We might as well start this blog post by admitting that I am a big fan of everything Apple. In my household we have something like 5 Macbooks, 3 iPhones and numerous other products bearing the Apple logo.
But the newest and (currently) most interesting toy in the household is an iPad, which has quickly become my “go-to” tool for about 70-80% of everything I do.
Around the web I’ve seen a lot of people saying that tablets are the future of computing for the “ordinary people” and to a large extent i completely agree!
When Apple announced the iPad I, like so many others, were completely blown away. I could see many of my existing tasks be much easier with an iPad and I also could see a lot of other situations where the iPad would fit perfectly. It had the potential to be the perfect digital assistant to just about everything I was doing – From reading books, to perusing the web for information, to catching up on my subscribed RSS feeds to playing games, watching movies and even …… creating content.
I basically saw it as the perfect study, research, school and work accessory.
That being said. In the current revision there a a lot of missing pieces and annoyances, which, fortunately, mostly can be resolved with software … but nonetheless … I see as an issue in relation to using it as a primary work tool. So there are definitely some missing pieces before it really suits my personal requirements.
Obviously my requirements are completely subjective, based only on how I work and how I have adapted the iPad to fit my personal requirements.
Since I make most of my living creating and delivering presentations while also writing massive reports on technical subjects and doing research on the web while keeping in contact with the world around me using primarily mail and Webex and iChat/Skype.
In my perfect world an Apple iOS update for the iPad would resolve or add most of the features that i’m missing, and these are:
How I am longing for the iPhones universal inbox and multiple activesync accounts. Mail on the iPad (despite a nice interface) seems so “last century” without these features. Fortunately it’s already in the iPhone version so it should be coming to the iPad with the next software release.
I’ve tried to use the iPad’s mail interface as my primary method for handling mail. Unfortunately I have a number of smart folders and filters to organize the hundreds of mails that arrive in my inbox every day.
None of those work with the iPad mail app, making it absolutely a pain to organize and sort all my incoming mails. Hopefully that will be resolved in a future release if iPad mail is ever going to be my primary interface to mail.
Addressbook/Contacts
I, like so many others, have multiple lists of contacts. Some synced through activesync, and others in Google, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIN and Twitter.
I’ve seen Android and WebOS be able to combine all (or most) the contact information in the Android/WebOS address book but nothing similar exists on the iPad/iPhone. Making it impossible to combine and integrate al contact and social information in a single contact application.
From a social (and work) perspective being able to integrate the social networks directly with the Addressbook would be an amazing benefit especially since that’s actually one of the features that I really like about the “competing products”.
So Apple, please give us a method for combining social networks with address book contacts. unfortunately I don’t really see that coming anytime soon.
Calendar
Calendar on the iPad looks amazing but is missing one thing which should have been obvious from the initial release of the product. Why is it not possible to drag-and-drop an appointment ? It would be the easiest thing to place a finger on an appointment, hold, and then drag it to another day or month. I reschedule a lot of meetings and appointments so being able to quickly and easily move appointments around is really annoying when using the iPad.
This should have been a no-brainer for Apple. But for some reason is just not there yet.
Multitasking
I really don’t care that much about multitasking on the iPhone but on the iPad with it’s larger screen and the potential to partially replace my normal day to day working tool, the laptop. Multitasking is one of those things that just have to work.
I understand all the reason for the method Apple used to implement “multitasking” on the iPhone. But it just looks and works wrong from my perspective.
Now look at tools like Multifl0w which creates an expose like multitasking ability for the iPhone and iPad. Now that is how Apple should have implemented multitasking (even their limited variation of multitasking). So listen up Apple …. Multifl0w is how you make multitasking look and work perfectly (unfortunately right now Multfl0w requires jailbreaking, and i’m actually thinking about jailbreaking my iPad only to get that application running).
Keynote
I love keynote, even on the iPad. And since delivering and creating presentations are a big part of my life I would really love the iPad to be perfect at delivering presentations.
Unfortunately Keynote on the iPad is still missing a large amount of features. Especially a presenter display.
Being able to use the iPad as my primary presenting tool would be awesome. But that would require a separate presenter display with all the nice information such as previous slide, next slide, current slide, time, minutes since the presentation started and notes. May be to much for the small iPad screen. But an ability to customize or even get a presenter display would make it the perfect (almost) presenting tool.
Also a kiosk mode and better support for building transitions, builds and hyperlinks in presentations would be amazing.
Other ramblings / features
Where, Oh Where is that wireless itunes sync capability that everyone is waiting for ? Having to hook up my iPhone and iPad to my computer every single time i need to sync and do backups is a real pain.
Why is transferring photos taken with the iPhone directly to the iPad almost impossible (there’s an app for that) ? Why not just have them detect each other on the same wireless network and then be able to drag the photos across to review and edit on the larger ipad screen ?
Native printing, more native printing, even more printing …. Not my primary issue. But I can really see that this is an issue. Have had a number of situations where I had to upload to box.net and then download onto a PC to be able to print documents or presentations. Really annoying.
What about a tool for configuring Airport express (potentially extreme) wireless access points ? On some of my travels I only carry the iPad and a preconfigured Airport Express. Being able to modify the setting of the wireless access point directly from the iPad would make everything a whole lot easier when I need to adapt the settings to a particular location.
Finally, a front side video camera should have been there from the start.
Well, I’m guessing that’s all I can think of right now ….. Gotta get back to my laptop, because I need to modify a large amount of appointments and sort some mail 
