OneAndOneIs2

The massively-awaited launch has finally happened, and Apple's tablet has finally been released.

And I have to say.. I find it a little bit of a letdown.

Let's start with the good:

• Size: A little under 8x10 inches, weighing a pound and a half. That's small enough to fit in my jacket pocket. Nicely portable.
• The A4 CPU. This is a 1GHz ARM processor. I'm a big fan of ARM and would rather have an ARM machine than any multi-core x86-64 monstrosity. Always good to see an ARM core in a widespread device.
• 3G and Wifi. The former is optional, but they haven't gone for lock-in so you can put it on any network. Good stuff.
• Battery life. It HAS one. 'nuff said.

• If it succeeds, it'll really piss off Microsoft, who've been trying to hawk a tablet PC for years, and failing laughably. I still remember fondly the Origami, the adverts for which had me in hysterics. They actually believed people would buy housebricks with screens...

Okay. Now the bad:

• Size: It's got a 4:3 aspect ratio. It's not big enough that black-barring for widescreen isn't going to make it look rubbish and who wants to watch non-widescreen movies these days..?
  
• No USB. Seriously, what good is a computer you can't plug a flash drive into? What were they thinking??
• No multitasking. This is supposed to be a real computer, why can it only do one thing at a time??
• They're so lacking in confidence about the interface that they've got a hardware keyboard for it. Not a good sign.
• There's just nothing revolutionary about it

And that's the killer.. They've scaled-up an iPhone. It's a big flat screen with a multi-touch interface and an on-screen keyboard. No (apparent) handwriting recognition, no stylus, nothing new.

When the iPod came out, it was just another MP3 player that fought its way to the top by being a well-marketed piece of good-quality hardware with excellent software for managing and acquiring music. Nobody looked at it at launch and said "Wow, this is the MP3 player of the decade!" It was good, but it wasn't a revolution. It was evolutionary.

When the iPhone came out, it was a game-changer. It wiped away the multi-button smartphones with their crappy low-res screens and browsers that didn't render anything properly. It was a superb display with the first multi-touch interface most people had ever seen; it had a REAL browser; it had a real PC OS.. it was a serious way of doing 'proper' websurfing and internet use from a phone. It was revolutionary.

And now we have the iPad and it seems to me that it's another iPod rather than a new iPhone. It's evolution, not revolution. It's very likely to succeed and become a very popular and widespread piece of hardware. I hope it does, in fact.

But it doesn't have the *WOW* factor that we were hoping for. You don't look at it and think "Nothing else even comes close, I must have one and I must have it now!" You look at it and think "It's pretty nice.. but maybe I'll see what the competition does first.."