[/amazon_link]Apple's early tablet lead may be slowly shrinking, but this racewatcher doubts that either Android or PC tablets will either sneak past the iPad, or spur it to greatness. Book cover: The Tortoise and the Hare, by Janet Stevens
Apple’s head start is nearly a year old, and you’d think that the tortoises, both Android and Windows driven, would be catching up with the hare by this time, but it just isn’t happening. Make no mistake, though my iPad’s been a nearly constant companion since launch day when I picked it up at the Apple Store, I’m not an Apple fan. I don’t like the closed ecosystem that Jobs has created, and consider it a hip version of AOL’s gated community from the 80s. No gated community can really be hip, but I get the utility of it. Job’s is a utopianist, and for those who fit the mold, it’s a great thing to be part of.
But I’m not here to bury Steve, nor to praise the iPad, except to lament that it’s still the best of breed in a field that stretches backwards a decade or so before it, but never caught on until the mixture of design, technology and most importantly, battery life, made it all work. As Amazon did for eBooks, Steve Jobs did for tablets, and I’m grateful, if not enamored.
Unfortunately, 2011 is not going to be the year that tablets move down-field in a big way. Apple has locked up the suppliers of its display size and other components (Apple’s Fiendishly Clever Plan To Kneecap Its Tablet Competition, Business Insider, Jan 21, 2011) driving the competition to smaller form factors like the 9 inch Samsung Galaxy and Motorola XOOM, stifling the competition. There’s a significant niche for those devices, essentially the same market as Kindle and Nook eBook readers, but for reading anything like a full page of text, the iPad is both the minimum tolerable size from a resolution standpoint, and the maximum tolerable size for portability.
Bigger devices, from companies like ASUS and Compaq are out, or on the way out, but they fail to match the battery life of the iPad, and I don’t hold much hope for their ability to steal its market. Unfortunately, reports of the specs for the upgraded iPad, due around the one year mark (The iPad 2 is Currently in Production, WSJ, Feb 8,2011) , show that the tortoise pack isn’t causing the hare enough anxiety to do more than stretch its lead with marginal improvements.
The new iPad will have at least one camera (for video conferencing) and possibly another on the back, but as that’s not confirmed at this late date, it’s hardly a certainty. An SD card slot is fairly well confirmed, but you can be sure that Apple still won’t let you access your files directly, insisting that you go through an application that they’ve approved of and distributed through their store. Maybe that works for you, but not me.
As far as I can tell, there will still be no USB port on the new iPad, though the clunky adapter that they made for the first version should still work. Fortunately, they should be readily available this time, unlike the first launch where the store racks stood empty for weeks. I ordered mine online, and it still took weeks to arrive, but at least I could stop worrying about it.
According to the WSJ, who should know, the new iPad won’t have the anticipated higher resolution display, like the one on the latest iPhone. It will have a faster processor, but really, who cares? Processor speeds are like horsepower, more impressive sounding than useful on your daily drive, stuck in traffic because the bandwidth of superhighways and information highway alike reduces you to a crawl.
Apple could have packed features into the new device, but instead it’s only getting modest increases, and ones that were well within their ability to provide a year ago.
What’s tragic is that they’re still the best game in town.