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.
