iPad: What were they thinking?

Yesterday afternoon (Jan 27) I followed the highly-anticipated launch of the new Apple device online by following several of the live blogs from the event. Due to the secrecy surrounding the event (which all helps the hype) not even the name of the device was known. iTablet, iSlate were several of the suggestions.

And then it was revealed – iPad. Er, excuse me, what did you call it? Cue instant sniggering from a billion male teenage boys (and plenty of men and women old enough to know better). To this ancient teenager, the first thing that popped into his head was female sanitary products, and clearly I wasn’t alone as the twittersphere lit up with jokes on the subject, and even a cursory google search threw up this item from quite a few years back.

They didn’t help it out with the line about the battery life: 1 Month on Standby. Standby for what?

Now, to recover from an unfortunate name it is going to have to be a tremendous product right? Well I couldn’t help feel, whilst watching the launch that we were waiting for a zap-pow! moment when the iPad did something really amazing. But all it did was do some of the things a laptop does and some of the things an iPhone does and some of the things an iTouch does and some of the things an iPod does. It is nearly as big as a laptop, and a lot bigger than the other devices. If I had one, I’d quickly come to a point where I’d think “If only it was more like a laptop – more like a Macbook Air, in fact”.

Apparently Apple see it being used on the couch by the whole family. A whole family includes kids and have you noticed how roughly kids treat things? That lovely screen all smeared with finger prints and sweets, the case cracked because eldest couldn’t beat youngests’ best score?

OK, like all recent Apple products it looks super cool, and I’m sure there will be a large number of early adopters, but me, I’ll wait for version 3 when it will be, well, more like a laptop.