The new iPad runs the iPhone OS -- and that's the problem Discussion

By Jay Garmon

No matter how excited you are about the 9.7-inch HD display, capacitive multitouch interface, or staggeringly cheap 3G data plans promised by Apple's iPad, there's one feature that's billed as a benefit but may prove to be more of a bug: The iPad runs the iPhone OS. On the surface this seems like shrewd platform cross-compatibility, but do you really want to pay between $499 and $829 (plus data plan) for a device that actually does less -- as in no built-in camera, no phone -- than your iPhone?

Read the full content of this Article: The new iPad runs the iPhone OS -- and that's the problem

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Agree with everything here, we should have seen something much more built on then the iphone os, flash and multitasking should have been a priority, however i wasn't aware that the IPad SDK was in the wild, with this out alot of the negatives to the device will surely change.

 

Before it was announced I had no idea if I would buy one of these. I have an ipod touch that I love and I would own a Iphone if it was on Verizon's network (I have a droid since its not). Now that it has been announced it looks too much like a glorified ipod touch and that is the problem. No flash, no keyboard, too big to carry everywhere, almost the size of a small netbook which can do so much more.

Because of the hardware and OS I can't see myself carrying this around in place of a netbook and because of the size I cannot see myself carrying this everyday versus my phone and ipod.

Where I think this thing does excel is if a person is already carrying something similar to a ebook. It appears to be way more functional than any ereader on the market today and would also excel as a pmp. It is more expensive but as a complete package it kills ereaders. I think I will pass and now I'm just waiting on Alienware's 11" notebook for portable complete machine.

 

Wow, since when is 1024x768 considered HD?

 

I feel you're being entirely too shortsighted here. Let's take a step back. This thing is pretty screamingly fast - according to hands on videos already being circulated. Putting a full version of OS X on here would have bloated it up and slowed down the entire thing. As for your complaint regarding how traditional iPhone apps run, well, I think that'll be fine. New and/or popular apps will be ported to the new resolutions, and if Apple had introduced this and said no current iPhone apps run on it, well, you'd be sitting here and writing that Apple made a mistake by barring compatibility.

Moreover, please keep in mind the intended use case for this device. This isn't designed to be a notebook replacement - in fact, it's designed, frankly, to be a netbook or smartbook. Browse the web, do some simple activities, watch a video. Basically, what netbooks were originally designed to do before manufacturers decided to sell them as cheap laptops. You're also incorrect in some of your assumptions. Can't listen to music while browsing the NYT? Why would it lose functionality the original iPhone and iPod Touch have? True, you can't listen to Pandora, but you can easily listen to anything in your iTunes music library. No, it doesn't have Flash, which bugs me, but I think that Apple is waiting it out and looking instead to throw their weight behind HTML5, which will be able to replace Flash for a lot of what it's currently being used.

I admit that I would like to see a camera. Frankly, however, I don't use a webcam all that much, and I don't think most people do, either. A rear-facing camera would be pointless, since you're not going to want to hold this up and capture pictures or video. The iPhone 3GS has no front-facing camera, and people aren't constantly complaining about that fact.

This is a device designed to consume media, browse the web and run small but significant and well-designed software applications - at all of these it seems as if it works extremely well. You talk as if the price point for some of it, like ebooks, is too high, but we don't yet know if you'll be able to add your own. I'd be very surprised if you can't. Too, I don't think the inability to "rip [your] existing dead tree books" to the new platform has been too much of an issue for Amazon and their Kindle.

This isn't the Jesus tablet, but it is an extremely significant step forward in terms of mobile computing. And yes, I'm willing to call it a computer - it sends and receives emails, browses photos and the web, plays music and movies, runs some small apps. I mean, that's all that my mom does on her computer.

 

Most electronics companies consider anything that can handle 720p as technically "HD" ... it's just the difference between 720p HD and 1080p HD.

 

bring on the jailbreak

Jailbroken iPad with:
Pro Switcher
Backgrounder
Lockinfo
=
Win

 

But it's already slow. The fact that it can't multi-task as you said. That and it's running a 1GHz Apple A4 processor. It's just not a true "netbook" replacement by any standards.

 

Isn't 720p 1280x720? 1024 doesn't equal 1280 though.

And isn't HD 1,000,000 or more total pixels? 1024x768 is only ~79% of that.

 

The A4's apparently based on ARM instruction set and features the GPU built in (Not bad )

I like what apple have done but i just feel this is too comparative to the other devices out there, the IPod Touch and IPhone have the same capability, slightly weaker processor.

I want to know what kind of power the GPU is harbouring though, and with The SDK released, apple must have planned something much bigger that we can't see right now.

 

You're right Apple, the price is pretty unbelievable.

 

If it was $100 cheaper and can run Flash then I might consider one.

 

At a minimum it needs to be able to properly display everything the regular version of Acrobat 9 can display. Until then it's little more than a Super Sized iPhone.

 

Hmm, amazed there's no multithreading... guess the Android OS has spoiled me in that reguard. And should have Flash support soon.... Ipad? who needs it ;-)

 

Not compelling. Not even close.

 

This. The lack of being able to run more than 1 application annoys me to no end. Pretty fail IMO.

 

Not a mac fanboy myself, but you will be surprised that the numbers of ipad group on FB is increasing every single second.

 

I said there would be Apple fans buying it regardless of the specs/price. And I was right. I'm not surprised in the least.

 

Partially true. I constantly web surf every morning while listening to my music. What iPhone do you have?

 

I would like to quote a post from someone at Macrumors today, which reflects what you said pretty accurately I believe.

And again...

And again...

Now granted, I think many Apple fans are not quite so ravenous, but I think no matter the device, there will be many flocking to the Apple stores buying them up, because it's Apple.

 

Talin, whoever wrote that fan boy garbage is an idiot. How is this a game changer in any way? It's not as if they really give any support.

 

Damn Talin, those fanbois really have no clue. If the tabletpc manufacturers copied this, then I'm done with tabletpc's. And if you can see my sig, you know I've already put my money where my mouth is. I'm about to do it again with another 1.5 lb tabletpc that soundly beats or closely matches the iPad in every way except thinness, which is a plus for me....you can't fit the iPad in a coat pocket, but the tabletpc will easily fit.

 

while i partially agree we still have to wait to see what graphics hardware the device will have,

the only problem i see at the moment is method of interface for gaming, i can see strategy games or turm based games working out well but other things would be inconvenient lol.

maybe some apple controller next? lol

 

I'd wait for the HP tablet, sure it might be more expensive but at least i'd be able to actually get some sembalance of work done.

Hell, I would have been happy if it let you run native OS X apps w/in the iPhone OS, with multitasking. but nope.

Looks like a netbook will still be good for me.

 

Is this thing locked down to ATT? Or can I plug my Verizon USB PANTech modem into it?

 

The iPhone OS can't run background processes. It can't have two apps open at the same time... You can't read the New York Times while listening to your music library.

Where do you get this stuff from? The iPhone OS can and does run more than one app at once. Go borrow an iPhone. Play a song in iTunes. Press the home button. Open Safari. Go to a web page. Is the song still playing? Yes. And you know what? If a text message comes in, it’ll show up, because the SMS app is running as well. That’s three apps at once! Do you think it might be able to do four?

The limitation is that Apple doesn’t let third party apps run in the background. I wouldn’t be surprised if that restriction eventually got lifted, at least on the iPad.

You can't toggle between a word processor and a spreadsheet, or a Web browser and a presentation.

Except you can. Decent iPhone apps remember where they were when they were last shut down, so for apps that don’t need to do anything in the background, the model works just fine. Where it falls down is for apps that need to run in the background. It’ll be interesting to see how frustrating that gets on the iPad, as compared to the iPhone.

This Flash incompatibility also bans any Web video player that isn't Quicktime or Youtube. Sorry budding filmmakers, but there will be no Vimeo or Hulu or Yahoo Video for you on the iPad.

Vimeo has an HTML5 video beta running, like YouTube. HTML5 is the way web video is going, because Apple’s sold 42 million iPhones, and websites would quite like people with iPhones to be able to watch their videos.

Is this thing locked down to ATT? Or can I plug my Verizon USB PANTech modem into it?

It’s not locked to AT&T, but it only takes a micro sim card, whatever that is. Not sure what your modem comes with, or whether Verizon will supply the right kind of sim card. Apple has got a special deal with AT&T for iPad 3G access: $15/month for 250MB, $30/month for unlimited, no minimum contract term.

 

I'm not sure if the iPhone's version of Sarafi supports HTML5.

 

They'll be supporting HTML5 I'm sure.

And the only other thing people use Flash for, mostly, besides video, is annoying advertisements. So I'm kind of glad they left it out.

But there's something I just realized. This is a 4:3 screen... NOT WIDESCREEN. 1024x768 = 4:3 ratio. Sort of kills it as a serious movie viewer for me.

 

I'm glad this has mostly gotten negative comments. Kind of blows my mind that it's literally just a Giant iPod. I'm tempted anyway, just because I'm tempted by all gadgets, but it's more expensive than and less powerful than a 'netbook', and without a full OS just isn't that useful.

I'm glad to see they're releasing versions of iWork for it, but it remains to be seen if they're better than the horrible Office apps already available for mobile OS X.

But...far less useful than a laptop, and too big to replace a portable media player you keep on you. Probably a worse reading experience than the Kindle too. Only advantage it has there is better DRM (Amazon's doesn't let you deactivate a device).

 

HTML5 will definitely be supported. Steve Jobs knows everyone will end up using the standard, and it's why the iPad doesn't really need to do Flash. Honestly, yeah, they could have enabled it, but it would have sucked hard, just like Flash on every other mobile platform does (with the possible exception, sort of, of Skyfire).

The 4:3 is something I've been thinking about, and it's kinda crappy, but it I think it is something of a more efficient form factor in terms of portability. I mean, I'd rather have the 1024x768 resolution than the closer to netbook-standard 1024x576, wouldn't the rest of you?

 

I probably would rather have the 4:3 resolution.

 

Most 10" netbooks now are 1024x600 (or at least many are), and Dell offers 1366x768 as an option on its Mini 10. Plus all the 11.6" netbooks that are 1366x768 too... and an 11.6" widescreen is probably about as much screen area as a 10" 4:3 screen... diagonals are a horrible way of measuring screen size... I'll have to do the math to see how they compare.

Edit: ok so it's not as big in area as an 11.6" widescreen... you know I think I'd still rather have widescreen than have 720 vertical pixels, if I had to choose. Oh well... maybe 4:3 will work well for some other tasks, somehow.

 

Yes, it does. Read the recent articles about how Google Voice is now an HTML5 "app" so it is available for iPhone despite Apple/AT&T stopping it.

I tried it, and it's pretty good.

 

Expect a "Multi-tasking" version comes out in a couple of months and watch the people go "wow, that's a new invention..."

Remember the cut and paste?

 

Correct. Correct. Incorrect. Correct.

The iPad desperately needs a new name and a new OS. The hardware is mostly great but it needs a forward facing camera.

 

The reason why its 4:3 is that you can use it in portrait mode. Anything other then 4:3 would be useless in portrait mode as you would have to scroll left to right too much.

 

I'm kinda surprise anyone was expecting so much from this. Technology simply isn't far enough to make a full fledged laptop in this form factor. Because of size and cooling and such it won't be able to use more than this kind of CPU. a LOT needs to be done before faster CPU's can be put in casings like this.
I never understood all the hype and was always asking people around me what they were expecting because it could never have been that much more than what is revealed now.

 

Not true. Apple have used cheap, simple and slow CPU for IPad, otherwise the cost can be much higher. Intel provides rich set of CPUs with different power consumption. It is even possible to build fanless 10' device basing on old generation of ULV intel processor (see for instance Panasonic R5 laptop), new generation of ULV and LV CPUs are even better regarding TDP. I think apple uses own processor to keep market in their hands:
-- It is very problematic to intstall anything unix-like (android, crome os, linux) on such sort (arm) of devices.
-- Lack of applications brings users to necessity to buy it and gives apple additional amount of work and money. Especially taking in account very restricted model of iPhone/iPad applications development (this area is fully protected from 3td parties applications).

Consider the new IPad device as another more advanced way to buy content in apple store, it is shop-window where various things are exhibited. Selling content is what makes Apple rich.

 

Not true????
Your whole post is exactly what i mean. ULV processors don't even come close to power full fledged laptops...and that's what i meant.

 

there's nothing innovative about this device at all (and wasn't for most apple devices). just don't tell the fanboys.

but in this case, it's so blatant obvious that it's ridiculous. all they've shown are ipod features. see, you can rotate it, it has no fixed orientation... and they rotate and rotate to impress. well... wow.. like i've never seen that before?!!?? even on an apple presentation!

they could come on stage, say, yeah, it's a big ipod, has some additional app features, and requires app rewrites.

done.




btw, about the innovative special built ultrathin macbook air.. check out this link, about half a year BEFORE the air got introduced:

Intel wows with ultra thin notebook (and starts to show it to manufacturers if they're interested in building a product around it)
now guess who was the innovator of the air..

 

The CPU aint wowing me either.

If it is true, and based on the A9 Cortex from ARM, and what Engadget, Electronista and Fudzilla have posted, this is a mere Tegra 2 rename. No "new and innovating" CPU, just a renaming marketing gimmick....geez, where I have heard that before

 

my old (3 or almost 4, don't remember exactly) R5 fanless Panasonic laptop (Solo U1.2) is pretty fast under Windows XP. No any problem with office or other daily used application. Skype, browser, music, e-mail is normally run in the same time. Let me underline Windows XP is real multitasking system ! It is difficult to compare PDA-like OS (iPhone OS) with real OS

What I am trying to say, Apple has create choice regarding CPUs that can be used for iPAD, but they didn't do it due to reasons I have mentioned before. As far as I remember Solo CPU TDP is something withing 8/10 Watt !!! It is nothing !

 

One thing I don't think people have focused much on but after handling one for a few minutes i think is a fairly intractable problem.

The ipad is more or less designed to be held during use (like an iphone). However it's a lot bigger and heavier than an iphone and even though 1.5 pounds is light compared to even a netbook it still gets fatiguing fast.

Think about just watching a 30 minute video. Would you want to hold the thing for thirty minutes? If you set it down it then lays on it's back which is not conducive to watching. So you then have to carry a stand around as well and/or find a way to prop it up.

For web and email it may be a bit better because you interact a lot moer with the device but even then... i know I load a page, and if it has any content at all, i drop my hands from the keyboard/mouse, read and then put my hands back when I need to go to the next page.

The ergonomics just dont make sense to me and add in the limited multitasking and I know I'm not chomping at the bit for one (and I was prior to the announcement)

I also think they blew it in terms of not having at least limited phone functionality. I would have liked to have seen it come with a blue tooth headset standard and voice dialing. That way you could leave it on the desk/seat next to you and still be able to get and receive calls (it could even use text to speech to tell you who is calling). as is for travel you still need two devices

Also there was already rumors of a "pro" version that runs the Mac OS coming later in the year.

In many ways this is version 1.0 of potentially a new paradigm in mobile devices and it has the potential to improve and possibly Apple can get enough of them out there that this innovation will happen (like it did with smart phones)

 

Apple self-proclaims it as "Revolutionary".

Its just a bigger iTouch for crying out loud. Its more crippled than an iPhone!

To add in

 

Well said, but it must have some other purpose?

 

it's pretty competent for an ereader. i think that's it.

 

Nope, Kindle is much better due to the e-ink screen.

This product is interesting for those who want a netbook just for simple internet browsing, and some simple media tasks, but also a e-reader to read their e-books.
The iPad certainly isn't the best in either category, but it is a decent option if you're looking for one product that can fulfill both tasks on a basic level.

 

I meant that to read "streaming" music library, not resident. (In my case, Slacker.) Victim of a fast deadline, I was.

 

Somebody needs to just hack this and put a Linux package on there. Maybe like Ubuntu. I'd actually buy that.