(Courtesy of Apple)
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Steve Jobs and company were quick out of the gate to call their new device, the iPad, “magical.” Apple employees “ooh”-ed and “ahh”-ed and the bloggers just went, “meh.”
In a video on CollegeHumor.com entitled “The iPad is a Comedy Gold Mine,” staff comedy writer Amir Blumenfeld asked some amusing questions, “Do we call it the iPod Jumbo? Do we create a sketch using the iPhone, calling it the iPad Nano, where we suggest that the smaller one can actually make phone calls?”
The bloggers had nothing better to do than trash the iPad’s supposed lack of features (no camera, no widescreen support, only running one app at a time) and make silly jokes about its name. No bloggers had an iPad in their hands yet so there was a lot of ranting and very little raving.
There isn’t much to rave about, anyways.
First, let’s start with the fact that the iPad isn’t very remarkable, no matter how magical Apple says it is. In art class, first graders tend to think that they’ve created true masterpieces, too. Showing their work to mom for a spot on the refrigerator, Junior can’t imagine anything better, Picasso and Monet be damned. We’re all a little biased in our own favor.
Mostly everything the iPad can do has been pioneered by the iPhone and iPod Touch: the multi-touch gestures, the brilliantly simple user interface, the impossibly small form factor and most importantly, the App Store. As Blumenfeld said, the iPad really isn’t anything more than an “iPod Jumbo.”
Once the iPad launches, though, the iPad is going to make the bloggers, the comedy writers and the rest of the naysayers eat their words.
But how, you ask?
What will make the iPad stand out are the third-party developers. They created the revolutionary products for the iPhone – the applications. They’ll do the same for the iPad.
One hundred and forty thousand applications later, the App Store is a distribution juggernaut. The iPhone platform is to today what the San Francisco gold rush was to the people of the 1840s.
It’s no mistake that the iPad and iPhone are built on the same platform, either. Both are coded in Objective-C and both can run iPhone apps out of the box. The iPad has the ability to scale existing apps to double their original size to run on its larger screen as well.
But that’s just the appetizer while you wait for your meal.
When the iPad launches sometime toward the end of March or beginning of April, developers will have had two months to start creating their second gold rush. The games will get bigger and more beautiful. New problems will find solutions, beautifully written in a language most will never understand.
Unlike the many bloggers talking endlessly about the iPad on the Internet, I’m not too interested in the device as it gets ready to launch. A few months from now I’ll be asking for one for my birthday. How do I know? I watched the iPhone launch and evolve over the past three years.
The iPad will molt, turning from an easy joke about feminine hygiene products into a must-have portable device like the Game Boy was in the early ’90s.
That’ll shut the bloggers up. Because the missing camera isn’t important and neither is the aspect ratio of the movies you may watch on the device.
The argument against the iPad only lies in what it has yet to do.
Contact CU Independent Social Media Editor Zack Shapiro at Zashapiro@colorado.edu.
2 comments
The problem is, the incentive for developers to build apps is that people actually OWN the device.
Although, develop a useful handwriting app and send out a stylus, and it becomes hot shiz for college students to replace their notebooks with.
I don’t think the Ipad will be as successfull as the iphone, as it is not as knew and revolutionary.