Like Mélissa Theuriau, the iPad looks great but makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the iPad recently. Mainly because every time I watch the Internet,
somebody’s talking about it. Or about John Terry bedding the wife of one of his football buddies.
Most of the people talking about the iPad thingy are full of praise for the way in which it’s going to revolutionise the computer industry. I have to say I’m completely unmoved by it.
This isn’t because I dislike Apple – admitting to this sort of heresy in public is likely to have me swinging from the pub sign before the day is out – but I do have to confess I’m not a huge Apple fan. It’s a personal thing, you understand. I don’t like football, either.
I did, however, watch the launch of the new iPad with some interest. Everybody was talking about it, so I didn’t want to miss out. But when Steve Jobs produced a very big iPhone, all I could think of was Dom Joly’s mobile phone sketch on Trigger Happy TV.
The iPad is undoubtedly very pretty, but then Mélissa Theuriau makes wat
ching the French news interesting too, even though I have no idea what she’s saying.
And that’s my problem with the iPad – it looks fantastic, but I have no idea what it’s saying to me.
It does everything the iPhone does, on a much bigger screen, yet it doesn’t fit in my pocket. The iPhone has that wonderful twiddly thing you can do with your fingers that allows you to zoom in and out of pornography easily whilst watching it on the bus on your way home from work. The iPad does the same, just on a bigger screen so the bloke sat behind you can enjoy exactly the same bit of the movie that you are.
You can read e-books on it, which is probably causing Amazon’s Kindle some sleepless nights. And so on and so on. All the arguments for and against the iPad have been heard countless times. No point in repeating them here.
There is no doubt that Apple’s latest baby will have put the willies up one or two manufacturers, but despite the Apples Are Ace crowd screaming that it signals the death of the PC and the printed document, I can’t quite believe it does. In fact, it may already be out of date.
This video, featuring MIT genius Pranav Mistry, takes “smartphone” computing to a whole new level that even Captain James T. Kirk would struggle to get his head around. Best of all, this technology’s apparently already available. And Mistry has made it Open Source…
The video’s fourteen minutes long, but it’s worth finding the time to watch. It might cause the iPad some sleepless nights.
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