5 Reasons I Won’t Be Buying An iPad

By Web Hosting Help Guy

Like everyone else in the tech world, I was eagerly anticipating the big Apple tablet announcement on January 27th. True, I had noted with sarcastic glee that Apple’s countless devoted fans do their PR work for the for free, and no, I don’t count myself one of them — even though, in noting this phenomenon, I did my own fair share of Apple’s leg work.

Secretly, though, I wanted to see a super-cool product from Jobs and Co. that I could be excited about, be a first adopter of, and ding my credit for the sake of. I like gadgets as much as anyone else, and as an avid reader and devourer of content, I’m always looking for something that furthers that particular life obsession.

What the world got, however, was a glorified iPod Touch — a product that’s too big to be handy, too limited to be useful, and too expensive to be widely used. It’s a product that seems to exist between the spaces of already-existing products. It’s more than an e-reader, but less than a netbook, which is itself just enough less than a laptop to undermine its own claims for legitimacy. Thus, while like all Apple products it looks cool and stylish and will be no doubt bought by the Apple faithful, it’s not the industry-changing device we all thought and hoped it would be.

And we should be asking for our money for doing all that free PR.

So, while you’re free to go out and spend your hard-earned money any way you want, here are five reasons why I won’t be with you on Opening Day.

1) No multi-tasking — This is, hands down, the biggest flaw of the iPad. If society has taught us anything over the last decade, it’s that if you’re only doing one thing you’re not doing enough. As I type this, I have 12 browser tabs open, a document I’m editing open, my chat open, and my BlackBerry in my lap — and I’m in my 30s. I assume that anyone more than 10 years younger than me is doing twice as much, and doing it three times as efficiently. Devices that can only do one thing at a time already exist, and they’re called books. Even the lowest-end netbook can do more than that.

2) No camera — Again, if this thing is supposed to be the next step up from the netbook, then why doesn’t it have the features that you can find on a basic one? Not to mention the fact that Apple really led the way on the integrated camera/video chat front — why would they not think that the iPad could benefit from a camera?

3) No Flash — Goodbye, two-thirds of the Internet! No Netflix, no Hulu, no Homestarrunner…if this is the future, I want no part of it.

4) Weird Size — As I said above, too big to be handy, to small to be functional. It’s like those little black backpack/purse things that popular for a about 10 minutes during the ’90s.

5) Limited Input Options — To me, a tablet should have the input capabilities of…well, an actual tablet. I’m surprised that the iPad doesn’t have a stylus input or some other similar function. A designer colleague of mine actually felt betrayed by this oversight; he noted, “Designers have been waiting for an Apple tablet for 10 years — I can’t believe this isn’t a tool for designers. I’ll stick with my MacBook Pro.” In this regard, I’ll have to respectfully disagree with the good folks over at Visual Swirl — the iPad won’t “shake up” the design world until we can draw on it.

That pretty much sums it up for me. If a new device doesn’t fully replace existing ones, then why bother with it?

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