iPad

Being the typical geek that I am, I was tuned in with anticipation of the new tablet from Apple. I was hoping to see basically what they launched but with a longer battery time and multitasking.

Multitasking
Wow, this was the big surprise. They put in a super fast processor, big screen, and fancy apps, but no multitasking? So if I am in iWork and I get a new email, I can't go and respond to the email and go back to iWork?

Now most people will say, yes you close iWork, go into mail, respond, and then go back into iWork right where you left off. For a lot of cases that is fine, but say I am in my email and need to send a paragraph from the document I am working on in the email. And lets assume I didn't realize this until I went into the email and read the message from the sender.

Now what do I do? I have to leave mail, reopen iWork, copy the paragraph, close iWork, reopen mail, paste the message, send, then close mail and back to iWork.......

Not the most optimal situation by any means. Think about IMing a friend while browsing the web, same issue. I can't believe this was left out, but it is only running version 3.2 and not the big 4.0 release that most were expecting.

I am sure Apple will be fixing this in OS 4.0, and it just wasn't ready for the tablet announcement.


A disappointment for sure and all those early adopters may get a negative view of the device because of it. If Google could sneak out a Chrome OS device in a similar form factor, I would pick that probably 9 out of 10 times because even though it is limited to web apps, it would multitask and their web apps are sneaking up on Office and iWork in functionality. Much less everything else you can now do from the web. Plus using Google Docs, you could save files and pull them from other computers.

Battery Life
To replace my Kindle or more recently Nook, you have to have a longer battery time than up to 10 hours. The up to is killer there. I have a Macbook Pro and wife has a Macbook all promising up to 7 hours, but they have never come close to lasting that long in reality. I am not complaining on the laptop, because for what I am doing even the 4-5 hours is incredible. For a tablet placing itself as your book reader, not so much, My wife hates cords and this just adds another permanent cord someplace to keep this thing charging daily. If it was a laptop replacement, that would be fine, but it lacks too many things to even really replace my wife's somewhat basic usage of her laptop.

Will I get one?
Right now my thoughts are that I would hold off initially since they are only releasing the wifi version at first and then if the usage scenarios expand to something I would use, then I could see purchasing a version with the portable 3g because I wouldn't want to be limited by wifi only. Having said all that, I might still be one of those people buying it on day one as somehow I get caught up in that frenzy and hype :)