iPad 2… a Post PC device – NOT

Ian Nock on March 3, 2011 — 2 Comments

Well the iPad 2 is here, adding camera features, a thinner case and dual core performance. People speculated whether this would be a damp squib 1.5 in reality rather than a 2, but in my view it is just about a V2 device.. mainly because of the promise of the dual core and the cameras because there was the distinct absence of software improvements/additions. For that we will need to wait for the iOS5 rather than the iOS4.3 that will be coming with minor improvements in the coming weeks.

From a mobile worker perspective, there is nothing new here.

One comment I picked on though is the comment by Steve Jobs, ‘These are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than the PC, and even more intuitive’. I believe it CAN BE a post-PC device, but due to the need to connect the device to a PC to activate and properly sync content/information to it then it definitely is not the post-PC device YET.

To go to another simile used by Jobs, where he described PCs as ‘Trucks’ and the new devices that are coming from Apple are the sweet little sports cars and people movers, then you can see the madness of having a sports car that needs to be jump started from a truck and needs a truck to transport you to where you pick the sports car up. Android devices simply do not have this problem.

This however can be solved by software… pure and simple, and I would be looking towards iOS5 to bring that standalone activation and content access. That is an excellent opportunity to make the iPad standalone and not needing the PC.

In fact this is one of the big issues for the mobile worker like me… I cannot just take the iPad as I need to get stuff onto it and what happens when I have one of those activation snafus? Looking forward to iOS5 now.

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  • Tom Thomas

    Yes they’ve made a rod for their own back my having to stick with the legacy situation of ‘iTunes master plus mobile device slave’. The iPad cuts right down the middle of that and you wind up with the worst of both worlds in a way. When you think of the Apple product evolution over the last few years it is excusable i.e. iPod and it’s spin-offs first, then this became iPhone, still a small device that most users accept with the fact is still ‘mastered’ by the PC, but now the iPad popularity is really stretching this paradigm and it’s starting to fail.
    This is why the much vaunted qualities of the iPad, though great for a domestic user or ‘regular’ (9 to 5) business worker, just don’t cut it if you’re away on a business trip for overnight or more.

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