I don’t know if you’ve heard of this new gadget called the iPad 2. It came out a month or so ago and it’s by this company that’s named after a fruit! Anyway, I picked up one of these iPad 2s. But I didn’t keep it.
The iPad 2. Sleek. Sexy. Impossible To Find. Painful to Type On.
Before I give you the specific reasons for returning my iPad 2, I want to be honest and tell you that I didn’t fully understand the need to have one in the first place. I already own two large HD TVs, a $280 netbook and an iPhone 4. I’m also not really a gadget collector (too practical and/or cheap for that) and I don’t have a lot of time to consume vast quantities of media.
I’m a busy working father, who barely has time to get to work, have dinner and spend anymore than an hour with the kids each night before I have to go to bed and do it all over again. I have Netflix disc of Inception that’s been sitting on my coffee table, unopened, for the past two weeks.
I was hoping the iPad would be a good way to remote into various PCs (work and home) and maybe a decent laptop replacement. I even liked the idea of allowing my kids to learn from the myriad e-books and “educational” games that are out there. And, to be quite honest, part of the allure of the iPad 2 is that they are still rare and difficult to get. I finally got my 16GB Black WiFi iPad 2 by using several different iPad inventory websites and checkers and by following a hunch. I found mine in a Wal-Mart of all places.
I played around with the iPad 2 for about three days. Hardly enough to call me an expert, but enough that I knew what I liked and didn’t like. Here are the issues that ultimately lead me to return it:
Form Factor: It’s sleek! It’s sexy! It’s thin! It’s also kind of difficult to hold. It’s essentially a smooth, curved piece of glass that you’re toting around if you don’t have a cover on it. The screen is fairly large which means the edge space around the screen is fairly small and that ultimately means that you don’t have much space to put your hands. I’m only 6’1″ but the thing just didn’t fit in my hands well. When I tried to hold it in one hand I often found that an edge of my thumb was touching a part of the screen which had all sorts of unintended consequences (zooming, no scrolling, anything with one finger was suddenly interpreted as a multitouch). A $50 case probably would have helped.
Heavy: Yes, yes, yes, it’s lighter than most other tablet/netbook electronic devices. You know what is lighter than an iPad 2? A piece of paper. A standard magazine, a paperback book and an iPhone. I found that I couldn’t read for very long with the iPad 2 because my arms and hands got kind of tired of just holding the thing up. It was just heavy enough to be annoying, and because it didn’t fold or bend like a magazine or paperback does, it forced my hand into an uncomfortable death grip just to make sure I didn’t drop the darn thing.
Typing Sucks: I don’t mind the glass keyboard on the iPhone because I’m banging away at it with my thumb on one hand. But with the iPad I had to have a level surface to put it on or use one hand to hold it up and one hand to type. But typing one-handed on an iPad was difficult because I couldn’t just tap the keys with my thumb (the keys are too far apart) so I had to hunt and peck the whole time. On a flat surface it wasn’t much better. It’s uncomfortable to have the keyboard and the screen on the same plane. Yes, I could buy a keyboard. They run about $100.
Video Is Not Impressive: The iPad 2′s screen is impressive. It’s beautiful. Really. Photos look great, but the iPad 2 is obviously meant for videos and lots of them. The problem? Standard and low definition videos, like those on Netflix and YouTube, are a little blotchy and pixelated and generally not perfect. When you’re viewing them on a television set that’s 8 feet away it isn’t a big deal, but when you’re seeing that on a screen that’s 15 inches away from your eyes the imperfections really get pretty annoying.
Kids Ebooks Are Really Lame Video Games: I’m sure there are some amazingly entertaining and educational apps and ebooks that are absolutely stunning on the iPad 2. I couldn’t find many of them. When I think about all the games my son likes on my iPhone it’s never the story-based games that he enjoys. A lot of the ebooks read to you, highlight words while reading and then offer nothing more than some animation and goofy sounds when you tap around the screen. It’s entertaining to a point before even a four-year-old gets tired of the limitations and moves on the action figures or sticking Cheerios up his nose.
I thought it might be me. Maybe I just didn’t “get” the iPad 2. So I spoke to my wife…
“I want you to try this iPad thing,” I said.
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“You might like it…”
“And if I do?” she inquired.
“Happy Mother’s Day! Woot! Done!”
So she gave it whirl. She thought it was pretty damn cool, too. But then she tried to type on it she grew immediately frustrated and uncomfortable. A moment later she tossed it aside, picked up her phone and checked her Facebook status.
Returning the iPad 2 to Wal-Mart was, as much as I hate to admit it, pretty damn easy. I just packed everything up and walked in with my receipt. A blue haired lady wearing a blue vest opened the box and poked around inside, making sure it turned on and everything was there.
“Is this one of them new iPad 4.0 things?” she asked.
“Umm, yeah, the iPad 2. It’s neat, but expensive…” I began to explain.
“Yeah, I don’t see why you’d want this. Most phones do everything this does. I don’t see why anyone would bother with one of these things. More money than brains, I guess…”
It is rare that a retail person will actually berate you for actually buying a product from their store, but I’m guessing she was bitter because she worked at Wal-Mart in the first place. I got my $500 back and walked out, much happier and sure of myself than I’d been a few days before when I walked out with an iPad 2 under my arm.
Again, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably not the market that the iPad 2 was designed for. It isn’t a netbook replacement, it isn’t a great media player when you already have a media player and you can do most everything else on an iPhone or iPod Touch.
But here’s the thing: all of these problems are inherent in just about every tablet PC on the market. The basic design of the tablet is one which tries to combine a little bit of three different devices without ever actually doing any single function very well.
And though I invented the term iPad years before Steve Jobs ever thought about the tablet market, I still wish him and his little fruit company lots of success in the future. He might be able to do something good with the iPad if his company could only make it smaller, a little less expensive and maybe build a phone into it. Maybe he could call it something catching like the “myPhone” or the “eyePhone” or something.
Then he’d have a real hit on his hands!
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