One thing that bothers me about the prospect of buying an iPad is that it means I’ll be carrying both an iPad and an iPhone, and there’s a lot of overlap between the two devices in terms of functionality. Worst of all, even though I already have “unlimited” data service through AT&T with my iPhone, I have to pay $30 for an additional “unlimited” data service for the iPad. Otherwise, I’m reduced to hunting for WiFi hotspots.

Thinking about this problem lead me to consider the following question: if I had an iPad, what would I use my iPhone for? It occurs to me that the iPhone really has 2 advantages over the iPad. The first advantage is that you can make voice calls over AT&T’s network. Though I think this is a big deal, it’s only a big deal because of circumstance. Right now, cell phones support voice much better and much more widely than they support data. If you were to have a robust, ubiquitous, and fast wireless data network, you should be able to make all of your voice calls using VoIP. Of course, you don’t want to hold your iPad up to your head like a phone, but you could easily get a Bluetooth headset or even a Bluetooth handset.

The second advantage that the iPhone has over the iPad is that it’s small. Of course, the advantage the iPad has over the iPhone is that it’s big, so being small isn’t absolutely better. However, in many contexts, being small is an advantage. The chief advantage of the iPhone being small is that you can stick it in your pocket. This means it’s much easy to take it everywhere with you, and just as importantly, it’s easy to access in any situation. When you’re standing in a crowded subway car, it’s much easier to reach in your pocket to pull out an iPod than it is to dig through your bag and pull out a notebook. Relating this back to the first advantage of the iPhone, you probably don’t want to have to pull out your iPad when you’re running around in the world and you need to make a phone call.

To address both of these problems, I think it might be good if Apple were to create a small Bluetooth iPad remote. I imagine that hardware-wise, it could look quite a bit like the iPhone but smaller and thinner. It would only connect to the iPad, so you wouldn’t need WiFi or cell connectivity. You could ditch most of the internal storage as well. The handset would retain the speaker, mic, touchscreen, battery, and perhaps a headphone jack.

The controls of the handset would expose 2 main functions: making and receiving phone calls and browsing through the media library on your iPad. The handset interface would have a dialer which would control the VoIP calls placed through the iPad’s data connection, and the handset would also “ring” like a handset when the iPad’s VoIP received an incoming call. During calls, you would talk through the handset like you would with a normal cell phone. Your voice would be picked up through the mic and sent to the iPad via Bluetooth. Incoming audio from the call would be sent to the handset’s speaker via Bluetooth as well.

The other use for this remote/handset would be to allow a user to store all of his music on the iPad and listen to the music on-the-go without actually needing to pull out the iPad every time he wants to change songs or adjust the volume.  The menu system could look identical to the iPhone’s normal music playback, but instead be controlling remote playback of the iPad.

Actually, the idea of a iPhone-like remote control for the iPad isn’t too far removed from features that Apple already provides.  One of Apple’s early iPhone applications was one which allowed you to use the iPhone as a remote control for an Apple TV or even any computer running iTunes.  It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for Apple to expand this application to allow remote control of an iPad.

So in the last post, I talked about some of the iPad complaints that I thought were unfair. There are a few that I think are quite fair, such as the fact that you’re locked into Apple’s iTunes store and can’t install software from other sources. Also, I’ve read that it’s a bit of a pain to get documents on and off of the iPad.

However, what I find most interesting are the missed opportunities for making the iPad even more useful, including improvements that could still be made post-launch.

The first big missed opportunity in my mind was that Apple didn’t make use of this patent:

For years I’ve thought that my ideal computing experience included something roughly like the iPad: a small lightweight tablet about the size of a standard sheet of 8.5×11″ paper with a highly refined touchscreen interface.  However, the problem with a device of this form factor is that working on a small touchscreen for a long time isn’t as comfortable as working with a nice big monitor, keyboard, and mouse.  So in my ideal computing experience, I would be able to dock this tablet to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for projects that require more intensive computer use.  Ideally I would have access to all the same documents and applications whether I was using the computer in touchscreen-mode or docked-mode, but I would always be presented with an interface that was optimized for whichever mode I was in.

Of course, this concept presents a lot of complications.  Not only would the OS need to host two totally different context aware user interfaces, but application developers would need to create two interfaces for each application as well.  The tablet would also need to be powerful enough to run a full desktop operating system and full desktop applications, while being energy efficient enough to allow several hours of battery life while in tablet mode.  The technology isn’t there yet.

However, what Apple could probably do is allow the iPad to be used to host user profiles.  Technologically, this would be a very different approach, but it could achieve similar results.  The idea would be that you permanently store all of your documents and media on your iPad, and when you dock your iPad to your computer, instead of syncing, your computer automatically mounts the iPad’s filesystem and uses it for your home folder.

You computer’s iTunes wouldn’t store all your music on the hard drive and then sync your music to the iPad, but instead it would store all of your music on the iPad.  When you ran iWork on your computer, it would read the Pages document directly from your iPad and edit it on your iPad’s internal storage.  When you disconnected your iPad from your computer, you would have access to the same exact document through your iPad’s copy of Pages.  When you looked at your task list in your computer’s version of Things, it would be reading and altering the same database that your iPad’s version of Things would alter.  This would also allow you to dock your iPad to any number of computers and essentially take your whole home folder, settings and all, from computer to computer relatively seamlessly.  If Apple really wanted to, they could even get fancy by supporting automatic backups of your iPad through Time Machine.  Or they could even allow you to store a cached version of your iPad on the computer so that you could work when your iPad was disconnected, which would automatically sync when the iPad was docked or connected on a local network.  Or perhaps an even crazier idea: the iPad could automatically sync all of its contents online via MobileMe’s iDisk.

I believe all of this is possible with current technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPad and considering whether to buy one myself. In reading some of the reviews and responses, I’ve encountered a set of complaints, many of which I don’t think are entirely fair, and I wanted to share my thoughts:

No Flash support

The iPad does not support Adobe Flash, which seems to upset a lot of people.  From my standpoint the fact that Flash has become so ubiquitous is improper and even scary.  Flash is a bad thing (unstable, insecure, slow resource hog), and if Apple had to choose to include Flash or not include Flash, one or the other, I’d prefer that they didn’t.  I’m also glad they don’t have Silverlight, and I don’t see much of a difference.

In my view, these technologies are good for approximately 2 things: games and video.  With the advent of HTML 5, I hope all sites will be moving away from using Flash for video.  I know there are people who will argue with this, but it’s not really the topic I want to address here.  Flash games: I can live without them.  Flash ads: I’d like to actively block them.

Multitasking

I’ve read a lot of people complaining that iPhone OS is technologically backward because it doesn’t support multitasking.  In truth, it already supports multitasking, it just limits the access 3rd party developers have to that capability.  There are a couple of good reasons for this.  First, no one has built a good enough UI (User Interface) into managing background applications.  Windows Mobile and Android based phones both get a lot of user complaints that boil down to having too many applications running in the background without a clear UI for seeing what’s running or a clear UI for closing them.

Second, most applications don’t have a lot of need for running in the background in a system like this.  For example, when you’re reading an ebook, it takes up the whole screen.  When your writing a note in the “Notes” application, it takes up the whole screen.  You aren’t split-screening, doing both a the same time, the way you would on a computer.  There’s nothing about these programs that needs to keep running– like when you leave the ebook reader, there’s no benefit to leaving it running in the background, using up system resources, rendering an invisible book.

Therefore, what you really need are (a) for programs to be able to save their state when quitting so that you don’t lose data; and (b) a good notification system for the programs that need it.  Essentially, I don’t need my full mail application and my full IM application and my full phone application all running in the background on my iPhone all the time.  I need to get an appropriate alert when I receive a phonecall or an email or an IM.

No ports/expandability

I’ve read some complaints about the iPad not having built-in card readers, USB ports, or an audio line-in.  I think there are probably many reasons for this, including keeping the size/weight down and keeping the price low.  However, I think some of the reason that the iPad lacks expandability is that Apple is managing user expectations.  If you put a USB port on the iPad, then people are going to expect that they can plug in their peripherals and have them work.

This presents some problems.  First, it means that Apple has to develop a large base of drivers for all these devices.  When you plug something into USB on your computer and it works, it’s not magic; there are loads and loads of various pieces of software sitting around on your computer on the off chance that you plug in a piece of hardware that uses that software.  Unless Apple puts all that software on the iPad then your USB devices won’t work anyway.  Then we’d be hearing complaints like, “Why did Apple put a USB port on this thing if I can’t use any of my USB peripherals?”

So why doesn’t Apple simply include all of the necessary software and drivers to support various USB peripherals?  Well… then you’re opening a whole other can of worms.  Let’s say Apple put a USB port on the iPad and I plug in one of the simplest and most common USB peripherals: a mouse.  Most users would expect that a mouse cursor would then appear, and they could use a mouse instead of the touchscreen capabilities.  However, the UI isn’t designed to be operated by a mouse; everything is big and spaced far apart.  Apple specifically avoiding replicating the mouse-driven interface on this device, and I suspect as a result, it wouldn’t be a terribly fun device to navigate by mouse.  So that diminishes the user experience. Even worse, allowing people to use a mouse with the iPad would encourage developers to create mouse-driven interfaces, which would in turn make for a poor experience when using the touchscreen.  So then you end up with a split between apps designed to be used with the touch screen and apps designed for the mouse.  Confusing.  Apple doesn’t like “confusing”.

Beyond that, you’d have extra hard drive space taken up by the mouse drivers and any associated software (e.g. calibration software), and you’d lose any CPU or battery power that got devoted to running those drivers.  Plus, the mouse would draw power from the USB port, which would drain battery life.  One of the key things that Apple seems to be very proud of is the iPad’s battery life: 10 hours of watching video; 1 month standby time.  They achieve this by using a low-power processor and carefully managing the resources, which probably means loading no more drivers than are necessary, not running applications in the background except when necessary, and not using any powered ports.

So for putting an extra port on the iPad (which would cost a little extra per unit, possibly require extra engineering of the case), you get almost no extra functionality and decreased battery life.  There actually is a USB connector built-in to the iPod docking connector, but the dock connector includes other things too (e.g. audio/video out, remote control support).  Plus the dock connector is skinner and is a little less likely to break anything if you yank on it, since it’s not as deep. Bluetooth devices, on the other hand, have their own power sources.  By forcing peripherals to use the dock connector, it ensures that people will only be trying to plug in devices that are designed specifically for iPhones/iPads.

Managing expectations

I think how you see the iPad of this depends on your expectations. If you’re expecting the iPad to be a full computer in tablet form, then I think you’ll end up being disappointed. I don’t think Apple is even aiming for it to be a full computer. It’s more like a device, like an iPod or an Apple TV. Or think of it like an XBox. Would you complain that you can’t do multitasking on your XBox? That you can’t play a video game and type a term paper on your XBox at the same time?

Essentially, the iPad isn’t meant to replace your computer. You know how you used to carry around a disc-man and a bunch of CDs, and that got replaced by an iPod? Well now the iPad is replacing your books and your moleskin notebooks, but also maybe your TV, iPod, and PDA. Not a bad accomplishment, if it pulls it off effectively.