Ipad

The iPad, the little Jesus machine from Apple that everyone adores, and which will be superseded by the next generation, thinner, with a camera, in just a few months.

Is the iPad great? No, it’s not. However, it sucks the least.

The iPad has terrible multitasking, some bizarre choices in the OS – for instance the seldom used ‘mute’ switch becomes hardware while the more often used ‘lock orientation’ function is moved to software. There’s no action for holding down the home button but puling a list of open programs up requires double clicking it. There’s no voice recognition – but there is for the iPhone… and so on.

Linux users point out that it’s a locked down, DRM encumbered system with significant bloat and a dearth of features compared with a real OS.

My reply has been: “You’ve had the time to make a Linux tablet, but you didn’t. You don’t get to compare a functional, working product to vapourware.”

Microsoft has put out tablets. Many many tablets, all of which took the essential idea of a tablet – a computer you could pick up and walk around with an adjust for input and reading, and handed it off to companies who merely added touch screens and a stylus holder to existing laptops.

And once the great Tablet race geared up – we got more of the same. Thick, undersized or oversized machiens with low input resolution screens that required stylus input, running Vista or WIndows 7. Then lighter machines running a mobile phone OS -  Android. Surely a step up, but Android still isn’t all that great to use, even compared with the rapidly aging and tarnished iOS, which makes each device slower an slower with every sporadic and feature poor update.