It’s been a week since I got my iPad and so far, I’m very impressed! I’m not disappointed at all in my purchase.
I keep reading postings on the net from the Apple haters complaining about what it lacks and what Android is going to have. I think they’re going to be waiting for a long time… I’d rather have an iPad now, than wait a year for the mythical Android device to show up that works as well. By then, the iPad will be so far ahead in apps and support, there won’t be any catching up.
From all the prototype tablets showing up, they all seem to have all those things that the nay-sayers keep arguing about religiously. They play Flash. They have USB ports. They have cameras. I’ve already discussed all these things in my previous posting. I hate Flash. I don’t want to carry other USB devices along with me while mobile. It’s too big to be a camera and my phone already has one.
Multitasking is a non-issue since iOS 4.0 will have that and after watching the demos of it, I like what I see coming from Apple. Multitasking on my Android phone does nothing but drop my free memory to 20MB and cause everything to run slow. I’ve even have it stall when I received a call. It didn’t have the memory and processor available to start the phone application!
These other pad prototypes looks like they’ll be selling for a lower price, but that’s probably possible because of the lower quality hardware being put into them. I’ve read reports on cheap plastic feel to the chassis, poor screens, sluggish response times to user interaction, etc. I believe it will be a good year before they can afford to put similar quality hardware into them to match the current iPad.
The other thing I like is the screen aspect ratio. Everyone keeps complaining that they want a 16:9 aspect for a pad. I’ve seen those demos too and I can’t imagine trying to read a web page or emails where my only choice is landscape. Web pages are vertical documents. Email are vertical documents. You really want as much vertical space as possible when reading these documents, and that means portrait mode. A 16:9 device in portrait mode will only show about 2/3 of the page. This is useless.
I really don’t care if I play a movie or TV show and it letterboxes it. I’m not going to spend my day watching video files on the pad. I want to read PDF files, see my documents, email, and web pages. 16:9 is only good for movies and that is a poor thing to focus on when designing hardware. Anyone who does software development or computer work will tell you that they would prefer 4:3 monitors over 16:9 anytime. Vertical space is always preferred!
Another good reason for choosing the iPad over other upcoming devices is the application support. I have no problems with Apple being picky about what shows up in the app store. When a developer has to wait a week or two for their app to be approved and put into the store, they’re going to make sure it is tested well, and that it works. There are still some crashes, but they’re rare.
Android apps on the other hand don’t have any restrictions. I’ve downloaded so many crappy applications for my Android phone, I wish they did have someone in control. It seems like the Android developers have a “submit to market” step as part of their compile process. Force closes are extremely common. I don’t want to trust my phone to kids coding in their basements.
The other reason that iPad applications will always be better is because of the market base. Any million dollar development company (or even smaller ones) are going to first look to see who has the most devices out there and target that platform. Apple is an easy choice. Testing on Apple’s devices is easy because there are so few to work with. Testing against Android is going to require them to test against about 20 phones, 15 pads, etc. Not an easy task especially when they’ll have different OS versions, different installed hardware, etc. I’m not saying there won’t be great applications on the Android, just that they will take a while, and I’d already have them on the iPad today.
And who helps Android developers build for those devices? Apple has a complete support infrastructure for developers to fall back on when they need to figure out how to do certain things on the iOS. Android development sounds like a lot of Google searching.
So, yes, I’m happy having the iPad today as opposed to waiting months for an Android pad to show up with something anywhere near similar.
I’m going to write a series of blog entries describing how I’m using the iPad and what applications I’ve installed so far. Given the amount of stuff I have bought, I will probably be looking at getting the new iPhone when it shows up in Canada as well. Might as well share the apps between the devices instead of buying apps for two different types of hardware 🙂