Apple's Old News

The last entry was written with an iPad at an Apple store (actually at a "Mac store"), it was my first hands-on experience with an iPad. This entry is being written from an iPad as well, but this one isn't borrowed! The iPad has lived up to all I said it would in my Feb 4, 2010 entry, and so much more! The detractors are conspicuously absent nowadays with so many Android-toting iPad knockoffs.

But that is all they are: knockoffs.
They're trying to do what 'the competition' did with the iPod and the iMac before it; they're making a copy, and adding functions Apple left out. I think it'd be safe to bet that ol' Jobsy didn't just 'forget' to implement those features. The iMac shipped without a floppy drive, so the knockoffs decided that they would one-up Apple and add one. Shortly thereafter the floppy died a quick death. With the iPod the competition decided that what the iPod was missing was buttons, a lot of them, and an am/fm radio, a voice recorder and more at the expense of the user experience. Lo' and behold, the only real competition to the iPod classic, to this day, is the iPod touch; neither of which have more buttons than the original iPod had in 2001. I don't care who you are, if you can design something that is so useful and simple that ten years later it doesn't feel dated or clunky, you're doing something amazing. If you can do that in the tech industry, you're way ahead of the guy who's ahead of the curve; you're designing the curve and deciding where it goes.

Back to my point; the many 'improvements' of the current generation of Android tablets. They've taken a look at a few of the areas lacking in the iPad 1.0; cameras, SD card reader (built in), and so called true multitasking, to name a few.

The lack of cameras may be a good point, but before the addition of Facetime on the iPhone, iPod touch and Mac OS, video chat was relegated to purely a desktop experience. Not to say that there were no mobile video chat options, but nothing on the scale the current iPhone enjoys. Having a tablet with the ability to do video chat is great, but if the only people you can talk to are on that device, and it hasn't sold a few million units, your use of the feature is going to be limited. There are more and more Android devices with front-facing cameras, but there is so much division among the Android OS versions, their compatibility with each other may become a concern.

I know, all of the devices can now run Skype and do video conferencing, so that pretty much makes all of my arguments null and void. Skype is great, and you can use it on Cell signal as well as WiFi, but what can I say, I just really like the way Facetime just works.

I know for a fact that I can use my iPod touch to call an iPhone with Facetime as easily as doing the same with a friend on his Mac or another iPod touch. It just works. When the iPad 2 comes out with it's front-facing camera, I know that there's a really good chance that out of the box I'll be able to use Facetime with it and all the aforementioned iOS and OSX devices.

The lack of an SD card reader has really never been an issue with my current iPad, and if it was, shelling out $29 for the adapter kit is no skin off my nose. The fact is, the only reason I'd use an SD card with my iPad is to edit and/or upload the occasional photo to Picasa or Flickr; I'm not going to archive all the photos on my iPad since I'm using 4-16GB per SD card and I don't see a reason to arbitrarily fill my iPad. And the occasional upload is not reason enough to sully the look of the device or build-in a reason to make the it that much more expensive.

Now, the issue of multitasking has all but been resolved on the iPad with the iOS 4.0 update: background apps can send push-notifications, complete tasks in the background or, in the case of Pandora and Safari, play audio while not active. With fast app switching the need for applications to continue to use resources is just asinine. The only real advantage to multitasking is to be able to have an application continue to crunch data while you do other things. That kind of work has no place on a tablet device. If I need to go back and forth between a few apps, say Safari (for an occasional Wikipedia fact-check), Pages to edit my blog entry and iTunes to change the current track, there is really no reason to have all three applications running constantly. The above scenario isn't just conjecture or a hypothetical situation, it's what's happening right now as I'm editing this entry on my iPad. I have suffered no inconvenience for the sake of "fake" multitasking, and I pose that almost all work done on a tablet can be done with little to no consideration for multitasking.

As far as the Android tablet is concerned, they're really not competing on a fair playing field as Apple has had decades of research into the iPad. I have no proof or real data to confirm my thoughts, but when you tear into an iPad (or let ifixit.com do it for you) you'll see technological refinement on the level of a 3rd or 4th generation piece of electronic hardware. I can only assume that Apple had been working on the iPad's hardware for many years and that only with the introduction and success of the iOS and it's interface could they release a device that lives up to Steve J's stringent level of perfection.

The best thing that can be said about the Android tablets is that they're almost close to comparable to what Apple did this time last year. Which is what they're competing with: Apple's old news.