Thank you, David Pogue

[acmespaceship]

I hadn't been able to put my finger on it, but now David Pogue in the New York Times has managed to articulate exactly the thing that bugs the hell out of me about the iPad: 

"It’s designed for consuming — books, newspapers, movies, photos, music, Web, e-mail — more than creating. There’s no physical keyboard and no camera."

That's it exactly.  I get the same nagging displeasure when I go to Fry's (oh how I love to go to Fry's...) and look for microphones, only to find three or four mics on display next to an entire aisle of earphones.  Or when I read specs for MP3 players trying to find out if they have a recording capacity and a line-in port.  Or all those netbook reviews and not a mention of whether you can type on the damn thing.  Are people really just sitting there with $500+ devices looking at them and not doing anything?  Still, if anyone wants to give me an iPad for free I'll take it. Ooh, shiny. 

Comments

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

So every iPad should come pre-installed with a copy of They Live?

[whl.livejournal.com]

As they do with the iPhone, which (unsubsidized) is in that ballpark too, with the difference that you can use the iPhone to talk to people.

The iPad starts to open the door to creating; it evidently has a file system (at least a folder) that can be accessed when it is docked, so things you type or draw can be moved to a more conventional environment without using iTunes. It has provisions for a physical keyboard, which means long form writing becomes possible.

There is a microphone, although nothing I've found so far confirms that the headphone socket is the usual 4 conductor earbud/microphone/control button affair that everything else uses these days.

But yes, it doesn't seem designed for creation. For example, in my own field, so far, no programs have appeared in the iPhone (and hence iPad) app store that allow a programmer to write scripts or programs and run them on the devices themselves. I can only assume that some have been written, but were rejected by the committee that approves things for the App Store.

On the other hand, this is a version 1.0. The iPod Touch didn't officially get sound recording capability before version 2.0. It will be interesting to see if OS revisions make the earlier pocket sized iDevices compatible with the keyboard.