February 16, 2010

• The iPad's missed opportunity

  Am I the only one who sees what a hugely missed opportunity this first generation of iPad is? It seems so because I've read nobody talking about it.

  Everyone seems to see a table at either a kind of laptop, a weird new gaming/app platform, or as a big over sophisticated ebook reader.  Some also imagine that people will find new and amazing use cases nobody has imagined yet.

  That may well be but there to me seems to be one obvious use case that the table design form is perfectly uniquely suited for that the iPad just isn't capable of doing out of the box that it totally should be.

  Think about what the iPad essentially is. It's a BIG iphone.  What possible good reason would you want your phone to have a bigger screen? Hint. It's not so you can type easier.

  Imagine if your ipod had a high quality video cam built in.  Not facing outward but facing the user. Suddenly it becomes a big video conferencing phone. It's the perfect form factor for it. Small enough that you can carry it in one hand, big enough so you can get a good view of the person you are speaking with. Imagine a world where you could easily share pictures and video with family and friends and business partners without the need of hauling around a huge laptop, unfolding anything or bothering with a mouse or keyboard. A few quick screen touches or even an audio command and you could be in a video conversation or you could be recording a video to upload onto youtube at a touch of a button.

  One of the most devastating critiques for the ipad to me is the criticism that the ipad is a step backward because it makes the web substantially more "read only". It's annoying and difficult to type and create on an ipad. There's no stylus for easy writing. It's not a multitask platform, and doesn't even have a regular camera for capturing pictures. It makes it easy to consumme apps iin the app store or read online books and watch static videos but doesn't make it easy to create and contribute your own apps, your own books, your own blogs, your own movies, your own pictures.

  Of course a video cam built in would have totally fixed that. Rather than trying to build upon older inputs, it would have been uniquely suited to give people the ability to experiment with the read/write interface of the future. Namely the video input. We can imagine people coming up with apps that make great use of this video cam feature, building in motion capture like the wii or utilizing facial recognition, etc. People would innovate. It would popularize the video interface in ways no other piece of hardware has yet managed to do. Soon everyone would have an ipad and everyone would be using it to video chat. It could even, I believe have ushered in a new era as often depicted in science fiction movies, where video communication soon phased out and replaced older school telephone communication as the new normal.

  But alas. The iPad for some reason doesn't have what should have been, in my humble opinion, it's most important component: a video camera. Rhe device could have, and I believe should have, been built around maximizing the utility of such a device. But it wasn't. And so all those possibilities are simply not going to come to pass yet at least not with this generation of the iPad at the lead. 

  Perhaps the technology just wasn't there yet. AT&T networks couldn't handle the video chat bandwidth and webcams weren't small and cheap and high quality enough to integrate.into the device. I don't know.  But it sure feels to me like a huge missed opportunity.

  And so right now I really don't see any purpose of ever buying an iPad since I already have a perfectly good laptop and a perfectly good iphone. The ipad just doesn't seem to me to add much.

  • 11:00 am
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