What could have been the iPad killer app

David M Williams
Thursday, 28 January 2010 00:43

Your IT - Home IT

The Apple iPad is official. Yet it just missed one ingredient that could have been its killer app.

Firstly, I’m relieved you can do “real stuff” on the iPad. The iWorks applications were, to my mind, an essential requirement for the iPad to be a serious device and not merely a massively-oversized iPod Touch.

Couple iWork with the keyboard dock and you have a super-portable device which actually permits genuine productivity. I’m sure I’m not in the minority in hoping to do regular dull activities like word processing and spreadsheeting. To my mind these are essential tasks and it’s where a lot of netbooks fall down with their screens that just don’t have the height or width to pull this off successfully.

For much of Steve Jobs’ presentation I was even left wondering if 3G capabilities really would be a part of the iPad, when he finally pulled that cat out of the bag.

Yet, there is something still missing – and unlike copy and paste, unlike MMS, it’s not something that a future iPad OS will add.

That vital ingredient is a front-mounted camera. The iPad had the opportunity to be the ultimate business video conferencing tool. The size is small enough that you can carry it around, but large enough that you can sit it on a desk, read shared documents on screen and have a couple of people sitting with you joining in on the action.

However, the lack of front-mounted camera means video conferencing like this is out of the question. There’s no VoIP video-conferencing-anywhere to be found.

Still, all is not lost. The iPad definitely has what it takes to be the ultimate all-in-one universal remote control. Imagine powering all the devices in your household with one unit, replete with a massive searchable database of infra-red codes, programmable macros and big hefty touch-screen buttons?