Consumers lined up this weekend to get their hands on the newest addition to Apple’s family of electronic products, the iPad.
The iPad comes with a starting price of $499 for the 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi model and escalates to $829 for the 64 GB model with both Wi-Fi and 3G support.
While the iPad is a great device for basic tasks such as reading news online, it lacks the simple innovations that Apple has long been a leader of. The device has a long way to go in terms of both hardware and software-based capability.
Most noticeably, the iPad lacks a camera, which there is no excuse for. Even the fifth generation iPod Nano has a built-in camera with the ability to record videos.
As the iPad has no phone capability, a camera could have been used to contact friends and family via Skype or other alternative video platforms such as iChat.
The iPad also lacks the ability to run more than one program or application at a time. This may prove frustrating to users who cannot perform multiple tasks on the device simultaneously.
As of now, the iPad does not support Adobe’s widely used Flash player. Popular Web sites such as Hulu will be effectively rendered unusable to iPad owners without Flash support, and a special app is required to view YouTube videos.
The decision for the iPad to support 720p and not 1080p shouldn’t be much of an issue for most people. The average person can’t tell the difference between the two unless they’re comparing them on a screen of about 32 inches or larger, but this won’t be a problem as the iPad also lacks an HDMI input, which would be needed to connect it to such monitors.
Basic handwriting recognition would prove phenomenal for activities such as taking notes, but that has yet to materialize. Apple has made an external keyboard available to owners, but to that point, a netbook seems more appropriate.
A 10-inch Dell netbook with 160 GB of storage, 1 GB of RAM, and a greater choice of ports can be purchased for $249 and is much more versatile than the iPad. For consumers disinterested in using Apple’s iPhone operating system, most netbooks run on some version of Windows.
The iPad simply does not provide much bang for one’s buck. Infamous technology research firm iSuppli estimates that the low-end iPad model costs only about $230 to produce, including materials and manufacturing, with the high-end model produced at around $350 per unit.
Apple still has some road to travel in terms of functionality and capability, which will almost certainly be expanded in forthcoming models and updates. As for now, the iPad is merely an overpriced and glorified version of the iPod Touch.
Patrick Levy is a communication freshman and may be reached at [email protected]
