Forgive me for being a cynical old curmudgeon, but I’m getting pretty sick and tired of people going on about the Apple iPad. Yes, it’s nice - a wonderful piece of industrial design, and another victory for Mr Ive. It has two show-stopping problems though;
It is a single user device. There are no logins, or profiles - so sharing it with anybody else isn’t practical at all.
Outside of the US the cost is so prohibitive that very few people are going to buy it. It will cost 4 times the price of an iPhone 3G - and if you drop it, you better damn well have it insured.
I’m not denying that the iPad is brilliant, because it is - I suspect one of the reasons HP bought Palm yesterday is to get their hands on anything they might be able to sell over the next couple of years - because that’s how long it’s going to take the competition to catch up with Apple in the tablet device market.
The Windows and Linux fan boys will no doubt wade in now and shout about the coming deluge of Windows 7 tablet PCs. They will all be crap. Windows 7 was not designed for a touch interface - it can support it, but it wasn’t designed from the outset with it in mind.
There’s also the fact that Apple have closed the hardware/software loop - they designed the CPU and chipset used in the iPad. Allied with an operating system tailored specifically for the hardware, the advantages are enormous.
What am I trying to say here? Maybe that the Apple iPad may indeed be brilliant, but at what cost?