Three Things I Wish My iPad Could Do (But Can’t)

Just few days ago, I read from my Flipboard app on my iPad that the sales of iPad remain high even as Samsung, Asus, Amazon, and other competitors are trying to catch up on the tablet sales. And about a week before, I read about how PC sales are down – “thanks” to the increase in tablet sales started by iPad.

There are still people out there who say that iPad is more of a toy and significantly limited than full laptop, which can install softwares and do things that a tablet cannot do. I’ve tried really hard to refute that argument – for one thing, I’m writing this on iPad, and it is much faster to write and upload blog posts with iPad than it is with my PC. There have been criticisms about photo editing abilities – well, check out some of my photos I’ve edited, and you’ll see that it can get quite complex even with just iPhone & iPad app combinations. In fact, the two photos you will see here are edited by just a single feature on Google’s app called Snapseed. This used to be a paid app, but ever since Google acquired it, it’s a free app available for iOS users as well.

Like many people, I’ve done reading with iPad (Kindle app and Readdle for PDF reading), writing on blog post or sending e-mails, playing some good games (nothing heavy, but I’m not a gamer either), listening to Pandora, editing photos, catching up on news through Pulse and Flipbard, and browsing on the web with Safari and Chrome as well as eBay and Amazon apps for my wish lists.

And when I really came down to figure out what I cannot do with iPad – as opposed to what I can do – I was only able to come up with three things, and for most people, they may not be that big of a deal (but read onto find out what they were).

1. Programming

So, to start, iPad was not meant to be a programming tool. I already know that, and that’s not too surprising considering Apple’s strict policy on security and safety. I did download an app called CodeToGo, which is OK for what it does, but certainly not something you can even compare to Command & Prompt or, clearly, IDE. It’s unfortunate that it is not possible to do some coding/programming in any language (dynamic or scripting) because given how easy it is to type on iPad for blog posts, I can see the big potential for web developers and designers to utilize iPad as another computer for programming. It can also be a good thing for students as well – and I dare argue that it can easily beat Chromebook, which is very popular but greatly limited in its early Chrome OS.

2. Complex Writing

Let me clarify what I meant by complex writing. So, when I do normal writing like for blog posts or e-mail to someone, the experience is quite smooth with iPad. It is only when I do complex writing in the sense to read something on Safari or PDF and need to compare and contrast from that. This usually means to put two screens side-by-side, but unfortunately, Apple has yet to allow apps to take up both spaces. I know this is a feature supported by Android tablets, and even for iPad if you jailbreak it, but for the most part, it is a feature that’s absent in the normal iPad. It would be nice though because that could help with productivity, and while there ARE still some screen splitting apps, these only allow actions within the given app, not across multiple apps.

3. Flash

Even with HTML5 coming and some paid browsers that have Flash functions built-in them, I still find experiences on iPad for websites with Flash to be very lacking. It’s not such an important deal since many key websites that I do browse have already adopted pages friendly to iPad and HTML5, but a good Flash experience wouldn’t hurt. My only real experience with Flash browsers for iPad was with free version of Puffin browser, which was decent but certainly not great experience even when I was connected to quite strong Wi-Fi environment.

So, what does that leave me? Well, I can be honest that #1 clearly does not apply to most people, and #2 and #3 can be a minor to irrelevant issue for some folks. My hope is that instead of waiting for these features to prevail in iPad itself (that would be difficult because of Apple’s policy for its devices), Remote Desktops become stable and strong enough to make these features true. I haven’t had too many experiences with these (TeamViewer and LogMeIn for now), but they can certainly use more work at this point.

Follow me at Twitter @jiwpark00