If you don’t already know me, let me just preface this by telling you an a staunch Linux user as well as advocate, I prefer my Android phone to my wife’s iPhone and after recently giving OSX a full-time shot for a week, I’m no closer to switching.
Now that I got that out of the way, here’s the deal, like everyone else that has bought one, I absolutely love my iPad. It’s fast, the screen is gorgeous, and I still love it even though “it doesn’t multi-task, you might as well go back to using green screens”. Just because I love it doesn’t mean I don’t have some gripe / opinions about it, shall we begin?
Lack of iPad apps on launch day
Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of apps in the store, but I expected a lot more. Specifically, I really expected there to be a free Facebook app. Yeah, I could drop 3 bucks on of the non-FB developed apps, but why would I do that knowing damn well that there will be a free one soon enough (there’s already one on the iPhone, so I’m just assuming it will be ported to the iPad).
Better Gmail Integration
This one won’t make much sense to you unless you’ve used an Android phone. Google provides an amazing Gmail experience from an application, and I long for that same experience on the iPad (or even the iPhone). The two things I love about Gmail are labeling and archiving, both of which I cannot do from Mail.app. Don’t get me wrong, the new Google Gmail touchscreen experience when visiting gmail.com is superb, but it’s not the same as having an app on the dock / springboard. Yes, I’m aware you can add a web link to the home screen, but is that really the same as an app that automatically updates and displays the number of unread messages?
Lack of User Profiles & Switching
Not sure about everyone else, but I didn’t really want to increase my expense for this new toy by buying one for me, one for my wife, and hell another for my daughter. We did that one Christmas with buying an iPod Photo for both myself and my wife (then girlfriend). I view the iPad as a family device, and thus far it has been. My wife has been playing Plants versus Zombies, I’ve been exploring everything about the new device, and my daughter loves this drawing app. Not that I have anything to hide, but the last thing I want my wife to have to do is log out of a website that we both us and log back in. The convenience of most web sites is staying logged in, and without user profiles we don’t necessarily get to take advantage of said luxury.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I love the device, but I don’t think it’s perfect, and if there was a better selection on the market, I’m not entirely sure I would have went with the iPad. If nothing else, for the first time in my life, I get to be in that club of Apple fanboys that had Steve Job’s newest toy on launch day.
