I’ve been using the iPad since day one, and I thought I would categorize some things that I still find annoying about the iPad. Consider this a Dear-Apple letter for things they should refine.
1) The brightness controls are not calibrated for dark rooms. I often read my iPad in bed, at night, but the screen is simply way too bright. It is bright enough that a bed partner will need to turn away from it so that they can sleep. So, every night, I go into Settings and lower the brightness to its darkest setting. The next morning, I reverse the process. This is not ok.
2) The iPad has a bad habit of doing an unwanted screen orientation rotation when it is moved from vertical to flat. Flat, like, flat onto my lap or table top. The is really never the desired behavior, because hey! – I was looking at that!
3) The wireless-keyboard connection is way too sticky. As I write this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table with my iPad and bluetooth keyboard. Its great. If I were move to the couch to surf the web, I wouldn’t want to use my keyboard anymore that is still sitting in the kitchen. However, the iPad stubbornly refuses to bring up the on-screen keyboard until I go into settings and disable bluetooth. I would really like to just hit a button on the keyboard to disconnect it, like, say, the Eject button…
[Update] I’ll be damned – guess what the eject button does! It brings up the soft keyboard – but its only temporary. I bet there is a way to totally disconnect – hmmm.
[Update – 24 May, 2010] I’m an idiot. You can get this to mostly work by remembering to turn off the wireless keyboard when done. You do this by pressing and holding the power button for about three seconds. When you press the power button, the little green light will turn on, and then off after a few seconds, which is how you’ll know it is off. At that point, your software keyboard will pop back up. This solution isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad. My happiness quotient just went up!
The keyboard dock I settle on
[Update – 10 August, 2010] My old wireless keyboard simply wasn’t good enough. The Apple iPad Keyboard Dock just arrived today. You know – the one the physically plugs into the base of the iPad. It isn’t an ideal solution since it isn’t as portable as the wireless keyboard, but it seems solid and has a few iPad specific keys. Most importantly, since the connection is physical, the device shouldn’t get confused as to whether or not I have a physical keyboard in front of me.
4) Don’t get me started on Apple’s official iPad case.
5) On physical keyboards, I can hit the Delete key to left-delete, but I can hit, say, fn-Delete to right-delete as if I were on my desktop.
6) [new] The home button is too loud. While in bed, I’m afraid to hit it. It would be too loud for some meeting situations, too.
So, that is a pretty short list. Since, though, you can’t hack the iPad or iPhone much, unlike the Android phones, we’ll all have to wait patiently for Apple to address these. None of the above are show stoppers, and competition in the field is hot enough, that things do seem to get addressed by all of the vendors eventually.
One of the iPhone’s, and iPod touch’s early competitive advantages against the Android, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry was it’s consistent development target. As a developer, a typical app that I built for the iPod touch would work just fine for the all of the iPhone platforms because they had the same input, same screen resolution, etc. If it worked on an iPod touch, then I really didn’t need to test it on, say, an iPhone 3G. Unlike, say, the Blackberry line, with several different resolutions, orientations, and input methodologies, developing for one model meant very little chance of it working on the other models. My early Blackberry development was a bit of nightmare. I screamed at Palm when, after making a game for them targeted at 320×480 on the Palm Pre, when they started shipping the Palm Pixi with resolution of 320×400. What kind of sadist company would do that to their developers? Don’t get my started on what it is like to test for a Nokia app. That fragmentation made it quite difficult to develop for them. The recent spat of resolution changes for the iPhone line, though, changes that Apple advantage (but don’t worry about Apple just yet).
