The iPad's five worst surprises | Hacker News Reader

The iPad's five worst surprises

macworld.com

17 pointsfiaz28 comments

Everybody is outraged with the lack of camera. Is it really that important? I see myself using this device for watching video and casual surfing on the couch - no need for a camera for that.

Three big things that I can see:

1. Lots of things in similar categories take pictures, so it just feels like an oversight.

2. Video chat is one of the applications that would seem right up the iPad's alley.

3. The number and types of augmented reality applications (such as the ones already appearing on iPhone) are more likely to increase in the future and the iPad as is would be left out of any of those developments.

Video chat would have been a truely killer application on the iPad. With an increasing number of laptops coming with built in webcams, I think personal video conferencing (think grandma to grandkids, etc) is just starting to really take off. The iPad could have been the market defining device for video chat.

#2 and #3 I can agree with. #1 is exactly the kind of thinking that I think Apple gets right by avoiding. A product should not compete by having all the competitors features and then some.

The fact that it takes up to 80 percent of the CPU in a quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro to render a 400x300 Flash game just boggles my mind

The reason is because Adobe developers don't use hardware 3d graphics acceleration. They do everything in the processor because they don't know how to write code that works on multiple types of hardware or maybe they are too lazy or cheap, I don't know.

The effect is that ALL of their apps run dreadfully slow on all platforms because every single calculation has to go through the CPU.

This is just one of the many reasons Adobe software is some of the worst on the market.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU or platform. Flash on Windows had no graphics acceleration at all until ~6 months ago.

Flash running in Virtualized Windows or Wine on top of OS X works terrifically.

In http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641 the Adobe developers seem to complain about lack of possibility to use hardware acceleration on OSX. Yet as you said, Windows Flash has been fast the whole time. Could someone better versed in plugin development tell us if there is a difference in how the browser plugins are done between OSX and Windows (drawing the video part perhaps?).

Or what else could create the difference as I would think that much of the Flash VM code would be identical between Intel OSX and Windows?

The Flash plugin for IE is ActiveX, but all Flash plugins for other platforms use the same Mozilla NPAPI plugin system, whether it's Firefox on Windows, Safari on OS X, or Chrome on Linux.

Both Windows Flash plugins have the same good performance: it ain't an API issue.

The article incorrectly claims the device doesn't have a microphone. The author added some weasel words "I don't think there's a microphone" to hedge something that would have taken a few seconds to fact-check on any of the liveblog sites that ran yesterday.

Having seen that, it was hard to take the rest of the article seriously.

Actually, apple.com had the iPad page up well before the publish date of this article and it had all the specs. It clearly stated that it had a microphone.

I'm also dubious of the article that it neglects to mention battery life. The iPad claims up to 10 hours wireless browsing/video/music, which to me is very odd. Web browsing should be taking significantly less battery than video, so what is the true battery life when watching full-screen 720P video like the iPad can allegedly handle with full brightness?

I know with my iPod, with brightness on minimum, it only barely managed to meet the maximum Apple stated. I can only imagine how much of a power hog the iPad's screen is at maximum brightness on a 720p screen. I have money riding that the iPad's battery life, max brightness and 720p video is only going to last ~3 hours, 5 at a major push.

>> on a 720p screen

There is no 720p video possible on that screen. It has 1024 pixels horizontal when in landscape, and it would need 1280.

If this is the worst, that bodes well.

I know it's far-fetched since there is no flash, but is there a java support? Would be nice to trade with an in-browser java app on this device.

One could argue that browser is multitasking environment - so you could have gmail/gtalk in one tab and other web apps in others. But, with no flash and/or java support there is still a wide empty area to fill in.

Let alone my fantasies about a modbook like device (wacom!) - I'd just be happy if iPad supported flash and arbitrary PDF files. Heck, even just arbitrary PDF's would be nice damnit.

Even with the 3G model the GPS chip isn't a "true" GPS chip. It's Assisted-GPS, and probably pretty unreliable without a 3G connection, just like the iPhone.

Assisted GPS is true GPS plus faster initial position finding (that's the "assisted" part).

Anyone who's owned a hand-held GPS can tell you it takes a few minutes to find your initial location, especially if you've moved location since the last time you turned it on.

An AGPS system uses hints from cell towers to get a rough idea of where you are. This significantly lowers the time required to get a lock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

So, yes, it will function without a 3G signal. The problem, however, is that when you're out of 3G range, you won't be able to download Google Maps data. So, if you need maps when you're out in the middle of nowhere, you'll probably want to buy the TomTom app, or one of the other "real" GPS apps.

Anyone who's owned a hand-held GPS can tell you it takes a few minutes to find your initial location

Yes, this is because a current (within the last few hours) version of the almanac (current status of the GPS constellation, which satellites are active etc) and ephemeris (more-or-less where everything is expected to be) needs to be downloaded. It's slow from satellites but quick via 3G.

I sell offline mapping iPhone apps. The GPS chip in the iPhone sometimes works (in open fields, clear view of the sky) without assistance, but often does not where standalone units would.

This may be a software problem. Core Location has a tendency to give up pretty easily, whereas a standalone unit would keep trying as long as you wanted it to.

Didn't this little thing get killed off during the 3G announcement? A-GPS > GPS. Same GPS chip but uses other data to quickly get a general location so you aren't waiting for satellites without any knowledge of your location.

I think that the awkwardness of using this as a camera, coupled with security policies against cameras in many companies, makes a camera a "why bother?" item. So they add support for an add-on, and especially for plugging in a SD card or camera for image management, which by contrast will be very popular.

They complain about lack of video, but I have to imagine that holding up this object to take pictures or record video would be quite awkward. It is a large object. It would look kind of funny - in the way that large cellphones from 1998 look kind of funny today.

Tethering an iPhone to this thing to act as a camera would probably be one of the few areas where they don't overlap uncomfortably in functionality, but doesn't feel very Apple-y.

I think they mean a front facing camera.

The camera could be built into a see-through part of the edge, kept horizontal by a small motor driven by the accelerometer.

This way you could just 'shoot from the hip', looking down on your tilted tablet like you would look at the screen of one of those old Hasselblad cameras.

The screen is large enough to hold at some distance from your eyes, after all!

They still make 'em, with digital backs. For a lot of types of photography waist-level finders (WLFs) make a lot of sense. For example, you usually want to shoot people from their eye level or slightly below, with an eye-level finder you might find yourself kneeling a lot...

I wonder if it's possible to make decent bluetooth cameras? That feels more useful to me. A tiny camera you point and shoot that sends pictures/video to the giant iPad screen.

The latest bluetooth standard (from april of last year) supports transfer speeds of 24Mbit/s according to wikipedia, so yes. Unfortunately for manufacturers, there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem there.

It's possible to make a bluetooth camera: http://www.bt-1.com/

I think it will depend on whether the Bluetooth stack is "keyboard only" in the same way the iPhone is "headset only", or whether it's "whatever you want but the App will have to be the driver" so it would need to be a Skype+Camera pairing. Actually, that sounds somewhat unlikely doesn't it? :(

(How would you Skype without it running in the background? You'd have to phone someone to arrange Skyping).

I use my iPhone camera as a note taking device, and on an iPad, video conferencing could be nice.

That said, people seem to be forgetting all about the camera connection kit. Right now it is for downloading off your camera or memcard (something I wish the iPhone had long ago) but it could support more use cases in the future.

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