Steven the lawgiver

The Wall Street Journal got it exactly right recently: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”

That distills the months-long tongue-wagging and online fervor over Apple’s plans to introduce an electronic tablet for access to the Internet, music and (especially) the quickly exploding e-book market. What would it look like? Would it work seamlessly with the other iProducts that we didn’t know we needed until they arrived? How deep would we have to dig in our slim wallets to buy it?

Steve Jobs, the sorcerer-in-chief at Apple, laid it all Wednesday at a news conference in San Francisco to announce ... the iPad, billed by Jobs as “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

There’s a lot to recommend it. The iPad offers a mobile repository for photos, a moving link to e-mail and the Internet via WiFi, a portable studio for artwork, a panoramic platform for video games, a notepad for text entry (complete with touch-screen keyboard, an e-book reader whose 9.7-inch screen presents text and images from books and magazines in crisp color, and a device that will make use of the 140,000 applications available through the Apple App Store.



Visually, it extends the iPod/iPhone design paradigm: sleek, elegant, easily as seductive in look & feel as any of Apple’s products in recent years (someone at the Moscone Center wolf-whistled when Jobs showed off the iPad). And if Apple’s past practices are any guide, the iPad that drooling early adopters will swoop down on when it goes on sale in March will be tweaked and upgraded between then and Christmas.

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That would be a good thing. Technology analysts are already up in arms about certain features that should be in the iPad right now, but aren’t. Since the Safari browser is the only one available, iPad buyers will of course be locked into Apple's ecosystem right from the jump. But there's more:

The iPad doesn’t support Flash, which means any number of videocentric sites like Hulu and Disney, and hugely popular sites like ESPN, are pretty much off limits. "[The] iPad offers the best web browsing experience there is — way better than laptops," Jobs said on Wednesday, apparently unfazed by the fact that, during his presentation of the front page of the New York Times home page, those devilish blue boxes with white question marks showed up in places where Flash-driven ads should have been.

The iPad doesn’t have a native USB port, which will make filesharing and file transfers more of a challenge than you’d expect from Apple; you need an adapter (optional) for that.

It doesn’t have an onboard camera, a deficiency that’s philosophically at odds with the device’s portability. While still photos would be a problem, who wouldn’t want to have the option of video chat when they move around? All the attention Jobs paid in his hands-on presentation to the ability to manipulate archived photos would seem to make having a digital video camera a no-brainer. Not in this first generation.

"Video chat fits right in with the hardware profile," said Aaron Vronko, CEO of an iPod and iPhone repair shop and author of a guide to iPhone technology. "Not having that really limits the benefit of that device. The iPad is no more capable than the iPod Touch as a communicator."

Since Jobs didn’t highlight it on Wednesday, we're left to assume there’s no way to personally adjust the iPad for brightness or contrast, which could be a problem given its LED-backlit screen; screens using the emerging OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology are said to be clearer for reading text.

And ironically (very ironically for Apple), the iPad doesn’t allow for running multiple applications at once — a truly concerning omission given the insanely great multitasking capability of the other, most successful Apple products available today. In real-world terms, the iPad’s portability is almost neutralized by its lack of multitasking power. In marketing terms, it’s a challenging, counter-intuitive reach to expect consumers to step back from expectations based on what Apple’s already proven it’s capable of doing.

JayMonster, commenting in Information Week, was decidedly underwhelmed: "I know there are going to be Apple apologists, but this is sad. The iPad as it stands now, will go down in history with the Newton, Pippen, and AppleTV."