Reviews by Matt

I will be the first to admit that I am an Apple fanboy. I have had multiple sips of the Apple Kool-Aid and worship at the altar of Steve Jobs. I own a Macbook Pro, I have bought four iPods, (due to theft and water damage). The only reason I don’t have an iPhone is because I don’t have the money and The Record does not pay enough to cover the bill, much less the phone.
Even with all that. Even with me treating my Apple products like they were my own children, there is one thing I just cannot get that excited about — the iPad.

First and foremost it is that name. iPad. The name sounds like it should come in regular and heavy flow. I get that Apple has this need to put “i” in front of all their products now, but was Pad really the best word for this product? What about iTablet? That is just as effective and it doesn’t make the product sound like a high tech tampon.

Feminine hygiene products aside, it is the product itself that confuses me. What is its purpose? The iPad is just an iPhone minus the phone and a MacBook minus the processing speed and ability to multitask. I have a laptop and, assuming I had an iPhone, it would seem that I have everything the iPad had to offer.

Part of the problem I have with this new iProduct is that this is essentially Apple’s response to Amazon’s Kindle. I would buy a
Kindle before I bought this because the Kindle uses e-paper and the iPad does not. E-paper does not use a backlight to light the screen and that makes it easier to read for long periods of time. As a copy editor, my job is to make sure every article for the paper is in the proper style. This requires me to be in front of a computer monitor for hours on end on Tuesday. More often than not, I got home with a throbbing headache because of this (and a lack of food).

There is nothing I like more than in the summer time, sitting in a chair on the porch and reading. I would and could never use the iPad for this. I would have to take a break every now and then which, when you are really into a book, is not something you want to do.

I do see the functionality of the iPad. It would work well for small business owners (maybe even some big business owners) who are out selling products. What to see what we have in stock? Pull out the iPad and show them. Why lug around a five-pound laptop when the iPad weights less than two?

Another issue I have with this is that there is no support for Flash (a player which most online videos are coded in). This means sites like Hulu are not accessible from the iPad.

So why would they limit content like this? The answer lies in the biggest “i” in the Apple arsenal — iTunes. Why provide free content when you can direct people to your own video content and get them to pay for it?

Of corse they do have an application for Netflix, so I could access my Watch Instantly Queue from the iPad.

So Steve Jobs put out one less than stellar product. I mean even Pixar, the kings of animated movies, has “Cars” on their resume.
It is still a good movie — it just falls below the high expectations. So it is with the iPad. I cannot deny that it is a cool product. If I had the disposable income I might have one.

As it stands now, I am unemployed and I do not have a rich uncle who is on his deathbed so I will be sans-iPad. Sorry Stevie, this is one Apple product that I cannot stand behind.

Of course, if you were to send me one, I could be persuaded to think otherwise.