And God damn did this come as a surprise to most of my peers as I’m pretty
adamant about my disgust for most Apple products. One thing that I found
interesting was the negative feedback I’ve gotten from folks concerning the
iPad. Specifically, folks are very quick to point out that it’s “just a
glorified iPhone”. First and foremost, it’s really easy to regurgitate the
mantra of most of the meme’s that came out over the iPad announcement. Yes, it
is a giant iPhone, and guess what, that’s what I love about it.
Now let’s take a look at my rationale for the purchase. My wife has an iPhone,
and I have a MyTouch3G running Android. Both phones are perfect in every way,
for their intended audience. The iPhone is sleek and very stable, the sacrifice
being that you can’t multi-task. My Android phone on the other hand, it’s very
open (I run a custom firmware), and it pretty much does whatever I want it to do
and then some. Cons? Well, the fact that the system does do multi-tasking means
I often times have to run a task killing application to recover memory. Overall,
the stability is good, but not what I would consider great. I do have to reboot
my phone, and I have had it take a shit on me a few times. Part of the problem
is me, I like to get the most out of the product, but I couldn’t imagine my wife
attempting to jump through the same hoops that I would with the phone. So yeah,
both phones are perfect for the people using them.
So all that being said, that level of stability and the fantastic user
experience of the iPhone is exactly the reason I wanted the iPad. The one thing
I want from a tablet computer is that it just works. Apple has perfected “just
works” as far back as I remember, to the point Trent Reznor said in an interview
back in the day that the reason he switched from PC’s in the studio was because
Apple computers “just work”. So that’s why I pre-ordered an iPad, because it’s a
giant iPhone, and because I know I will just work.
As it stands, there are still no plans for me to switch from my precious Linux
to running OSX… and there’s a good chance my next tablet computer will run
Android when I feel the time is right.