The iPad is strangely antisocial

Speak for yourself, social butterfly. My iPhone is my device to use as I wish, and if I'm an individual who loves solitude, then the way I use the device will reflect that.

that got me wondering about the hardware differences between the ipad and iphone.

has anyone looked at the sdk yet that can verify whether the ipad os works the same with respect to push notifications? does the ipad have the hardware to vibrate? when you push the power button on it does it just shut off the display like an iphone or go completely to sleep like a laptop? if it's completely sleeping, does it wake up on a timer to display notifications like calendar alerts? but then how can it handle incoming push notifications from applications if the wireless radios are off? with a month-long standby time i have to imagine it's a pretty deep sleep and can't keep the wireless/3g radio on that entire time. my kindle can only survive about a week with the 3g radio on while not doing anything.

I agree with electromagnetic that the lack of a webcam is a mistake. Perhaps a later version will allow for multitasking so you can chit-chat via skype or Goggle Voice while surfing or using apps, but it's a shortcoming in the first version. Of course, I expect that part of the reason for the 2 month delay between announcement and availability is to gather feedback of the kind we're discussing here.

If you introduce a product with distinct features X, Y and Z, then you'll sell that product to everyone interested in it and who require X, Y and Z.

If you introduce product V1 with only X, you'll get the X people, and most of Y and Z people will sit it out.

But then you introduce an upgrade, V2 that includes X and Y. Now you'll sell to some of the Y people. But also, some of the X people will buy it again, to have the full experience of X and Y.

Then introduce V3 with X, Y and Z. New customers, and a percentage of repeat customers who have now bought the product two and three times.

i.e. devices aren't social, their use is. And their use doesn't preclude the use of other devices. Ergo not every device needs to be useful for everything.

e.g. the iPod functionality of the iPad is technically terrible. Does Apple expect you'll carry that thing around to listen to music? But therein lies the rub: you don't. You have an iPod for that.

My guess is that the camera feature in the iPad SDK has more to do with a bluetooth interaction between mobile OS X devices than future iPad hardware plans.

My old Palm Pilot is "modal", but you can still happily switch between apps, do something else, come back and pick up where you left off. It would make perfect sense for the iPad to have a similar system at least, so you could e.g. download a picture from your browser, edit it in another app, then use it in a presentation using KeyNote, all without breaking stride.

It would also make sense to have some sort of notification bar or other system telling you that you have mail, tweets, facebook comments, IM messages, whatever.

(Granted, playing music might be a different story, as that would make for a heavier load on the processor as a background process.)

Did Apple make explicit statements about this? Did they state that this definitely isn't possible? Or are we just guessing?

(In case there is actual proof of this, please post a link or so. The articles I've read so far have done nothing to back up their claims.)

The iPod (line) – same thing. This is where Zune has done some innovating. In realizing that music is social, they’ve created features that let you temporarily share songs and see what others are listening to.

There’s no technical reasons why Apple would need to leave these features out. Traditionally Apple hasn't fully grasped the power of the open web, much less social.

But things are starting to change. Their acquisition of Lala is a huge deal. I can’t remember them ever acquiring a website — and a VERY social website on top of that. I’m ready for Apple to take these to the next level by injecting social into their products. They should start with the iPod audio player interfaces (iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad). Let us Tweet, Facebook, Copy a Link, Share With A Friend.

I'm sorry, but this is 2010, I've rarely seen a cell phone without a camera since 2000. Apple has even pioneered placing them in devices that have no need as a gimmick. So someone at Apple HQ was having serious brain farts when they decided to let the iPad go to production without even a single camera in it.

The iPad requires a self-portrait camera for video chat and the ever popular self-pic, but it also needs a camera for taking pictures and recording the environ.