We deserve the iPad disappointment

It's true, there's no way it could have lived up to the hype, but yesterday when Steve Jobs and his crew finished demoing the new Apple iPad, I was left seriously disappointed. Not mad like this guy, but just seriously, seriously disappointed.

For all the reasons the world and his dog have posted, the iPad misses the mark. Just quickly, they are:

• The name: Awful.

• No multitasking: What? On a device with a near 10-inch screen I have to go 'home' and close apps all the time? I can't use streaming apps, or have Twitter pop up when I'm surfing the net. On a 10-inch screen. Really? Wow.

• The big, wide, clumsy black bezel round the edge that screams 'cheap digital photo frame' or, worse, 'Fisher Price Toy' almost as badly as the one on the white polycarbonate MacBook does. Those iSlate concepts were so much sleeker. In the same way the 2G iPhone is far, far sleeker than the 3G/S, it seems to show Apple's once sleek design for such products is going backwards, big time.

• The fact that, really, it doesn't do anything we haven't seen before. Except... OK I'll give Phil Schiller this one, 'a really fun new way to play with a spreadsheet'. Whoop whoop.

• And viewing that last point from a slightly different direction, the fact that it's missing something really innovative. It is. There's just nothing genuinely innovative here.

• Too much 'i': iPad, iBooks. Really? Why not just 'the BookStore on iTunes' (just like 'the App Store' - on iTunes).They even ripped off the iBooks app design from an Apple Award winning developer - after they'd poached all his staff. Real classy.

• The rhetoric and acommpanying cheezy video: 'It's revolutionary'. 'It's magical'. No. No it's damn well not. It's a giant iPod Touch. Literally. It's a bigger screened version of a product you already sell. That's not revolutionary and I don't appreciate you trying to ram such rubbish into my ears. I won't agree with you, no matter how much you say it.

• 'It's so amazing - it's the internet in the palm of your hand!' Yep, we've heard that before, it's exactly what they said about the iPhone. 

• It's disappointing compared to things we've already seen from… Microsoft, believe it or not: Look at this Surface app from Shane Morris. That makes you go 'wow'. it makes anyone you show it to go 'wow' as well. What about Microsoft's Courier concept, leaked (previewed?) by someone late last year. Far more intriguing and seemingly innovative than the iPad.

• The iPad also looks just like HP's slate device (pictured right) that Steve Ballmer showed for a few seconds at CES in early January. Big bezel, eBook capabilities and all. Thankfully the iPad didn't have the damn cover of 'Twilight' on it, but I digress.

Again, while it couldn't possibly live up to the hype, I was hoping, really hoping, for something that lived up to some of the potential that's out there for these tablet things. Something that did something special (just like they're trying to tell us it does), just like the iPhone really did when it was launched. Like the tablet and touch interfaces on this video, perhaps (the first video, not the parody).

But the iPhone launch was three years ago and I think Apple is a different company now. In hindsight, there was no way, no way in the world, that that 'wow' product was going to happen yesterday.

In fact, I'm beginning to think all of the endless Apple hype (that I myself have contributed to - and I do still think their other products are better than most), and the billions of dollars they're making, has told them one thing: They can now, more than ever, cripple their products, hold back on features that are common and relatively simple (yes, multitasking), lock down access to an unheard of degree, claim they're 'magical and revolutionary' when they're not, not even give us decent aesthetics, and still charge a fortune for them. And we'll buy them, in the millions.

The iPad is the result of us accepting what we should not have accepted, and the mountains of hype heaped on Apple. We deserve it. We've thrown so much money and praise at them it's gone to their collective, heads, and they're getting giddy with the idea of creaming more money from the likes of a million plus iPads and several million iBooks.

Truth be told I don't need an iPad (who does?), but sadly I don't actually want one, either. As first-gen products go I think they may have really jumped the shark with this one. There's nothing it can do that the phone I'm already paying $80 a month for cannot. A phone that is, by the way, really pretty amazing, although it's not as pretty as the one before it, still can't multitask properly, the 'Bluetooth A2DP' doesn't actually work with the majority of headphones that are bluetooth A2DP, that I charge pretty much consistently when I'm at a desk, that scratches unless it's sealed front and back in a nice protective blanket… You get the idea.

Conceivably, if the overall 'underwhelmed' sentiment on the web is anything to go by, Apple will not sell as many of these as it hopes and, hopefully, we'll see a much better second-gen product. But the first impression is gone and I bet the ugly betty bezel will stay for a while to remind us of that fact.

Let's not forget though, that the iPad will be put to innovative use by the army of third party developers who have already done some great work with the iPhone/iPod touch, despite the straightjacket constraints of the iPhone SDK.

iPad is not a bad product, it's just not great product. Not yet. Not even close. For me, and after weeks, months, years of anticipation around an Apple tablet (an Apple TABLET!), it needed to be seriously great. It needed to make me go 'wow', big time, but the best we got is an unconvincing 'bless my whiskers'.

Damn it.