Really, who gives a ****?

About what the iPad uses for its viewing technology, that is. Tekla Perry in the IEEE Bulletin (a journal for geeks and those who love nuts and bolts) gives reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer.

Mainly because…

It doesn’t sport a bright OLED display; it isn’t wearing the latest Pixel Qitechnology that combines normal transmissive LCD technology with a black-and-white reflective version for easy viewing in bright sunlight.

Get that? People are going to go into the Apple Store, pick one of these things up, play with it for a while, look at the integrated Web browser, email client, photo viewer, video viewer, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and the 140,000 apps in the App Store, all on the rather nice-looking color screen, and put it back on the shelf, regretfully shaking their heads and saying “but it doesn’t have Pixel Qitechnology”. Next they rush out and order a white plastic monochrome device that looks like an albino Etch-a-Sketch with a cheap mini-QWERTY keyboard stuck on the bottom, costing them the same as the iPad. Sure they will.

So the Kindle has a non-reflective screen and the iPad doesn’t? Ever heard of matt screen protectors? And the iPad has a brightness sensor built in to adjust the screen brightness to the ambient lighting conditions. Yes, probably the Kindle is a better reading experience. Is it a better mail experience? Can it run third-party apps? How about Web browsing, or photo viewing? Can you write on it (seriously, I mean?). Add an external keyboard so you can type in landscape. It’s about the user experience, not the megapixels.

And that’s what a lot of people coming from the other end (the netbook end) don’t seem to understand. My netbook can run Linux, etc. etc. Sure it can. That’s really what you want? To be stuck with a chiclet keyboard and a balky browser (I’ve just tried to upgrade Seamonkey on PuppyLinux – otherwise a great little system – but it keeps looking for shared libraries that don’t exist)? And let’s not even talk about the ergonomic lunacy of trying to run a GUI meant for a big screen (window borders, toolbars, menu bars, etc. etc. on a tiny screen with a poorly designed pointing device.
When it comes to multitasking (i.e. the iPad’s lack of this capability), there is some validity to this criticism. But you know what? An awful lot of PC/Mac users don’t really understand that the computer can multitask, and carefully shut down their Outlook Excess before opening their Internet Exploder (these are users who think Firefox is only the name of a Clint Eastwood movie). My father, who is far from being stupid, has only now, after 10 years of Windows use (I haven’t been able to convert him to the One True Path), come to appreciate the functional difference between RAM and a hard disk. He has enormous problems with folders and directories, constantly losing things, and forgetting where he stored files. Right-clicking was a complete unknown to him until I pointed out to him what you could do with it. The iPad, with an external keyboard, would do 99% of what he does with a computer–a little mail, some Web browsing, photo viewing, and some word-processing — intuitively! Of course, there is no printer utility – yet – for the standalone iPad, so this isn’t going to replace a desktop entirely. But you never know…

Some people are saying that the iPad isn’t powerful enough – they need to run Adobe CS4 apps when they’re out on the road (and yes, there are people who do need that capability – there’s no denying it). But guess what? The iPad isn’t for these people. Apple make things called MacBooks for them

So yes, the iPad doesn’t do everything. But then it’s not meant to, and people who complain it doesn’t are missing the point.