is ideally suited to pretty much every other function on the iPad except video: books, documents, web pages, and photos are all laid out far closer to a 3:4 or 4:3 ratio than 16:9. Using a 16:9 ratio on the iPad would not only make the device larger than it already is, it would also leave all other forms of media on the device at a disadvantage compared to video.
The iPad’s lack of camera is another point Debra and others have brought out against the device, but like multitasking, this is one point on which I agree. A back-facing camera like the iPhone’s doesn’t make a lot of sense on the iPad — it would be a bit unwieldy trying to take pictures or video with a device this size, rather like trying to hold up a MacBook Air to take photos with its iSight. Most people probably have a standalone point-and-shoot camera that would take better stills and/or video than the iPad’s hypothetical back-facing camera anyway, and you can load those pictures directly onto the device with either the iPad-specific camera connector or SD card reader. But a front-facing camera for video conferencing definitely would have been a killer feature. Apple apparently thought so, too, because it actually included a space in the iPad for exactly such a camera, only to withdraw it for reasons known only to Apple. Whether the company is waiting for the next-gen iPad to introduce a camera or pulling a big switcheroo like it did with the original iPhone — which was originally supposed to ship with the scratch-prone plastic face of previous iPods, but was replaced with nearly scratch-proof glass in the six months between its announcement and release — no one can say.
6. There are no USB ports
Debra’s main complaints against the lack of USB ports are that you can’t hook up a flash drive or a USB keyboard. As far as the keyboard goes, I’ve already mentioned the fact that you can purchase a keyboard dock or use a Bluetooth keyboard. As for not being able to hook up a flash drive? I can see why some people might want to do this — expanding the iPad’s storage, transferring files, etc. But I’m willing to bet that for most people this isn’t going to be an issue. While I run the risk of sounding like Bill Gates’s infamous “640K should be enough for anyone” by saying so (although Gates never actually said that), 64 GB of space on a device like the iPad really should suit most users’ needs — at least for the next couple of years, anyway. As for transferring files? I can think of a number of existing, cloud-based solutions, the most simplistic of which is e-mail. No, you can’t transfer several gigabytes of files at a time through e-mail or “the cloud,” but most people don’t transfer that much data all at one go even a handful of times with a portable device, much less on a regular basis.
I’m not going to go full fanboy and say it’s a good thing the iPad doesn’t come with USB ports. In fact, I’m kind of with Debra and the others on this one in wishing that Apple included at least one USB port. While I probably wouldn’t use the port very often (if at all), it definitely falls into the category of “nice to have.” I’ve been an iPod user for almost five years and an iPhone user for a year, and I can count the number of times I’ve needed/wanted a USB port on one of those devices on exactly no fingers… but I’ll admit that I might sing a different tune with a bigger device like an iPad. But for most of the people who are likely to buy the iPad, i.e., the non-geek, non-techie, “I just want internet and music and movies” folks, they’re probably not going to miss USB ports at all.
7. There’s no flash memory slot
No, the iPad doesn’t have a flash memory slot. You can buy an SD card reader attachment, though, although Debra and others rail against the added cost of the connector, claiming that in order to reach “the functional equivalent of a netbook, you may end up spending a bundle.” A lot of the same arguments for or against USB apply here as well; most non-geeks aren’t going to miss an SD slot at all. Transferring documents via SD cards in 2010 reeks of the “sneakernet” we thought we were abolishing along with dot-matrix printers and 2800 baud modems; let’s just say that most users are going to have photos and/or videos on their SD cards, most users are going to wait until they get home to their main computer to upload those files, and most users aren’t going to care that the iPad’s missing a dedicated SD slot any more than they cared about the iPod missing one. If anything, the argument for an SD slot is far weaker than the argument for USB.
8. The price is not right
Debra claims the iPad “costs twice as much as the Kindle and other ebook readers.” That’s flat-out false. The 9 iPad does cost almost twice as much as the standard Kindle, but compared to every other e-reader out there, the iPad’s pricing is extremely competitive once you consider all the things the iPad does that the other readers iDon’t. A 9 Kindle DX, for example, while cheaper than the cheapest iPad, doesn’t have a color screen, has only 4 GB of storage, doesn’t have a touchscreen, doesn’t run apps, doesn’t have e-mail, music, and so on, and so forth. The iPad’s price is the one aspect of the device that few pundits have complained about; in fact, the pricing has Wall Street and other financial analysts doing cartwheels.
You don’t even have to compare the iPad to other companies’ similar products to see how good a deal it is. The 16 GB iPad costs 0 more than an 8 GB iPod touch. That 0 gets you twice the capacity, a much larger and higher-quality screen, a more powerful CPU, better Wi-Fi including 802.11n, vastly improved battery performance, a built-in speaker and microphone, and, eventually, access to a host of apps designed to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen and higher performance. A 32 GB iPad has the same 0 price difference compared to a 32 GB iPod touch, as does the 64 GB model. Once you tack on an additional 0 for 3G wireless the price difference widens, but so does the device’s utility — access to wireless broadband anywhere there’s an available 3G network, which, as iPhone users already know, is invaluable.
Debra compares the fully kitted-out 9 3G-enabled iPad to “a powerful compact laptop that runs a full-fledged operating system and multi-tasks and that has USB and SD and Ethernet connectors, 4 GB of RAM, and 250 GB of storage.” The “full-fledged operating system” she’s talking about isn’t OS X, however, and the laptop she’s talking about definitely isn’t manufactured by Apple. That might not make a difference to a lot of people, but if you’re already in the “Macs cost too much” camp, it’s no wonder the iPad doesn’t hold much appeal compared to that Windows Home Edition running, plastic, bargain-bin quality laptop from Dell or HP that’s almost certain to stop working in two years or less. Yes, I recognize the extremely fanboyish sound of that sentence. No, I don’t apologize for it. Cheap laptops are exactly that: cheap. Call it elitism, fanboyism, Kool-Aid drinking, whatever: I’d much rather put up with the iPad’s shortcomings than those of the “powerful” but oh-so-cheapo laptops of other manufacturers.
9. It’s locked in
“You have to buy your apps from the App Store,” Debra notes. Yes, you do: from a store that has over 140,000 apps available, most of them for free, and capable of doing almost anything. Hate the App Store for some reason? Fine. Jailbreak the thing and use Cydia instead. Apple may not want you to do this, and they may go out of their way to prevent it, but if you’re of the jailbreaking mindset already, that’s not going to stop you, is it?
A very vocal minority of people love to complain about “vendor lock-in” when it comes to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, even though those same people have likely been playing around with video game systems from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft for decades — all platforms with “vendor lock-in” even more pervasive and insidious than that of Apple’s platform. What these people don’t seem to realize is that same vendor lock-in is precisely what keeps Apple’s portable platforms from being riddled with viruses, malware, and apps made of more crap than code. “Security through obscurity” may be a valid(ish) argument to fall back upon with the Mac, but with 75 million plus people using the iPhone OS, it’s a very high-profile target for virus writers. That same “walled garden” that Linux proponents and “open internet” evangelists whine about is what keeps the iPhone platform from being an unusable nightmare. Yes, the App Store approval process has in many cases been a pain in the nether regions, but things are improving — apps that might have once taken days or weeks to get approved are now getting through the approval process in a matter of hours. Has the App Store’s “lock-in” affected sales of the iPhone one iota? No. In fact, sales of the iPhone took way off after the App Store’s arrival.
Yes, “Apple as gatekeeper” gets the George Orwell fans riled. But someone has to keep the gate, because the instant the iPhone OS becomes a truly “open” platform like some people are espousing, that’s the same instant the Russian mafia remote-hijacks your iPhone from a basement in Vladivostok because you just had to download that “Siberian Honeys” app from the dark alleys of the internet.
Other aspects of dreaded “lock-in” that Debra’s concerned about are riddled with falsehoods. “You can’t run Skype to make phone calls,” with the iPad, she claims. “We wouldn’t want to cut into the iPhone market, after all.” Say what? That must be news to the Skype team, who’s already investigating an iPad-specific Skype app. It must be news to Apple, too, who no longer restricts the use of VoIP over 3G. “Nor can you download Flash to install on the browser, which means you won’t be watching those