There's no shortage of tablet devices available today, and demand for them seems pretty high. Scanning through Engadget, it seems like we've got a good stock coming in the future, too. The problem, as I see it, is that the future tablets that everyone is so excited about are exciting (at least to media outlets like Engadget) for the wrong reasons.

Tablet onlookers seem enticed by the latest versions of operating systems, faster processors, and additional cell network capabilities. The latest versions of iOS and Android certainly are improvements over prior versions, but they don't add anything groundbreaking or genre-defining to the fundamental features of a tablet. Faster processors are nice of course, but they also tempt battery drain, which is an essential, oft-overlooked feature of a tablet. The latest LTE connections are certainly alluring as our dependence on the cloud and correlating bandwidth needs increase, though the dependence on cell networks and their high-cost plans are strange things to look forward to. I think there are other things that we should concentrate on for producing the "fundamental tablet".

What you see

There's no denying that the Amazon Kindle is one of the best eBook readers on the market, and in my opinion, the best. It does so many things right. The size is perfect. The battery life is great. The WiFi connectivity is convenient. And although the display technology is pretty good, it could be improved.

The black and white display of the Kindle is a high quality e-ink screen. The screen of high-contrast, high-density black and white pixels is able to retain its state with a low- or no-power charge, and it's visible in ambient light. The combination of high resolution with low power consumption is what makes it so attractive. Nonetheless, the problems with it are obvious: The refresh rate on the screen is too slow, and the device does not display color.

The technology I've been looking at to replace it has been available for a while, and there even have been rumors that Amazon is looking into using it for their next generation e-reader. The technology is produced by Qualcomm and is called Mirasol. Mirasol retains the e-ink properties of low power consumption, high resolution, and daylight visibility, but adds color and a high refresh rate. The screens look a little odd because they're not what we're used to - LCD screens with bright, energy-eating backlights projecting images on our eyes - but they're easy to grow accustomed to.

Consider the form factor of the Kindle, also. It's small and lightweight, yet still contains all of the basic functionality of most tablets, being the ability to display data and to connect wirelessly to the internet. While an iPad may have more functionality, it weighs significantly more and is larger, and is only separated in functionality by what the Kindle allows its users to do and the capability of its processor. This is why I'm kind of disappointed by the recent announcement of the Android-based, backlit Kindle, since it almost certainly uses LCD.

How it works

The world needs a real tablet operating system. That's really all there is to it. Even though iOS and Android are running the game, neither are really well suited to the task. iOS was built with the iPod and iPhone in mind, and is great at playing minigame apps. But iOS apps don't talk to each other in an integrated way that would make them so much more useful. Android suffers from a number of problems, the most significant of which is the uninspired - and similar to early Linux operating systems - user experience design, not to mention the citadel-like app stores depending on which stingy manufacturer you obtained your device from.

Perhaps the best suited of the available mobile OSes for tablet use is WebOS, whose only hope of being useful in the future is if HP opens it to the world. Otherwise, it's a death brought on too soon by complete and utter mismanagement. WebOS had done something very right in providing API access to pluggable cloud services for its application developers. This allowed the apps to work with each other and with services that were off the device, which would be essential to any underpowered handheld.

I can't say for sure what the perfect tablet OS looks like. It's certainly not TabCo's disaster of a UI. But I imagine that it would be more oriented toward connecting people to each other and their services than explicitly "running applications".

How it connects

This is one of the big hardware design changes that I'd propose for a new tablet. What is the biggest pain about connecting your devices to the cloud? Right, it's the price.

We can still have the internet, but let's do it differently. Instead of relying on existing cell infrastructure as our primary means of getting mobile devices online, let's build a mesh network of devices that connect to each other and relay information. If I want to send something to my friend across the country, the data routes from my tablet to my neighbor's tablet, to a tablet nearby, and on and on until it reaches the intended recipient. Between me and my friend, there are only tablet nodes on the mesh network. No cell towers, no cell payments.

Sure, in the short term tablets could hook into local WiFi access points and relay their messages through land lines. But the idea is that we cut out the huge payments to cell companies that don't really do anything more than what we could do with a couple of personally owned radios that are contained in every new tablet.

How it changes banking

I'm done with terrestrial banks, aren't you? And paper money. And the US Dollar, really.

Wouldn't it be something if you could store value in your tablet device? I'm not talking about tying your device to a bank account, which is certainly possible. I'm suggesting a different currency, born in the tablet network, backed by something other than the faith in the US government to pay its debts. Because, I mean, really?

Maybe Bitcoin isn't the way to go, but a simple, open, secure way of exchanging value would be a financial boon. Think about it: Being your own bank or using someone else as a banking service, making loans and accepting interest. Sure, there's piracy and money laundering to be wary of, but there are probably means by which you could augment something like Bitcoin to be more resilient to patently illegal uses.

When you combine a separate monetary system with independent network capability, you have something powerful. Something much more powerful than the next processor or the next touchscreen or something with a camera built-in which we're soon going to be taking for granted.

These are the kinds of revolutionary steps I'm talking about. And it's the same kind of thing going on, I suspect, as with the way cell phones seem to make very slow technical forward progress, always leaving out some simple to include yet vital feature that would make it the next Best Thing for a reason that is masked from consumers.

I'm curious about what will come out of the iPad 2 event from Apple that is supposed to happen today. With the market for tablets opening up, it's just a matter of time until someone releases a more functional tablet than the iPad that Apple provides. I say this having read about the reason that the iPad is so successful - Apple's ability to offer the device for a low price. But I think that the iPad is still just a bit deficient in a particular area.

Don't get me wrong, I use the iPad very often. It's not deficient to the point of being unusable. I'm using to write this post right now, in fact. With a bluetooth keyboard, the iPad is almost a computer. And that's the problem - "almost".

Sure, I guess that it's not supposed to do everything a computer can, and I guess that's ok, but later this summer, there will be many tablets on the market that can do just that. The Fujistu tablet I saw announced yesterday looks really nice (and I love their products otherwise), and even Palm come HP's TouchPad with WebOS on it looks like something I wouldn't mind having, because at least it's a light installation of linux at its core and can be augmented.

With the iPad, none of this is so. The only way to create applications for it is to use a Mac to compile one and then launch it (for widespread use, anyway) via the app store. For as much as Apple touts their products as educational devices, you'd think you'd be able to at least write a program on it in Logo, or something. It seems like a device prime for on-device coding; something that will make it possible to run small applications.

I guess Apple's getting miserly with their fortune. They must not be making enough money off of the sales of movies, music, and other apps to allow an app that builds apps to enter the marketplace. If they could make it possible for an app to build apps that could then be deployed via the app store, they'd just make more money. The only thing they'd lose is a few sales of Macs to people who really didn't want to buy them just to make apps but did anyway. Maybe that number is huge, but it smacks of the gym membership tax - charging people for something they stop using afte the first week.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what the problem is, or why Apple won't allow a high-level language app on their devices. It'll be the first thing that really differentiates other tablets besides price. I'm looking forward to that.

I've had this idea forever, and at first it sounds like nothing new, but when you see how the pieces fit together you'll recognize it as something a bit more original.

The idea has its origin in a Star Trek exhibit that the Franklin held many years ago. One of the more creatively inspiring things about the exhibit was the user of the LCARS interface elements on each exhibit display. If you're only marginally familiar with Star Trek the Next Generation, you'll know the look of these things on sight. They're really a contrivance for the show, offering no real UX benefit at all, but some computer applications have taken the look of LCARS and used it to produce some interfaces for things, whether they're Star Trek-related or not.

The idea this spawned for me was a video game in which the participant was a student/cadet at Star Fleet Academy. The idea is that there would be a good amount of interesting fiction and story, but the fundamentals of space exploration - read: astronomy - would be taught to the user in an entertaining way. In other words, use the Star trek franchise to actually teach kids real things about space in a fun way. After all, this is the purpose of the Franklin, right?

Well, we all know that Star Trek isn't anything about honest-to-goodness space exploration, so the melding of those ideas probably wouldn't stick. But the idea of educational software on the topic of astronomy tied with a franchise has always been an interesting thought for me. Moving on to the present day...

I have this application on the iPad called Star Walk. Star Walk is in essence a map of the sky. What makes it interesting is that it uses the internals of the iPad (there's a version for the iPhone, too) to make the map live and interactive. The end effect is this: If you hold the iPad up to the night sky, you see an overlay of labels and constellations on the astronomical bodies that exist behind your view of the iPad itself. It's like putting an educational overlay on the sky.

I could speculate as to how this works, using the iPad's internal sensors - the GPS, accelerometers, and compass - to figure out what's behind it. But the main thing is that the pad becomes a transparent device to the universe behind it. People might call this artificial reality, and that's fine and good, although I think that the term is a nice buzzword for "I'm going to sell you crap by showing you new places to buy things" than anything else, but it's useful for explaining this whole game idea I promised in the title.

Because if you look at the capabilities of these devices, there are enough sensors on board and enough processing power and enough display capability that you can do something that I think is pretty neat.

So imagine that you're Johnny, maybe 9-12 years old. You're going on another of those annoyingly long trips to wherever that your parents always drag you on. You love Star Wars/Trek and space, and you like to play video games.

Your mom or dad loans you their iPad for the trip. On the iPad is a game that, having been pre-programmed by mom/dad, knows the GPS route that you will take in the car. But instead of showing you real things as you pass them in the car (which could still be pretty neat), it turns outside scenery into astronomical features of a video game.

The Starbucks? An intergalactic energy station. The McDonalds'? An enemy stronghold.

Hold the iPad up to the windows an look "ouside" the ship (car) to see what's going on outside. Maybe this is a material collection game. Maybe it teaches you about astronomy as you go. There are a lot of options, and the "game board" would be helpfully generated by actual real-world places.

The best part, for the parents, is that the game knows when the kid has reached the "dock" destination, and doesn't have to fight the kid to turn the iPad over when you reach Grandma's.

The game doesn't have to be exclusively astronomy-oriented, either. It could be a safari or some other kind of Earthly adventure. There are plenty of skins you could put on the game to change the angle of presentation and type of education imparted. Or it could simply be all fun, rather than impart any direct education at all.

The main potential blocker I see is the ubiquity of parents willing impart their iPads to a kid for long car or train (plane?) trips. It would be useful if the next Nintendo portable had some external sensors or the capability to connect to external sensors wirelessly for this purpose.

When this type of game comes to market, I'm going to have Berta do most of the long-distance driving.

I expect that the common consumer dodders along, taking what they're given, and doesn't see many mistakes with the products that they use day-to-day. Some products are pretty easy to get right the first time, since they're simple and elegant. Others, particularly those involving technology, are harder to get right, and usually require some revision to get as good as they could be.

My personal gripe with cell phones over the years to make them into the devices they should be is a great example of how technology exists to make a device really good, but for one reason or another, it just never gets there. Another great example is the iPad.

I'm not saying the iPad is "bad", just that it has a handful of currently unavoidable problems that limit it only to somewhat more than a really expensive toy. This is my short list of things that I think really need to be addressed in the next revision of both the hardware and the software.

The Dock Slot

I've complained about this on other occasions, but I'll do it even more now. The non-standard (read: proprietary) dock slot needs to go.

Worse than that is its portrait-exclusive orientation. For a device that is touted in part for its movie playback, you would think that docking would be possible in landscape orientation, but it's not. Well, it is if you don't mind the able sticking out to the side of the device. A second side-slot would have been a great addition.

Dock Accessory

The iPad also suffers from being too sexy for its own good, and interfering with the docking slot. I've had an iPod Touch for a while, and the back of the device is all scuffed from being spun around on tables and placed in pockets. The metal back looks pretty beat. I don't want this to happen to my new iPad, so I applied the thinnest protective skin I could find. Now the iPad doesn't fit in the standard (crappy) dock. Even with the Apple-branded case, inserting the iPad into the dock is impossible.

Granted, Apple probably doesn't want me to wrap my iPad in a protective sleeve, but frankly I'm not going to expose this $500 device to the elements for aesthetics and the need to buy a new one when mine gets too beat up from exposure.

The Apple-brand accessories are pretty lackluster. The dock accessory hardly holds up the iPad in portrait orientation. When the iPad is in the dock and you touch things near the top of the screen, it wobbles back and forth. There's no back support for the device. A better dock would have just the connector at the base, and some solid supports behind the device that reach farther up its back. The supports would also leave room for any reasonable case accessory I choose to apply. This simple design change would improve this accessory immeasurably.

Multitasking

The iPad does not need multitasking, but...

Data Sharing

What the iPad software desperately needs is the ability to more easily share data across applications.

Grabbing something out of email to paste into a Pages document is so tedious it has me grabbing for my netbook. The iPad can't replace a netbook due to this utterly simple failure. It's both a matter of speed, in the case where it works at all (which may be remedied by the upcoming 4.0 OS update), and of impossibility.

The worst part being since the system abstracts the idea of a saved file from you, you have no opportunity to share "files" between applications. For example, I can't save a "file" in one application and open it with another. At all. Ever.

And don't get me started on Google integration. My whole life is organized in Google (which is a scary thought in itself), and I can't get at it effectively on the iPad. One ical feed in the calendar app is hardly enough. I require at least 6, and the feed has to be bi-directional. As far as I can tell, there is no great solution that makes the native calendar app useful with Google. That's a big problem.

Obvious Poor API Choices

And yet... At least two apps that I have installed include HTTP servers that allow me to transfer files into the iPad. I can only imagine the inefficiency of code that would require both applications to include full servers inside them because real file transfer outside of iTunes doesn't exist. And the file transfer from iTunes (which is one of the ugliest, unwieldy, flaky programs on my PC, by the way) is less than what any real user would hope it to be.

Photo Management

Photo management is terrible. There exists the possibility to pull photos into the photo manager, but you cannot create new albums within the device. You must do it from iTunes. If there was one thing out of this whole list that Apple could do for me, it would be this one: Let me create new albums on the iPad itself.

Many apps support the only cross-app sharing that the iPad has -- photo saving. But it only lets you save to a single album on the iPad; a generic photos album. When the photos get in there, they can't be moved to another album without connecting to a PC. This further emphasizes that the iPad is not a netbook replacement, because it doesn't have the basic management and organization features that a netbook does.

Bluetooth

I had an amusing moment at a conference recently, when my Bluetooth keyboard turned itself on inside my bag and started playing the music on my iPad at full volume in the middle of a session. That's a problem with my packing, not the iPad itself. But there is a problem with the iPad's Bluetooth.

It's disappointing to me that devices don't implement more Bluetooth protocols. I want Bluetooth headphones. I want to connect to external GPS devices. I want to connect my camera via Bluetooth. I want to connect external monitors via Bluetooth.

Imagine being able to hook your iPad to your TV for video playback without physically connecting it to anything! Awesome!

Native Format Playback

I know there are or may be apps that will do it, but the native player is always preferred to some crazy 3rd-party thing. I want to play back DivX. Everything in my media library is in DivX.

Currently, the only way I can play back anything in my video library is if I connect to my home PC over the net (which isn't possible on a plane) and use the Air Video app to stream it. I suppose I could use a converter (I have a couple), but I don't want to keep a separate file in a different format anywhere on my network. I want one copy, and I want that copy to play back on my iPad, whatever it may be. Simple.

It's No Zune

I love my Zune HD. Seriously. It's an awesome piece of tech. If you're around me and need to see it (I have noticed that most people haven't ever seen one, and think only of the old brown bar-o'-soap Zune), please ask. It's sexy. It also has a better screen than the iPad.

But my point here is about the Zune Pass. Think "Napster". I pay a flat fee, I can listen to practically anything in the Zune Marketplace as much as I want. And every month I get 10 download credits so I can download and keep any 10 songs in DRM-free format.

The difference being, of course, that anything I listen to on the iPad must have already been purchased.

Note that the Zune Pass is different from Pandora or the like, because I choose what I want to hear. If I want to hear a specific set of 5 songs right now, I can do that on Zune Pass. I can't do it on Pandora. This happens to me a lot more than you might expect, actually, especially with the kids.

Form Factor

I hate to say it, but I think the device is slightly too big. If the device was overall as large as the actual display, it would be better. The weight is just a slight bit too heavy. The footprint just slightly too large. I think two inches off the length and width and a half-sized bezel wouldn't hurt it too much, and make for a much tighter product. As it is, holding it up with one hand to read a book is tedious after a few minutes. The Kindle's weight and size kicks the iPad all over the playground.

Buggy Piece Of...

The wi-fi issue needs to be corrected. There's no reason I should dump wi-fi when sitting in my house. It happens all the time.

There are a bunch of other little quirks, too. Before I left for Drupalcon, I started the download of the movie Ninja Assassin from iTunes. It didn't finish. All through the conference, the iPad nagged me for my iTunes password, no matter what I happened to be doing. At least, I assume that it wanted the password for that purpose, since it stopped asking me after I let the download finish. The password dialog would pop up in the middle of anything, though, and didn't mention why I needed to provide it. Annoying.

Simplicity For the Stupid

It seems like a lot of work has gone into including only those features that are essential to getting work done. I can appreciate that. Still, there seem to be many places where something more feature-rich would have done better than throwing away features based on them being too complicated.

A prime example of this is the color picker from iWork apps. No, there isn't a color picker. Instead, you can pick from an assortment of color themes. You can't just pick "green". You can pick this one particular shade of green within a pre-defined palette that includes coordinating colors.

This is great if you don't want to screw around with choosing a color palette that works and just want a pretty presentation. It's also great if you want your presentation to look exactly like everyone else's on the planet. For people who can successfully pick coordinating colors, its extremely limiting. How difficult would it have been to include at least a regular color picker, if not something that would help you create a coordinated palette? The idea that I can't pick a straight color is perplexing.

Documentation

A corollary to the "keeping things too simple" issue is that there is no documentation. While I appreciate an attempt to create a product that requires very little documentation, the docs on the iPad are so sparse, there is a ton of stuff you miss.

Discovery is fun, but I don't want to figure out how to "undo" (you shake the iPad - which is really kind of stupid) only after I stumble upon it by accident after weeks of using the device. Some docs are preferrable to none.

The Standard Complaints

The modal push dialogs are ugly. There's no camera. No GPS in the non-3G. Costs $8 billion. iPad-exclusive apps are more expensive than iPhone apps. Etc.

In Summary

These are just my complaints. I'll admit that I don't remember a day since I've had the iPad where I've not used it. It's almost a standard fixture when watching TV these days, since it's so easy to pick up, surf a bit, and put down again. This is something I was doing with my phone before, and the bigger screen is better.

The iPad is a nice piece of tech. I will likely continue to use it. The iWork suite is truly something cool. I hope things will improve with future OS updates.

Still, there is room for a competitor to come along with superior interoperability and broader connection options. I would love to see Microsoft release Courier in a smaller form factor, with pen and touch support, better Bluetooth, support for lower-level file access, and good UI that includes the obvious missing things that Apple removed in a failed attempt to balance simplicity with feature-richness.