Monthly Archives: January 2011

Some well known commentators in the world of mobile continue to insist that the iPad and other tablets are not purely designed for consumption, but are perfectly capable of creation. I disagree.

We have seen some incredible examples of creation on the iPad and Galaxy Tab to date and when wonderful works of music or art are produced using nothing more than a tablet commentators like John Gruber fall over themselves to say things like “…and they say tablets are just for consumption.” I get the point and understand what these tablets can do, but I sold my iPad last week because I could not do some basic things that such an advanced piece of kit should be able to do.

I cannot update PDA-247 on the iPad without jumping over multiple hurdles; it does not support the default admin screen, image manipulation is tiresome and there are so many other aspects that make it difficult to use. The same is true of my freelance work; I can of course write what I need on the iPad, but adding screenshots and zipping them up for sending is again difficult due to the way the system works. In short, I cannot manage 247 or complete my freelance work on the iPad without sending stuff to my Mac for completion later. It’s not just the iPad either because the Galaxy Tab suffers from similar problems; the browser is better, but the same problems apply to image manipulation and so many other tasks that I need to complete to fulfil what I need to do. This is not complicated and falls in the realms of basic computing tasks, but today’s consumer tablets are not good at this kind of thing.

There are some huge advantages to using tablets, namely instant start up, ease of use and the general touch navigation, but for serious stuff they are still lacking. Once the iPad had gone I started to take my son’s low-end Linux Netbook to work and tested it out with a 3 Mi-Fi hub. I can now do everything I need during my lunch hour and this gives me more time in the evenings to spend with my family.

For all of the ease of use of tablets, they have some distance to go to let people undertake all that they need to on the move. Consumption is very different to mass consumption and there are so many things that tablets cannot do well at this time. I am not for one minutes saying that tablets are inferior to Netbooks and laptops, but they are very different and have different aims.

With so much talk of tablets taking over the mobile computing market, I still wonder how many people have bought tablets and then found that they are not using them as much as they expected. I realise that not everyone is like me, not everyone runs a website or has to send off multiple documents in one email, but many people have needs outside of general web browsing, emailing and using apps. Until these are catered for, the current crop of tablets are not built for mass creation.