Reasons the iPad is fail (For me)

Well, Apple caved into the fans and developed a tablet, fan service is never good.

For me, the first fail is iTunes. iTunes is the blanket app Apple use to distribute all their stuff, be it apps, music, movies or whatever else they want to cram on, and naturally it's one of the worst apps for that sort of thing, not for distribution, i'm all for digi distribution, but the DRM is draconian and stupid, people don't want to rent their music, they want to own it. Sort of a blanket fail there, all of Apples i products have to use iTunes.

Second, multitasking. The iPad uses the iPhone OS, which is never a good start for a 'computer'. The keynote stated they wanted the iPad to take the place of netbooks. Now, if you want something to take the place of something else, then you have to make sure it's much better, and i'm sorry, but doing one thing at a time is not better, it's a massive step backwards.

Onto the 'best browsing experience ever'. This sentence is so laden with bullshit i'm surprised the words are visible. Here is a clue Apple, the best browser experience means all the features, and as many bells and whistles as you can fit, the lack of flash is a big problem here, if you want 'the best browsing experience ever' you have to be able to see the whole web, and the iPad happily leaves out full third of it. Now, they're trying to push HTML5, which is excellent and I can't fault them for that, but bullshitting in such a way is just a bait and switch.

"Do you want peripherals?" "Yes please! As many as possible!". The iPad, coming with practically nothing, being just a scaled up iPod touch, has already a plethora of add-ons and peripherals to make the device somewhat more useful, addressing camera concerns with an attachment, physical keyboards with an attachment, and other such things. Now, you create this lovely looking piece of hardware, and i'm not going to deny that the simplicity of the design makes it look jolly nice indeed, but there is a point when simplicity impacts usability. With most of their products it's not a massive issue, there are oft workarounds or the solution they provide is adequate, however, with the iPad, they just decided "Screw any form of usability, this looks great".

Another point I have to make is about external displays, the iPad has the ability to output onto a TV or PC (Personal Computer, not Microsoft mac fanboys, Linux exists too) monitor, however, while the iPads display is 1024x768 (Something dire in itself for a device of this size) but the output to anything is even lower than that, so which it can display 720p HD video, not a great feat in itself, it can't actually display the video in the original resolution, instead scaling it down to either 576p or 480p, both of which are standard definition.

Now for the clincher, the price, standard iPad, the bottom of the line is $500, now, what this will be in England we don't know, but it will scale perfectly to £500 no doubt. What do you get for that? Pretty much nothing, 16GB of storage and WiFi connectivity. The full package costs $829, with a 64GB hard drive, WiFi and 3G connectivity. So Apple, please explain why I would spend that much on your product, when I could get an equivalent netbook for £200 - £400 that CAN multitask, CAN output at 720p to anything, and doesn't need hundreds of peripherals to make it usable.

Apple could have done something quite special, instead they shat in a box, and now they're going to sell millions because people will buy anything with an Apple logo