Scoring Topper on the Tablet

By Jake • February 2nd, 2010 • View Comments

Image from Mac Daily News

Last week, you got not one, but two posts by authors not named Jake. I felt lucky too.

Matt (@topperge) gave us his rundown of “no brainer” features in advance of the iPad announcement. As a giggle, let’s score his accuracy:

So, five out of eight, not bad, Matt, and I’ll bet two of the three you missed will be coming soon, probably camera first. Although the iPhone OS finally implemented copy/paste in version 3.0, so the future is murky.

Matt also added two final pieces to make the phantom tablet a killer device: cloud-based storage for all your media and what he calls MediaSync.

Although both of these were misses, he’s on the something here that will eventually be Apple’s ace in the hole. Microsoft does a decent job (I’m told) of managing digital assets within the home, but not from a central location accessible outside the home.

I think that’s right.

Anyway, Apple could take a huge step toward pwning the home entertainment experience by pushing everything to the sky and centrally managing access, distribution and backup there. Just as Matt says, with that infrastructure in place, cool features like MediaSync (to turn a phrase) would be easy to add.

So Matt, are you queueing up to buy an iPad, or are you bumming that it didn’t meet all your expectations?


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  • bex
    actually, the health care industry historically pushed Apple the hardest to make a tablet. Hospital keyboards are practically germ warfare factories. They'll purchase them in boatloads even if they just have a web browser.
  • Where did you read that? That doesn't sound like Apple, i.e. being pushed. The fear of germs makes sense, but the use case I've heard is the doctor carrying one around instead of charts. Sounds bogus.
  • bex
    I saw it on a mac rumors blog about 4 years ago... Steve Jobs had a sit-down with a bunch of hospitals who were literally begging him to make a touch-screen tablet. Something that would be easier to disinfect than a keyboard. He gave them many reasons why the market just was not right for the kind of tablet they were wanting.

    Of course, then he made the iPhone... so things are a bit different now.

    In general, software makes your hospital LESS efficient, not MORE efficient. Most of the systems I've seen really cannot prove their value. Asking a doctors to do tons of data entry really isn't the best use of their time...
  • Interesting. I'm surprised he agreed to sit down with them at all, being Steve Jobs and all. Maybe his public persona is overstated.

    I can see the issue with keyboards. I saw a piece on TV years ago that measured germs on a public toilet seat vs. other places, including the average keyboard. You know which one was nastier.

    I do love my keyboard though. If it were flat and tacile only, with no keys, that would allow me to clean better.

    I've always wondered about doctors and paperwork/data entry. They must hate doing it (like police reports), but it's a necessary evil I suppose.
  • bex
    in my opinion, the less a doctor has to touch paper, the better. Hospitals never quite optimized themselves with "para-professionals" that could make the doctor's time more well-spent. If you're a small town general practitioner, then doing your own paperwork with an iPad app might save money because you don't have to hire a nurse or a clerk. But, for any hospital with more than 10 doctors, it's probably a huge waste of time.
  • I went to a place that had Macbooks in every room connected to a wall-mounted display, seemed totally paperless. While it appealed to the geek in me, I didn't feel too awesome knowing my records were digital. The kicker was that their records system ran on Vista within a Parallels instance.
  • Jim
    Computer keyboards can get some gunked up, it's horrible! Give them a quick shake, and out falls a load of fluff, hair and crumbs. It'd be great to be able to have a wipe clean one.

    Someone in our office +never+ cleaned his keyboard, and when he retired his keyboard had a thick crust of gunk on each key, rubbed clear on the impact point but grimy all around the edges, and then seriously crusty down the sides. I don't think his keyboard was re-used! I think that was an extreme example though.

    Like you say though, nasty!
  • Yup, I remember seeing a lot of those grimy off-white keyboards back in the day. Dell skirted the issue by making them black so the white wouldn't fade and show off how dirty they were. Win if you're into the aesthetics, but definitely a hygiene fail.
  • Sensors: from what I've read, it's not true GPS but cell-tower-assisted triangulation. Any confirmation?

    Front Facing Video Camera: correct, no camera -- however, the insides of the iPad have room to store one in the appropriate location

    The *one and only* thing that keeps me from getting excited about the iPad is a lack of multi-tasking, but I suppose it could be "jailbroken" to handle that.
  • Apple's website says wi-fi plus 3G triangulation. So, good enough GPS. Re. camera, it's definitely coming in a later version, probably with widescreen viewing another miss.

    I don't know about multi-tasking. I thought I'd miss it on the iPhone, but I haven't. Actually, the iPhone OS has multi-tasking, it's just not exposed to developers, e.g. the iPod and Phone apps run in the background.

    We should start a predictive market around how many days after its release the iPad will be unlocked. Jailbreaking won't be as desirable for the iPad, since it's not a phone and isn't super portable. Even so, it's going to be jailbroken too, if only to pwn AT&T.
  • The one disagreement I have regarding jailbreaking: what drives people to jailbreak isn't just carrier preference, but also application preference -- if you want the ability to install and run what you want (vs. what is available to download), you will jailbreak.
  • I always get those backward. You were right initially, jailbreaking (i.e. from Apple) to control the iPhone OS is what I think people will do immediately to install what they want and take advantage of multi-tasking, etc.

    Unlocking, i.e. removing from AT&T for use with any carrier, is less likely.
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