17 notesApple has the iPad’s features almost all figured out
It’s a whole lot easier to talk about what the iPad can’t do right now because no one has an iPad in their hands to rave about. It’s important to remember that Apple is positioning the iPad in between your everyday computer and your cell phone.
There are features that both your laptop and cell phone do much better than the iPad ever could. Apple will obviously never make the device that does everything because it would cut into the sales of their other products. They selectively omits things from their devices for a reason, usually because there are other products in their line that can do the same things, better.
Aaron at TechThinker.com has posted 8 Important feature missing in Apple’s iPad. Of the eight that he points out, only one of them is actually a feature Apple should have included.
His missing features include:
- No SD Card Reader
- No USB Slot
- No Multitasking
- No HDMI Port
- The iPad does not support true HD. The aspect ratio of the display is 4:3 instead of the newer 16:9 ratio.
- No GPS
- No Built In Camera
- No Cellular Voice
The SD card reader and USB ports are on your computer already. In the Keynote, Steve Jobs talked about how the iPad would sync just like your iPhone, loading all of those photos, videos, and playlists onto your iPad. The iPad has limited solid state memory and Apple realizes that it’s more important for the user to control the amount of stuff they’re putting on their iPad from their computer, hence no SD readers or USB ports
An HDMI port wasn’t included in the iPad because chances are high that the TV you want to connect your iPad to already has a connected DVD player. Apple knows that if you wanted to watch a movie on your TV, you would go through other devices. Keeping the form factor small was also a priority in the iPad. More video-out technology means more space those components take up inside the device. Apple was right to leave out the HDMI port as well.
Your iPhone or in-car GPS device do GPS and navigation better and more efficiently than the iPad could. I don’t really see anyone keeping an iPad in their front seat to help them figure out a way around town. Falling prices in the GPS market would make buying an iPad solely for the GPS features an irresponsible purchase.
Your computer has a camera and what’s more important — a battery whose resources aren’t as valuable (assuming your primary computer is a laptop). The iPad’s battery is limited and video chatting would waste valuable battery time that you may need later. Besides, there’s no multitasking, so if you needed to look up something while video chatting, you would be out of luck. Apple knows their MacBooks can do video chatting in a more efficient way so the camera had to go.
And as for using the iPad as a cell phone, come on, Apple already made a phone for that. Chances are there’s already cell phone in your pocket. Why do you need two? Put a cell phone in the iPad and you might as well call it an iPhone Jumbo or the iPhone an iPad Nano.
Finally, the feature that is rightfully missing: Multitasking. At this point multitasking being omitted from the iPhone OS is irresponsible of Apple because competitor’s phones are busy capitalizing on this feature. If Apple does implement multitasking, they’ll limit the amount of apps to some number under five, in the interest of battery life. Hopefully multitasking comes with the next iPhone update later this year.
The only other feature that’s missing from the iPad is Flash. I won’t go into that here because there are a million other blogs talking about how the lack of Flash is the iPad Killer.
Before we go pointing at the iPad and talking about what it can’t do, think about what purposes the device is supposed to serve and what other technologies that you already own can do those things in a more efficient way.
