iPad – Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price. — Apple

On January 27th, Apple finally announced their long anticipated “tablet device” called the iPad. While iSlate, iTablet, or even the rehashed iBook would have been good choices, iPad is fine I guess. I would like to see Apple drop the “i” prefix one of these days however.

As expected, the fit and finish of the device is amazing. In keeping with their recent designs, the iPad sports a unibody aluminum back plate and the front is all glass. I’m sure it really feels great in-hand, and I know the glass surface is going to be super-silky smooth to the touch. For the materials, I give an A+. You can’t get any better in my opinion.

Now, the way the front looks is not as impressive as the back/sides of the unit. The front has beautiful glass with the now traditional home button, but there is this really thick black bezel around the edges, just like a MacBook Pro and iMac has. On the iPad, it is kind of distracting as the screen is much smaller than the MacBook Pro or iMac. The one thing you’ll quickly notice is that the device does not sport the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, but rather it uses 4:3. This is surprising, since Apple has moved to a wider 16:9 ratio for their new iMacs, and probably will use the 16:9 size for the MacBook refresh coming soon.

If Apple is touting this device to be a great movie player, why 4:3? Even with 16:9 screens, you almost always will get black bars at the top/bottom of your screen because the actual movie uses a still wider aspect ratio. But with 4:3 and some of the widest movies, you’re going to see a tiny strip of movie in the center of the screen, the rest will be all black. Rather than black bars, the movie strip will be the only noticeable bar. Not what I call a better viewing experience, which leads me to my next thought.

At the Apple media event, Steve Jobs proclaimed the iPad a new category of technology. It’s not a phone, not a computer, but a new kind of computing device. He went on to say that unless you make it the best of it’s class, there is no point in even creating a product. I agree with him that it’s the best of its class, partly because there is no competition. But why does there need to be this new class?

He then went on to say, with the help of his slideshow, that this device must do some things better than a phone and better than a computer. He used the iPhone and MacBook Pro as examples. The things he said this new device must do better are Browsing, Email, Photos, Video, Music, Games, and eBooks. I’m going to take these one-by-one.

Browsing

For me, this is the bread and butter of such a device. A large 10 inch screen, touch sensitive, with the ability to quickly read news, search Wiki, or do most things you can do at home, but on the go. I think the potential for browsing on the iPad is there, but the current implementation is still lacking. On my MBP, I can view a site, download a file, save it to my desktop, and share/sync it using MobileMe quite easily. Not much effort. If the iPad offers a “Downloads” folder like MacOS and has an easy way to sync these files with your MobileMe account, I think I would feel much better about the browsing experience. It could easily be almost as good as my MBP.

However, one glaring hole still exists– the omission of Adobe Flash. Like the iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad will not be able to properly render websites which use Flash. Now, we can get into a debate about how Flash is becoming obsolete, and how HTML5 is coming down the pike. But Flash is here now, and here to stay for the foreseeable future. By not allowing Flash to run on the iPad, you are effectively breaking millions of websites. How you can say the iPad does browsing better than a computer when you can’t even see Flash content, I don’t know.

To add insult to injury, it has been shown that Apple used deceit in it’s iPad promo video by faking the New York Times website, and showing the site with Flash working. If you watch the video, pause it at 1:15 and then screen-zoom to view the web address bar. You’ll see it’s pointing to www.apple.com. Busted! Later in the video, they show the NYT site again, this time with the correct URL. Looks like someone forgot to change the URL before they took that screencast!

This directly contradicts Steve Jobs’ demonstration, where he went to the New York Times website (I can’t imagine why) and the Flash content did not render, instead showing the missing browser plugin icon. My question, why would they try to fool people in the video? I mean, they made a conscious effort to fudge the Flash, they had to have known that Mac geeks would see that in a hurry.

At first I thought maybe it was a demo site by The New York Times, maybe made to support the iPad with no Flash content. But the video and the live demonstration show that not to be the case. So Apple basically is lying to it’s customers. Am I surprised? No. When you see a commercial, the first thing that should pop into your lead is the word lie. I heard that somewhere, don’t know who coined it.

While writing this article, Apple has quietly edited its iPad video and has removed the flash content, and now shows the plugin icon where the flash content would have been. Way to get caught with your pants down Apple.

Email

While the email app looks nice, and it appears to have many useful features, the iPad does not do email better than my MacBook Pro. The Apple Mail app on my computer does 100 things that I’m sure the iPad version won’t or can’t do. Just because I can view my mail with a flick of my finger doesn’t mean it does it better. It may do it better than the iPhone, but not my computer.

Am I to believe that I can type an email faster on the iPad than I can on my computer? What about attachments? If I get an attachment the iPad can’t read, I have to wait till I view it on my computer. That doesn’t sound like better email.

Photos

Again, just being able to use your finger to see your photos doesn’t mean it’s better than iPhoto on my Mac. Also, having the ability to turn the iPad over and have the photo re-adjust its orientation so the person in front of you can see it properly doesn’t make this a slam-dunk. If anything this is iPhoto Light. Sure, it looks cool, but it doesn’t do anything better than my Mac. And, my Mac has a camera for actually taking photos, something the iPad lacks.

Video

This one is really laughable. A 10 inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio is better than watching movies on a 17 inch MacBook Pro widescreen or a 27 inch iMac? The iPad does better video than a computer? Again, no video camera on the iPad, yet my MacBook Pro has one. Why would I downgrade features? I really don’t know where Steve was pulling these nuggets of wisdom from, but every time he said something I felt embarrassed for him as I know he knew it was a bunch of crap.

Music

If you are talking about playing music, you don’t really need a complicated interface. The original iPod proved that. Thus, the iPad can handle music equally as good if you just intend to listen. But if you want to start ripping, burning, or doing anything special with your music, the iPad isn’t your tool. This is probably the closest I’ll come to saying the iPad does something better, but it still doesn’t do music better than my computer.

Games

I’m not spending too much time on this one. This is totally ridiculous. A computer will always play games better. I guess it’s the type of games for which you can get into an argument about. Small, hand-held games typically play better on the iPhone than a computer. But the idea of using the accelerometers in the iPad to play games… I think people would look really silly holding this 10 inch device and moving it in all directions. You certainly would bring attention to yourself.

eBooks

Finally…. the one thing the iPad does better than my MacBook Pro or iPhone. It can read a mean book. So wait, the iPad is just a book reader with a bunch of extras? In a word– YES. This is what the iPad really is… a book reader. This is what it was really meant to do. For me, I would love to ditch paper books and start reading all digital versions. Plus, I’d like the idea of being able to read various print publications digitally as well. There is nothing like subscribing to a magazine and have it electronically sent to your device.

So for me, Apple was 1 for 7 on it’s feature list. Don’t get me wrong, browsing, email and the like are welcomed, but they don’t do anything better than my computer. So again, we are going to pay a premium (starting at $499) for a book reader that can do a bunch of other stuff. Plus, if you want internet access, you’ll pay $15/month for 250MB of bandwidth, or $30/month for unlimited bandwidth.

As a revolutionary device, I have to give this 2 1/2 out of 5 stars. It’s the best eBook reader, but I was hoping for much more from Apple.

Update 4/11/10: Ignore everything you have just read. This is probably the most breakthrough device in all my years of computing. It actually has replaced my MacBook Pro for certain uses. I can really foresee this platform, given the apps I use on my MBP are offered, being able to handle *most* of what I do with my computer. Right now, the iPad is really a content consumption device. But with better tools and more power, this will allow for creation as well. I will write a dedicated review in the days to come.