I had alternating feelings on the iPad as it was unveiled this past Wednesday. It seemed like for everything there was to like, there was also something that I disliked about it.
Now, to be clear, I think it’s a fantastic device and it has a the potential to change the way we interact with our computers. But if you substitute “cell phones” in for “computers” you get the same way that people felt about the iPhone 3 years ago when Steve Jobs unveiled it at MacWorld. And that’s the problem I think most people have with the iPad (aside from the name, which is stupid, but we will all get over it).
I think many people, myself included, expected this device to be a radical departure from anything we’d ever seen. But given that it functions like a giant iPhone, we were left wanting. It’s true that the iPhone has revolutionized the way we use phones, and it’s brought smartphones to the mainstream. But geeks like me were expecting more from Apple. We were expecting to be wowed. If the iPad had been the device that was released 3 years ago, make no mistake, it would have had the praise it deserved. The release of the iPad just seems to be an incremental update to the innovations we’ve all been using, though.
Maybe we weren’t ready for this device 3 years ago, and maybe it wasn’t ready for us. If we thought the lack of copy and paste on a phone was bad, how could we justify it’s absence from a general computing device with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities?
I look forward to seeing the effects of the iPad as they trickle into other areas, and as the product itself matures.
