The iPad 2 is out. Duh! I’ve been receiving emails from Apple for a month now announcing its arrival and building the hype machine. I don’t have an iPad nor do I really want one however I will admit they are cool. My ten year-old daughter wants one REALLY bad but when I ask her why the response is the ever familiar “I dunno, they’re cool”. Yes, the hype machine is working well.
Personally I have no need for something that tries to look like a small laptop but offers a minimal tool set. It seems to me like it is just a gigantic iPhone… without the phone. It doesn’t even have a word processing app. You can view movies while on the go… but why on earth would I want to do that?
Even if I were not a web designer who uses applications like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and all I did was surf the Internet and send emails, typing is just too awkward on the touch screen. You have to hit a toggle key in order to type numbers which I find particularly annoying however there is a very convenient .com key which saves me from having to type three characters and .005 seconds of my time.
So the iPod 2 is very sleek, easy to carry around and kind of cool but the tasks that it seems to be optimized for just aren’t things I would do in places where something portable is necessary.
I get giant T.V. screens and monitors, I get the convenience of small handheld devices for email, texting and phone usage, I get netbooks, which are easily portable and have almost as much functionality as a desktop computer. I don’t get this middle child the iPad and wonder where it would stand without the power of the hype machine plunging it into the market and our faces.