favor form over function. I’ve said this before, but there’s something wrong when a company releases a handheld product that cannot be properly held without third-party accessories. The iPad is not an iPhone, and it can’t be gripped like one. The iPad 2 should either have some kind of built-in grip—maybe a rubberized section on the sides or back?—or a kickstand like the one on the Sprint EVO 4G. Or it should come with detachable accessories that accomplish the same thing.
Scorecard: I’m giving myself a quarter of a point on this one. Apple acknowledged that the previous case options for the iPad were suboptimal, and it introduced a nifty new magnetic “SmartCover” for the iPad 2 that folds up into a lectern-style stand. My guess is that third-party accessory makers will immediately introduce other snap-on magnetic accessories, including, perhaps, some sort of ergonomic grip, though it’s hard to know whether magnetism alone would be enough to hold such an accessory in place.
5. A Camouflaged 3G Antenna.
Call me a perfectionist, but when I traded in my Wi-Fi iPad for a 3G model last summer, I winced at the way the 3G model’s black plastic antenna shield interrupts the otherwise beautiful aluminum rim. Apple should look for a way to fix this in the iPad 2. But if the company has learned anything from the iPhone 4 Antennagate fiasco (another form-over-function mistake) it won’t try to use the rim itself as an antenna.
Scorecard: 1 point for me. The 3G version of the iPad 2 does have a black plastic antenna shield on the back, but as far as I can tell it’s not visible from the front; at least, none of the product shots at Apple’s website show an interrupted rim.
6. A Dual-mode Display for Indoor/Outdoor Use.
Amazon scored a few PR points against Apple with this TV commercial dramatizing the fact that the reflective E Ink screen on its Kindle e-book reader actually gets easier to read in outdoor light, whereas the iPad’s transmissive LCD screen dims to a faded scrim. Of course, the Kindle screen doesn’t support color or video. But maybe this isn’t an either/or situation. San Bruno, CA-based Pixel Qi has developed a color dual-mode LCD screen, already used in the XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, that’s both reflective and transmissive. Indoors, the screen looks like a regular LCD. Outdoors, with the backlight off, it looks sort of like a color Kindle. (And as a bonus, it draws 1/5 as much battery power in this mode.) Maybe Apple should give Pixel Qi a call.
Scorecard: 0 points. Apple is using conventional LCD technology for the iPad. Understandably—the screen is one of the most expensive components, and the company needed to find a way to keep the iPad 2 affordable while also packing in new components like the dual-core A5 processors. I didn’t really expect to be right on this one; it was a left-field idea.
7. What You Definitely Won’t See in the iPad 2
There’s one new iPad feature that many commentators have asked for, but doesn’t actually make sense to me: an iPad-sized Retina display. The iPhone 4’s Retina display is a truly remarkable piece of technology, squeezing 640×960 pixels into a 2-by-3-inch space, or 320 pixels per inch. But if you scaled that up to the size of the iPad’s 5.75-by-7.75-inch display, you’d have something like 1840×2480 pixels to work with, or nearly 5 megapixels, and that’s just ridiculous. It’s far more resolution than you need for HD video, and it’s more data than you can really stuff through today’s wireless pipes or store on today’s flash memory chips.
And there’s another addition that would be nice, but isn’t even worth asking for: the ability to run Flash video and animation on iOS devices. Apple doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to a truce with Adobe on this issue. And if Steve Jobs’ contention that Flash is a CPU-hog is true, then it doesn’t make sense to ask Apple to add more processing power to its mobile gadgets just so that Flash can eat it up.
Scorecard: 1 point. I was right about all this.
