mrhunt blogs

Apple are due to ship their first non-3G enabled iPads early next month but I won’t be getting one, yet.

I’m just not too sure what I’d use it for at this stage especially as I already have a laptop and an iPhone. The laptop has a nice 15in screen, plenty of power and a nifty physical keyboard! I can use it for surfing the web, email, Twitter but more importantly the full suite of design and word processing apps. It’s battery life is appalling but at least I can work on it for long periods of time and it’s still reasonably portable. Then there’s the iPhone, a fantastic tool for email, RSS news feeds, Twitter, games, music, podcasts, etc. but next to useless as a serious design tool (fair enough, it was never really designed for that). I also wouldn’t be too keen to type out a whole blog post on it either. Between these two tools I think I’m pretty much covered.

What I have always wanted is a kind of iMac/iPhone hybrid but not in the same guise as the iPad. My ideal would be a full size iMac with touch screen capability that I could use at an angle on my desk much like a draughtsman’s table. Along with a full-size virtual keyboard and a specially adapted version of Photoshop I could use multi-touch gestures to draw directly onto the screen, sweeping gracefully between Spaces on the desktop. Perhaps even some sort of stylus input like a Wacom tablet would be handy for fine detail. Obviously, this isn’t in the slightest bit portable which is where the iPad might just have a purpose.

What I’d like to see with the iPad is a carbon copy of my computer at home, all the files, all the apps, the music, even the exact same desktop. So, whilst out and about I’d have the ability to work with my full size desktop apps (albeit on a smaller screen). Even cooler would be for changes made on the iPad to automatically sync with my home computer. My other suggestion for the iPad, and this is probably infinitely more doable, is to use it as an input device for my main computer. The iPad could double as a keyboard, mouse and Wacom tablet which in effect would serve the same purpose as my giant touch screen iMac mentioned above. I think this latter suggestion is bound to happen soon enough as there are already iPhone apps (such as Logitech’s TouchMouse) which do a similar thing, the iPad would just be a less fiddly solution.

Beyond that, there’s a couple other things the iPad needs before I’d consider getting one, a user-facing camera to enable proper VoIP calling and multitasking would be really nice. Basically, I’d prefer it to be much more like small laptop than a large iPhone which at this stage I believe it is.