I have nothing against Apple® I actually want a few of their products, but when I saw the iPad, I was unimpressed. This tablet has been one of the most talked about products of the past six months, but, after seeing videos and pictures of it at the reveal, I realized it got more hype than it deserved.
The tablet not only looks like a giant version of the iPhone, it pretty much is a giant version of the iPhone. It runs the iPhone 3.2 operating system and is limited to the Apple® App Store. But, I guess it is not entirely like the iPhone. At least the iPhone allows you to make phone calls. But, I guess you could use Skype® on the iPad to talk to other people. Oh, wait! The iPad doesn’t have a camera, so you don’t even get the full Skype® experience.
Thankfully, there are other choices when it comes to tablets – most notably, the upcoming HP® Slate, which is rumored to to launch in June. The Slate will run Windows 7, so you will be able to do pretty much everything you can do on a regular Microsoft computer. You can use whichever Web browser you prefer and it supports flash, which is a big plus if you consider 30 to 40 percent of Web sites have at least one flash component.
Other features the Slate has over the iPad include a USB port and its cameras. The HP® tablet includes a Web camera (facing inward) and a 3.0 megapixel camera (facing outward). The tablet also includes a traditional SD card slot as opposed to the iPad’s micro SIM slot for 3G models only.
However, it would not be fair to omit the downsides of the Slate. As mentioned before, the tablet runs Windows 7 – which is neat, but it was not designed for a touch screen tablet – so it may have a few kinks to work out. Another possible downside for the Slate may be its battery life. While the iPad claims to run for 10 hours, the Slate comes up short on five hours.
Even after considering all the positive and negative aspects both tablets appear to have, I still can’t see why anyone would spend $600 for a 32 gigabyte iPhone (that doesn’t make calls), when they could get a 64 gigabyte computer.
Click here to read Lauren Aurigemma’s article on the iPad.
