I completely agree with you that for note taking OCR is not important. As long as you can accurately see your scribbles and diagrams afterwards, that will be a much faster and compelling user experience. And as you point out it gives you a physical memory of the notes as well. Imagine being able to make notes in your digital textbook this way, without having to bring up the keyboard (you can’t type on a touchscreen keyboard without looking at it) or figuring out how to add diagrams and figures.

I now use a MBP; but a few years ago i used to tote a ThinkPad x61 and it had a BEAUTIFUL touch screen. The sensation of using the orange “digital ink” in One Note to take notes, was a blast.

I suspect the iPad’s screen won’t have the resolution for writing with a stylus? I know that only the ThinkPad models had a “really great” touch screen for writing (capacitive? resistive?), all the other brands of PC touch screens that I tried (Fujitsu, HP, etc) seemed to use lower-quality touch screens that didn’t produce the same kinesthetic experience.

If you could take detailed notes and make sketches on an iPad using a stylus, i think that could be a huge winner for Apps based upon it. Most people think that character recognition of notes is very important; but it turns out that is often NOT the case. Those who have used touch computers often come to that realization. It’s the note-taking and sketching that engages your thinking and memory, and being able to refer back to it, that’s more important. For some of us.

We’ve critically analyzed the iPad and talked about the missing components that Apple needs to address here – http://www.tkxel.com/blog/2010/02/01/the-ipad-%E2%80%93-tablet-computing-gets-new-life-from-apple/

I still don’t think I will be able to explain to my grandmother why her new iPad (if she would buy one) won’t show all kinds of websites correctly (because they use flash of course; on a iPhone the screen is so small that surfing in a less than reasonable way can be excused: but this looks like the real thing, so it not *being* the real thing will hurt much much more!) For her the web is “magic” and a distinction between different technologies to have it work doesn’t mean anything to her. She’ll just understand that “this thing that cost me so many dollars doesn’t work right”. Bad.

Similarly I have friends who just bought a new mac ask me “why doesn’t it play wmv movies?” And really, having to install that *stupid* Flip4Mac thing, it just is not right, Apple, believe me! (It recently broke the trailers in my FrontRow too, so I kicked it off, with a big sigh of relief. I have VLC, thank you very much! But VLC probably wouldn’t get by Apples app store? Would it? This non-openess is *evil*… If I pay for hardware why can’t I make it run whatever I like?)

And then *my* pet peeve with the iPad is the no webcam thing. I had imagined a “videophone” that I would be able to carry around. That would have been very cool. So I *am* disappointed with the iPad.

Also it’s too small, storage-wise. Apple always claims to be amazing, but in this respect it is feeble. I own a 160G iPod. The iPad won’t hold my video library. Which means: no iPad for me right now.

Conclusion: I’ll wait until it has a camera and the storage to hold what I carry with me already now. And then I’ll start considering it.

But I’m not sour at you, once more many thanks for the wonderful article! I’m just a bit sore at Apple. They are a bit fascist. Like always, really.

Although they *do* make nice stuff.

The absolute control apple has over the applications that can be sold via the app store combined with their random nonsensical secretive approval/rejection policies actively limits the investment made in any software product for their devices.

As an individual developer or company intending to see a return on their development effort/investment it makes sense to write small feature light applications, so that if they are met with a random rejection they minimise their losses.

This device demands a greater level of investment. With the app store approval process the way it is today I don’t see any individual developer or company will be prepared to make the kind of investment required to create the applications this device needs to succeed, just to see the work thrown away on the whim of some nerd in their review department having a bad day.

So convinced of this am I that I’ll be using my iPad as my primary device and retiring my MBP on Day 1. (Shameless plug: I’m even blogging about the thought process at iPadAlone.com)

Many thanks.

I know people have commented that a camera wouldn’t be useful, but term “Skype” has been being thrown around a lot, so a front facing camera would make a lot of sense. We’ve all heard of “video chat with the grandkids” being used as a selling point in the past, but this device has the UI that could actually pull it off.

Viva la iPad 2.0.