One of the more exciting parts of the iPhone and iPad family is the well designed and useful accessories that are built specifically for that. I don’t see that excitement in Android or WP7. Is the extensibility and popularity of iPad/iPhone/iPhone accessories a factor?

Android and WP7 diversity in terms of hardware is also its weakness, manufacturers need to invest a lot to build accessories for a broad range of devices. In the end they’ll just pick the most popular such as a HTC Desire or Xpera. Something like an iPhone is great to build for as you know your product is at least valid for a year.

It may be sporting a pretty competitive tablet OS but all consumers are going to see is

Introducing some thing that looks like an iPad, does the same stuff as the iPad but costs $100 more than an iPad.

People may argue “but it has higher specs, 3G LTE, etc etc”. No consumer cares about what gigahertz are in the thing, all they care about is whether it can do “The Facebook” and play those cool games like “Angry Birds”.



Also what do mean by fully Flash enabled (ASTERISK)? If by that you mean that Adobe is still working on a good version of Flash for tablets, then you lied it isn’t fully Flash enabled. It’s Flash ready, just like my care is not Spoiler enabled but Spoiler ready.

The XOOM really feels like it is for Android geeks or people who want a hybrid tablet-PC. It doesn’t feel or seem to be a tablet aimed at people who don’t care about dual core CPUs, RAM specifications or some advanced operating system and just want a tablet to runs apps and browses the internet. I think the Motorola’s website for the XOOM especially speaks to some sort of sci-fi nerd fantasy.

vs.

He’s an an app from EZi APP that costs around $1,199.00AUD and all I can tell from the description is that it is used for generating reports. But from the screenshots it seems like someone has just fired up InterfaceBuilder and “crafted” something from generic tools; building something they think is worth a lot of money and then just releasing this ugly thing into the world.

Would you really pay over a thousand dollars just for some report generator? Especially for something where no trouble has gone into making the UITableView look like a thousand bucks.

I’m especially worried by any app that has 9 ratings, all with 5/5 stars.

This seems to be a constant question or speculation about the next version of the iPad, will it have USB? My feeling is that iPad will never add a USB port to their post-PC device, the iPad, and it all comes down to the fact that USB use amongst users is just too hard.

Go to any electronics store near your house and you’ll see shelves of random unknown brand TV tuners that retail for some cheap price of $40 and come in some cheap packaging. Plug it in and you’ll find the dodgy drivers only allow it to work on a Windows PC (possibly only a 32bit copy).

That’s really confusing and odd for most users. If I can plug it in to my USB port and it fits, why won’t it work. It’s The USB right? That’s the problem with USB, this powerful and extensible connectivity format has no guarantees on OS or computer support.

With Apple building this post-PC device the plan is to rid users of the relics which came with computers; filesystems, Windows update, setup installers, RAM upgrades and USB. Removing the relic USB means Apple can say to users, whatever you plug into this thing just works. There’s no need to look at the system requirements, if the package says Made for iPad buy it and it will work as soon as you plug it in. USB itself has no promises, it’s just a plug. The iPhone/iPad connector has promises, it was built for the iOS family.


Update: Someone very rightly pointed out that the “dongle” or Camera Connection Kit has a USB port. If you look at the description, Apple states it is used for plugging in camera USB cables. While we all know the iPad actually can support keyboards or USB sound devices (like the iMic), Apple wants to ensure people think it’s a camera connection kit and not a USB connection kit.

Perth (my home town) has just received it’s first news app for the state developed by The Sunday Times (which is owned by News Ltd. -the Australian arm of News Corporation) to enable West Australians to access news on their iPads as they would normally with a traditional newspaper.

Sadly, it’s just the same old from newspaper publishers trying to carbon copy their traditional print media behaviour in digital app form and it’s noticeable right from the beginning. Starting up the app you’re stuck at the spinning wheel loading screen for a good 2 – 3 minutes. Why? Because the Perthnow app operates in edition format; one at 7am and one at 7pm. This is amazingly bizarre to me that an internet connected and basically always on device is treated to news delivered in the same way a paper boy would deliver the news the front lawn years ago. Who would of thought something as volatile and ever changing as the news has to be delivered in a edition form over the internet to a tablet?

You begin browsing around the application and discover something even more annoying that the ever patient wait for the download to finish; pre load advertisements. I am hoping that these pre load advertisements will disappear when the free trial expires but regardless I’m worried that this old school style of delivering content is just going to ruin the idea of great content (Flipboard, Zite, Our choice) for consumers who bought the iPad as the next generation content consumption device.

Everything about this app feels less like the iPad is always connected and instead feels more like the device waits for the paperboy to deliver it’s latest round of news. Every time you relaunch the app from the background it prompts if you want to replace your content and download the latest batch of news. Sorry? Are we in some sort of data shortage on my 16GB iPad or are you so modelled on your outdated brother that you need to delete any old news because the stack of newspapers is out?


As you browse more it just gets worse and worse, as you swipe back and forth between articles these will invoke the pre load advertisements ruining the flow of the iOS swiped based gestures and your ability to quickly glance at the content and move on to the next page.
Each article just feels like a newspaper article because there is no effort to make the related images interactive or at least alive on the iPad, even in the Confidential section there was 2×3 grid of photos that you couldn’t touch to zoom in. It all just feels like a PDF surrounded by a menu system and god awful advertisement “engine”.

I’d rather see newspaper team up with the people at Flipboard to get their content syndicated through their section catalogue. It just makes sense, Flipboard is a company built to design content to fit the tablet and mobile experience and newspapers are companies built to create content for the consumers; they are not designers and they clearly don’t use an iPad or any tablet on a regular occasion.

Just like most newspapers didn’t get blogs, I don’t think many newspaper houses get iPads. And they shouldn’t, it’s not their job to so why not offload their content to the marketplace of Zite or Flipboard?