Friday 29 January 2010

iPad paddywhack, that deserves a groan.

So it’s arrived after much hype and rumour, the sleek, new, beautifully designed iWhat-the-hell-is-it?
Now I confess I am an Apple fan. I have a MacBook Pro laptop, an old iMac and an iPhone. If there were an iCar, an iHealth drink or an iPackage holiday I would probably get one of those too. But I just don’t get the iPad. What is it for? It seems like a product looking for a niche, rather than a niche needing a product. It’s not a replacement for the laptop, as you can only run one app at a time, and can’t run any programmes that would be of any use. You can send emails and surf the web, but so can my phone and I can do it without that nosy chap to my side seeing what I’m typing or looking at. You can watch films, but if I want to watch a film I’ll do it on my TV or while eating popcorn at the cinema. I don’t want to be watching Last tango in Paris on the train, thank you very much.

There’s a far more ebullient review here by Stephen Fry who enthuses as only he can. The main thrust of his text is that you can only really appreciate it once you have tried it. Well that’s all well and good if you have been flown out to the keynote speech and been given a test go by Apple, but most of us haven’t been afforded that luxury, so can only go by what we see. And what I see is an oversized iTouch that has no real purpose. A gadget for gadget’s sake.

Still, as I've said before it's all too easy to criticize, and this is only my opinion. So in the sense of fairness, I have included the views of another, impartial observer below.

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