The iPad is a Giant iPhone

Apple CEO Steve JobsBy now, you’ve already heard about Apple’s new tablet device, the iPad. You know it’ll run the iPhone OS, it’ll have a 9.7 inch multitouch LCD screen, it’ll have a ten-hour battery life, and it’ll cost $499 up. Like the iPhone, it’ll be locked into the iTunes app store, and it won’t support Adobe Flash. Unlike the iPhone, it has no camera. You can check out Apple’s iPad product page for the rest of the specs.

As I watched Apple CEO Steve Jobs reveal the iPad yesterday, I felt like I was watching a parody video straight out of College Humor. He used words like “magical” and “revolutionary” to announce something that, stripped of such hyperbole, looks patently ridiculous: a giant iPhone. What’s more, this larger device actually lacks the camera of its smaller twin.

A Giant Leap Backwards

Steve hails the iPad as Apple’s most advanced technology ever. That’s funny; you’d think deminiaturizing a cellphone and taking away one of its biggest features would actually constitute a technological step backwards. For all intents and purposes, the iPhone 3G may as well be the iPad Nano.

Steve also boasts that 43 million iPhone owners will already know how to use the iPad. What he doesn’t address is why iPhone owners would want to buy a second cellular data plan for what is essentially a second, bigger iPhone. Sure, people get separate data plans for their laptops, but that’s because laptops are more flexible than cellphones. The iPad has all the restrictions of the iPhone, without the convenience or the camera.

As if this giant iPhone weren’t illogical enough, it uses an exotic micro SIM. iPhones use regular SIMs. Why a larger device would require a smaller SIM simply eludes common sense.

An Insult to Your Intelligence

The first official advertisement for the iPad itself sounds like a parody. The opening line would be a joke if it weren’t so insulting to your intelligence: “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.” Oh look, we can now browse the Web on a big screen! That far exceeds my puny ability to understand how things work! What a magical concept!

The iPad could easily have become so much more than a giant iPhone. It could have bundled a slim, multitouch version of Mac OS X. It could have been hailed as a really cool Mac tablet. The fact that Apple chose to put the iPhone OS on the iPad hints at something far more sinister than a mere lack of creativity.

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Comments

45 Comments (with 15 Conversations) on “The iPad is a Giant iPhone”
  1. sakisgalan says:

    i like ipad! thank to accept my post.

  2. Razor Caster says:

    You really made me curious about this ipad thing, it really is an evoloution of the iphone
    I was thinking of getting an iphone but now i disregarded this idea and will keep my phone and get an iPad.

    razor caster

  3. I haven’t jumped on the iPad bandwagon either, but a helluva lot of other folks have. Guess Mr. Jobs has the pulse of the public better than most of the techno geeks of the world do. And lots of folks are following his lead by designing pages without flash. At least most of the photographers I know, realize they need to get rid of flash on their sites if they want the whole world to be able to see their portfolios. Pretty soon flash may be a thing of the past.

Reply to Mike Abundo