[X4U] iPad news

[Neil Laubenthal]

I'm guessing the lack of Flash is due to a combination of it being buggy and causing crashes, it being a popular security target, and the fact that Apple doesn't want to be beholden to anything that Adobe owns. Combine that with the fact that we're starting to see new ways of doing video on the net with HTML5, etc and you can see Apple's logic, even if you don't completely agree with it.

Multitasking . . .Neil's guess is that it is due to the iPad we saw this week running iPhone OS 3.2 . . .which probably means it's the existing 3.1 with just enough added to make the new hardware work. I believe we'll see multitasking in version 4 . . .the new chip clearly has the power available.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see this June's iPhone also using the new A4 chip . . .that we'll see iPhone OS 4.0 when iPad ships including multitasking, and that the this June's iPhone will also support multitasking. The biggest drawback to multitasking is battery life . . .again I'm guessing that multitasking will either have an on/off switch in the preferences with the requisite warning about battery life or that one will be able to selectively allow multitasking for this app and that app. 

With the essentially single pane interface . . it isn't like one really needs multitasking for different windows . . .folks say they want multitasking but what is really wanted is (to a great extent) to allow things like Pandora to work in the background like the iTunes player so you can listen while you're typing in Pages. I could think of a bunch of ways that this could be allowed . . .it just depends on which one Steve thinks is the most elegant and/or likes.

Keyboard . . .I'm with you . . .I would want to try one. Andy Ihnatko and others who got to try it the other day indicated it was way better than the iPhone keyboard . . .and while not as easy to touch type on as a physical one would be usable to do a 500 word column on or to make some minor edits to a column to fit space requirements . . .but that for doing a lot of typing folks will just use the dock/keyboard or a bluetooth keyboard. After all . . .people griped about the iPhone keyboard when it came out and for a lot of us it's eminently usable for what we do on the iPhone.


On Jan 29, 2010, at 5:34 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> I think the most important of these is the lack of flash support. Does anyone know why this is?  The lack of multitasking could be a benefit to the underpowered CPU.  What is the problem with the LED screen?  As for the camera, I've mixed views on that.
> 
> Are they complaining about the virtual keyboard?  At least I think I've seen that it includes one.  I'd personally want to try it prior to complaining about it!
> 


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There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello.

neil