About Apple’s iPad via here and via iWorry …
“iWorry” is my foray into the iPad discussion, focusing less on the product and more on its support infrastructure:
But the iPad isn’t a phone; it is a general purpose computer. It does email and Web and documents and presentations and games and all of the other kinds of things we do with our “regular” computers. Yet it will suffer under the same restrictions as the iPhone–prohibition of any application that Apple doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Sometimes that means the application uses undocumented features, but startlingly often it just means “duplication of features”–the application does something that Apple’s own software does, but does it differently. (This raises the uncomfortable question as to whether the Kindle app for the iPhone–which works quite nicely, actually–will run on the iPad.)As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:
This is Apple’s big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that’s borderline acceptable, but it’s not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.
