once you get past the excellent hardware design, I think that Apple’s purposeful crippling of the iPad by excluding built-in: USB ports, printing, video camera and support for 3rd party keyboard/mice will prevent this device from reaching it’s full potential, much the way that previous tablets reliance on stylus input prevented them being being adopted outside the corporate world. This lack of basic functionality will doom the device to be primarily a consumption only device used by consumers for personal use and therefore not a replacement for a trusty laptop. That’s not to say sales won’t be atmospheric, they will be. Apple may have missed the chance to hit a home run and truly change how people work and play. But hitting doubles still generates huge profits.

If you stop and think about the iPad it’s not exactly revolutionary or even evolutionary. It’s just an obvious product extension and not a revolutionary design epiphany. It uses the same OS as it’s smaller siblings, the iPod Touch/iPhone. Sure it’s bigger and all, but any breathing, sentient being could have figured out that: “hey, people like the iPod touch/iPhone, why don’t we make a bigger one so it’ll be even easier to browse websites, watch videos and read books?”

Now don’t get me wrong Apple got many things right in this version 1.0 device, or Version 1.5 if you count the iPhone/ iPod Touches as versions 1.0. And version 2.0 will be better and so on. Hopefully by then Apple will have added the cameras and possibly even printing functionality. Otherwise it just seems like a lot of money for a device that doesn’t fit in your pocket, but which can’t do all that much.

Of course nothing develops in a vacuum, HP’s Slate  is just around the corner and I think that will become my personal tablet of choice because it runs Windows 7 Home Premium. And because it runs Win7,

You can read the rest here:

http://www.thommitchell.com/2010/04/11/ipad-schmipad-im-slated/