In case you’ve been living in a box for the past few months, you may have noticed that Apple announced details of their newest creation yesterday; the iPad.

Now, if you know me, you’ll know I’m not an Apple fan-boy, that is, someone who will buy every Apple product regardless. So, what are my thoughts on it?

It looks like a giant iPhone at first glance, and at second glance you realise that’s exactly what it is. It has the same power button, the same volume keys, the same silence option, the same dock connector, the same operating system and the same apps. Albeit, the built in apps have been tweaked for a bigger display.

So what is it for? The iPad is designed to fill a gap in the market. PCs and Laptops are inherently designed for production. You use them to create things and do work. Netbooks are the same to a lesser extent, but in the end they’re just miniature laptops. The gap I speak of, is for the casual consumer. Someone who wants to browse the web like a book from their sofa, someone who wants to read books without being away from their email, someone who wants a massive electronic map (for some reason, this makes me squee). For this purpose, it’s ideal.

But it has failures. Such a device could be considered a pseudo laptop and as such people have certain demands. The iPad, like the iPhone, doesn’t support multi tasking. This means if I want to chat to someone, I have to stay on one app, locking me into a venture of doing nothing else. The same for music, video or any other app. You can only do one thing at a time. This is frustrating, especially as the task is just so easy to do on a normal laptop. Another position where I believe it falls short is connections. As someone who doesn’t have many Apple products, the ‘dock’ connector is somewhat useless. A form of locking people into a bespoke connector so you have to buy the Apple brand, more expensive devices to use it. The connector itself is vertical, which is great if you have it plugged in whilst browsing the web at your desk, but what if you were watching a video? There’s no dock connector on the horizontal, meaning any need of charging at the same time will leave a big obtrusive wire coming out of the side.
A common feature of netbooks is built-in SD card readers, but again, the iPad doesn’t have one making transfer of any kind of data as tricky as an iPhone. On an iPhone, this is somewhat understandable (it is just a phone after all) but on a device such as this, it’s almost unthinkable to leave such a thing out. Sure, you can get Apple’s SD reading extension to plug into the dock connector, but it’s an annoying bulky lump I don’t want resting in my groin whilst reading something from the card vertically.
I’m also somewhat bemused about the lack of USB connectors, another very common thing which would have been an excellent feature to have. If I wanted to print something from an iPad, the printer better have wireless, ethernet or bluetooth support!

Even with all these failings, it’s a beautiful piece of design, but you wouldn’t expect anything less from Apple. Once the iBook store and 3G tech has been sorted out for us non-Americans, the age of the tablet may finally take off.