Millions of bits, tweets, posts, reviews, jokes, YouTube shows, mockups and rumors have been made about Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad. The hype about the gadget started when the first rumors came out and it never stopped, not even when the real gadget was presented, by Steve Jobs, at a special event in San Francisco last week. Before that the whole CES had Apple’s dark cloud all over it with Steve Balmer, from Microsoft, making one of the most disastrous presentations ever in the history of the show, when trying to demo Microsoft’s answer to a rumor. That is how powerful Apple is and that is how high the expectations were.
But let’s face it: Even if Apple is thankful for all the free advertising that is getting for the iPad, this time, it failed to deliver a product that really revolutionizes anything. The iPad was a disappointment to many that thought that Apple was going to be, again, a game changer like it was first with the iPod touch and then with the iPhone.
Let’s start with its name, shall we? The iPad, specially with the Pad part of it. What was Apple thinking? That people would overlook the Pad part of the iPad brand? That no jokes would start traveling around Twitter the minute one of the tech blogs gave the name away? Come on! The joke potential for this kind of nomenclature is inversely proportional to the actual innovative features of the device itself!!
But it would be just fine if Apple had got only the name wrong, right? Unfortunately that is not so. The iPad (insert joke here) is like a huge iPhone without the phone in it. Like its mini-me, the iPad doesn’t support flash technology: if that is ok to most iPhone’s users it is a major drawback for a device that is supposed to take over that world between your computer and your mobile device. Unlike its mini-me you can’t carry it on your pocket and make calls with it.
The list doesn’t stop here but one of the most disappointing things, to me, was a lack of any kind of camera on the iPad. In a time when one of the most talked about technologies is camera based (Augmented Reality), Apple missing to have one on the first version of the iPad shows a lack of vision that I always took for granted when speaking about anything Apple.
What do you think? Will you get one? Will you, like me, wait for a 2.0 version of the iPad and see what that brings? Let me know in the comments.
Picture Credits: Tom Rafferty under a CC License
Strategist, Sound Designer, Electronic Music Producer, New Media Artist, Activist, Blogger, A&R of the 
