The iphone was right. The ipad is wrong. Time will tell...
Tonight we were shooting on location, took a break next to an Apple store so I went in and saw my first Ipad in person.
Is it a tool? Not sure. Is it a novelty . . . definitely and a very pretty novelty at that.
Now it may become a must have item for commercial artists as it does play a portfolio well, allows you to do some web work, certain e-mail etc., but it's not the most intuitive computer I've used, but that's probably because it's a touch interface and though I'm familiar with my iphones and ipod touches, it's a little different.
The deal killer is for viewing anything on the web is it doesn't play flash. That just seems absurd and regardless of Apple's hold on quicktime, or the future advent of html 5, flash is here today, has better compression for motion files and is more interactive. There are things that the user could do with flash that you can't do with quicktime.
My web designer quoted some numbers to me . . . and he might be off a few percent but he says that flash plays on 65% of all computers in the world today and quicktime is only on 14%.
That right there greatly limits the use of the Ipad.
Now with all that in mind come April when the 3g version comes out I will buy one. Do I like it . . . dunno . . . will I use it . . . yes at least for a quick way to show our work . . . will it become more useful . . . I dunno.
What is interesting, it would have been great tonight to play and view the imagery we just shot on the Ipad screen because the screen really is beautiful, but nobody I asked knew how to transfer images form a cf card to the ipad.
Maybe that's coming next.
BC