[geeks] iPad - a 'Miss' for me I'm afraid

[Mark Benson]

On 27 Jan 2010, at 21:46, Jonathan Patschke wrote:

> I can't figure out if it's trying to be giant iPhone that won't fit in
> your pocket and won't function as a phone, or if it's trying to be a small
> Mac that doesn't have a keyboard and won't run Mac applications.

It's definitely erring on the Giant iPod side (if it was a miniature Mac it'd
be at least half useful!), but I get ya 100% there.

You can get a iPad version of iWork for it. It probably won't output to
Excel/Word/PPoint unless you dock to a Mac.

Of course, because it runs the iPhone OS which has such horribly borked
Bluetooth support (or rather lack thereof) you probably can't even use a Apple
Wireless keyboard without the dock on it. Great move there... unless they
**fixed** that in 3.2?? Surely not...

Apple's intention, well Steve's (lets be honest he's still calling the shots)
is to create something between the notebook and the phone that's easier to
read on (if you want to pay for digital books via iBooks) and you can do some
light work on via iWork and also surf, read your mail, and be generally hip
and trendy. Now, I'd love to do that but I'd also like to be able to flip
between Mail, Safari, Tweetie and anything else I was doing. iPhone OS = not
gonna happen?[1] :(

>> Oh and it's a netbook size device with a 1GB ARM CPU and it likely won't
>> multitask[2]... GET REAL!
>
> Ever seen ARM at 1GHz?  ARM Cortex isn't a toy; it's a very swift CPU.

You misunderstand. I was inferring the power of the 1GHz A4 chip is wasted by
the OS not multitasking. It runs iPhone OS 3.2, which on the iPhone won't
multitask, so I expect it won't on the iPad either[1].

Believe me I have been using ARM since the Acorn days, I know how pokey they
are even at low clock speeds. I really like the idea of Cortex. I guess the A4
is a Cortex CPU core + peripheral cores designed by all those guys Apple
brought in when they bought up P.A. Semi.

> This device[1] seems to echo back to the first PowerPC Macs: Insanely
> great hardware, pity about the system software.

I could not agree more. Like the 1st generation of PowerMacs, it's also so
hideously proprietary it'll probably never (easily, or effectively) run
anything else either. Only hope is a jailbreak, I suppose.

[1]Peevy point number 37a: Don't you just hate how Apple manage to woo the
world with big media releases and manage to show off a great looking device
and then tell you JACK **** about what it actually does apart from some crummy
demos. The whole tech community seem to be looking at each other and
muttering, "great, but what about... and does it... will I be able to..."
etc.

</rant>

Soo... anyone seen anything similar looking that might be packing Android
under the hood?

--
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."