They market themselfes as uber-user-friendly. But thats not the feeling I get from their devices. I often feel frustrated by my ipad. Examples:
* I was on holiday in a hotel. Before leaving in the morning I looked up the road map of the local subway stations. They had a nice PDF so I wanted to save it. I didnt find a menu entry for that. I thought "Whats going on here? Where do you hide something as simple as the save command, Apple? I dont have time for searching!". In a hurry, I went to the internet for help and Googled "ipad save pdf". Answer: You cannot do it. What the fuck? You sell me a computer and then you dont allow me to save files on it? A real pain for no reason. I grabbed my android phone from my pocket, saved the PDF and was ready to go.
* Some days ago. I went out for lunch with a friend and wanted to show her a couple of photos I recently made. So I plugged my ipad into my notebook with the usb cable to copy the photos over. When I dragged the photos onto the ipad i got "action not supported". What? I got a strange feeling... googled "copy photos to ipad". And again... not possible. Is this a joke? Ok, so started a webserver on my notebook and then copied one by one in Safari.
Yes, I probably could achieve those actions with additional software. Itunes on my other machines and some apps on my ipad. But I dont want to. I dont feel comfortable with that. I have certain expectations about the basic functions of a computer. I have enough other tablets, phones and notebooks laying around.
* Development. Last year I hired a programmer to write a special tablet software for me. When we planned to go ios or android, from what I understood with ios you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the software on your tablet. While on android you can just get an apk file and run it. So it was a no brainer to go with android. And it worked like a charm.
I heard similar stories from people who wanted to copy mp3s over to their ios devices. And from people who wanted to use their iphones for tethering. I told them "Well, on my android, theres a button for that. It must be on your iphone somewhere too". Just to find out, that even the iphone hardware would support it, there is no software for it built in.
Can that work? Artificially reducing the usefulness of your own product? Even though the competition is offering fully functional products?
Are there any historical examples?