iPad is a Disappointment

Steve Jobs announced the iPad today, and to be honest I was quite disappointed.

To be fair, iPad is a good product idea. The scenarios make sense and it’s a logical extension of the iPhone. There should be a market for it and I believe Apple will make some good profit given the marginal investment required. The bottom line is, it’s just a bigger iPhone. It’s not a revolutionary device that’s drawing us closer to the e-paper vision (think Harry Potter) or whatever hype the media have been generating.

The Daily Prophet in Harry Potter

As a tablet device guru, I dream of a device that will one day take a good share of the duty out of the paper and becomes a prominent medium that sits in between the computer screen and physical paper.

Tablet PC pushed the limit of the digitizer and inspired various form factors; Kindle popularized electronic ink display with a lightweight, low-heat device; while iPad contributed close to nothing.

To get the full picture, let’s look at the most successful medium in the world:  paper

Good:

• Extremely light-weight
• Readability (reflecting light instead of emitting light, contrast ratio)
• Support read & write
• Cheap
• Easy to expand to multiple displays

Bad:

• Static content only
• Hard to duplicate or transfer
• Hard to edit/modify the content
• Can only scale to a few hundred pages of content. Beyond that, it’s too heavy to be mobile.

Tablet PC solved a lot of these problems, some of which only half way, and also introduced new problems:

• It’s hot, thick, and heavy, compared to paper.
• The interaction (typing, browsing) feels awkward, compared to keyboard, mouse and real pen.

I was hoping iPad would address at least some of these big, challenging problems, but it didn’t.

It’s still thick and heavy, relatively speaking. I haven’t used it yet but I expect it to get hot overtime. The way you type on it is through a virtual, non-textile keyboard, which I expect to be a pain (Steve Jobs said it’s like a dream to type on it. I think it’s BS.). Beyond which I haven’t seen any interaction technique introduced. It still uses a LED display, which means your eyes get sore quickly like reading from a computer screen.

From Steve Jobs’ demo, it also looks like you are stuck with some awkward screen size and will have to pan & zoom around in order to browse a larger web page. I don’t know how you can call this the best browsing experience ever.

In short, iPad is a new product, not an innovation. I was expecting innovation.

Oh, and how embarrassing it was to see the lack of Flash support at Steve’s demo. Really?