
The iPad's five worst surprises - fiaz
http://www.macworld.com/article/145976/2010/01/ipadissues.html
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kristiandupont
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.

~~~
foulmouthboy
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.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
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.

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fnid2
_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.

~~~
blasdel
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.

~~~
eonwe
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?

~~~
blasdel
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.

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natch
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.

~~~
electromagnetic
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.

~~~
gdee
>> 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.

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GHFigs
If this is the worst, that bodes well.

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Keyframe
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.

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wooster
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.

~~~
chaosmachine
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.

~~~
gaius
_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.

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Poiesis
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.

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lssndrdn
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.

~~~
MartinCron
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.

~~~
krakensden
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.

