Raise your hand if you honestly thought Apple was gonna call the new toy "iTablet" or "iSlate."
Yeah, us too. Here are some reasons why we think "iPad" as a device name bites the big one:
- * It's waaaay too close to "iPod." Even though that's exactly what the tablet turned out to be: an iPod on 'roids.
- * As you can see from the above Twitter trending screencap, it's already inspiring insulting puns. (One iSmashPhone reader joked, a bit more accurately, that the 64 GB version should be called the "Maxi-Pad;" another wondered if OS updates would be referred to as "iPatches.")
- * It's arrogant. A full week ago, we wrote the story that Apple doesn't own the US trademark for the term "iPad" — Fujitsu does, and has already assigned it to a handheld inventory-tracking device. Now, Apple has been planning (for some time, we might add) to mount a legal challenge to Fujitsu's trademark, claiming there's too narrow a gap between "iPod" and "iPad." Meanwhile, the House of Jobs has basically performed a public hijacking of another company's existing trademark. The lawyers are gonna have a mondo healthy bonus this year, you betcha.
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Just coming out of my coma from yesterday, lapsed into it when Steve Jobs muttered iPad instead of iSlate. I’m coming around finally, great idea for new updated version of the iPad, maxi pad. Love it!
Actually the tablet space that we all thought they would enter, has a clearly defined set of functionalities. That is precisely the reason that everyone was so disappointed with the iPad. It had NONE of those features.
Think about it, if Apple had just come out and said they were developing an advanced ereader like nothing else you’ve ever seen, we would have been impressed. But to say this whole time they were developing a tablet, and then show this? They killed their own hype by claiming this device was something it wasn’t.
You can’t just come into a space that has been in existence for over 10 years now, say you have something to add to it, then change the definition of the space to fit your device.
A tablet has been, is, and always will be a device that is a fully functional notebook you can write on. It should be a notepad replacement. It CAN be a convertible laptop, OR a slate type device, but it needs to be a fully functional computer to fit the definition. Even a netbook is a fully functional computer at it’s heart.
The iPad is a big iPod touch…not even an iPhone. And it HARDLY fills the space they claimed it would.
Even Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field couldn’t help him this time.