Fred Wilson Sketches The Product Trajectory For iPad

In four hours of use, Fred Wilson tells Apple what they need to do to make iPad a monster: make it lighter, improve wifi, add multitasking, get a broader range of apps.

Fred Wilson, Thoughts On The iPad: Not A Mainstream Computing Platform Yet

Reading (and watching some video) is how I will use the iPad. It is just not that good for much else. I sat in the family room and watched the Duke Butler game with the Gotham Gal and my son last night. Even though I downloaded a beautiful version of Tweetdeck onto the iPad, I was not the least bit tempted to use the iPad to be my Twitter dashboard during the game. My MacBook is still vastly superior as a computing device and it’s not much bigger or bulkier.

You give up a lot with the iPad and you don’t get much in return. You lose multi-tasking which is a huge deal for me. I can’t listen to music while I write this. That alone is a showstopper for me. Plus it’s slow as a computer. The apps run slow and so is the browser. That could be my wifi but my MacBook runs on the same wifi network and there’s a noticeable difference in the speed of browsing between them.

The selection of apps is still poor. There’s no Facebook app that I could find. None of my favorite web music services have iPad apps yet and I won’t even get into the no flash thing other than to say it totally bums me out.

I think the iPad is stuck in a difficult place between the smartphone and the laptop and it’s not nearly as convenient as a phone or as powerful as a laptop. That’s based on all of four hours playing with it. The device will get more powerful and lighter and less expensive. Over time it may turn into a mainstream computing platform but I don’t think it is there yet and I don’t think Apple has the kind of hit on its hands that it had with the iPhone.

I gave away my first gen iPhone because it sucked so bad, but I love the current generation. I predict the same trajectory for iPad.