iPad iOS 4

I too use my iPad less, now that I have my iPhone 4. I have a feeling we are going to see all the same features as on iOS4 (folders,multitasking, etc) but I think Apple will need to add a few more features to bring the iPad up to speed. Things I'd like to see are: 1) multiple-user configurations 2) PRINTING!!! - for crying out loud 3)Implementation of widgets or home screen customization.

This is exactly why I'm selling my iPad while its still hot, lol. The top features that everyone is excited about are features that have existed in regular laptops and computers for years. Even a cheap $300 netbook is capable of basic tasks like printing and multiple users xD.

Not that I'm knocking the iPad. I'm just saying its a toy - a very, very expensive toy that I don't need right now. I'll gladly check it out again once they fix these glaring omissions.

But what I do care about is the speed and multitasking. I'm so sorry, I have Jailbreak my iphone . and the ios was slow down.

I'm afraid that people are going to be sorely dissapointed in iOS 4 running on the iPad due to its limited RAM. It was surprising and dissapointing when Apple released the iPad with only 256 MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 has twice that and still sometimes struggles with resource constraints when multitasking.

There are plenty of apps that let you print coming directly from vendors like Epson, HP and Brother. iPad's are meant to be simple so I wouldn't expect multi user unless it can be done really easy.

The thing that makes an iPad easy for an 80 year old first time user is the learning curve. No user accounts to login, no hierarchical folder etc.

Well, you can set up your Mac to log directly in or require username/password. It's easy for those who need "easy" and offers more flexibility/security to those who want it.

I think a way to allow user switching would be a welcome addition at some point as the devices' capability expands (I'd argue that the current capabilities are sufficient to justify it). I'd love to have a feature like that for my iPhone so I could let my sons play with it without worry that they'll disturb anything I have set up.

As for printing you're right and I fully expect Apple to implement it at some point when it can be done well and elegantly. In addition to the apps you mentioned I tried one called Print Magic that seemed to do a pretty decent job of printing anything you can "copy" or direct from the pictures stored on the device.

It's intended as a personal device. Nobody expects a cell phone or an iPod to have user accounts.

Agreed as far as iPhones and the iPod Touch being personal devices, but there are a number of places where an iPad would benefit from user accounts. The iPad is in a gray area as far as devices go. Sure, it can be a personal device but I'm sure plenty of people bought them and routinely share them with their families. As the software matures and we're able to do more with them, user accounts would be almost a requirement. If the device is to be shared you'd most likely want to segregate preferences/data/applications. If this can be done without implementing user accounts so much the better but it would seem that user accounts would be the easiest way of managing it. It wouldn't even have to be enabled out of the box. You could enable it as required in order to keep things simple.

Maybe, but the same argument could be made for the iPhone or touch. But they never are, because "size matters?" I don't know that it does, or at least that Apple will ever see it that way.

Except those of us with kids that see it as a family device, and different parts of the family have slightly different needs. How many families can afford 3 or four iPads or iPod Touchs?

A user for a special needs kid that can just show the few apps that they need on one page would be greatly helpful. Login just by selecting a picture of themselves. Then let me log in on my profile, on the same machine with admin privileges, to maintain it and use it when the kids aren't.

Enterprise can use multi-user too. I can think of a half dozen use cases where an employee may not need an iPad constantly, but may sign one out of a pool. Replicate users across all the pool iPads and thieir login provides substantial responsibility auto-tracking, with very low equipment and admin overhead.

So maybe the iPad isn't just a big iPod touch after all.

I can see your point, I but I have an idea that Apple's conception is somewhat different. Not that this could not change.

I can't wait for multi-tasking to come to the iPad either. I don't see Expose or widgets happening in this generation or next gen iPad though.

What I hate is I have a uneasy feeling they are waiting for ios4 to come to the iPad when they are ready for 2nd gen iPad. I think that will be too soon if it is this fall. People are going to be pissed and rush to sell their iPad to get the next one.

Tabbed browsing in Safari would be great...

I agree it will be a significant upgrade, however I don't see it running well on the current iPad. It simply doesn't have enough RAM to do a lot of things in iOS 4 well.

Actually my hopes are the same i want more viable multitasking. This does place a big demand on hardware though, thus the current iPad doesn't stand a chance of meeting user expectations.

Which means anything is possible. Don't get me wrong widgets would be a good idea especially if they could run in background some way. But again a new feature like this simply means that your main app has less RAM.

If Apple does implement this functionality it will be interesting to see exactly what they implement and how. Will the widgets be native code, Javascript, Ruby or some other technology. Assuming Javascript might be a mistake as native code could produce far better performance and save battery power.

Hard to say. It is interesting that there has been complete silence here. Beyound some of the obvious advances from the iPhone version any other suggestions would be guesses.

I know many want printing but to do that at the system level would again demand more RAM and bloat many libraries. Still it is possible.

Personally I'd love to see the following:
1.
Much stronger USB support.
2.
OpenCL support ( this obviously needs the right hardware)
3.
Expansion of GCD.
4.
Vast improvements to the packaged software and Apples primary apps. Mail could use some HTML love for example. The current Safari sucks ( whomever designed the new address bar funtionality needs to see a shrink). IBooks is coming along nicely but yet has significant issues with organizing a collection. Besides PDFs should be acessible outside of the iBooks library. In a nut shell I expect that all of the apps will be improved.
5.
Lots of new APIs. Especially for sensor support.
6.
Reworking of the OS and app infrastructure to better support SMP based hardware. We may not see it from the user level but Apple will wantto have things ready for dual or quad core processors that should come to future iPads. GCD mentioned above is part of this refinement process but other parts of the OS and associated apps will need reworking. Some think I'm crazy suggesting that dual core or better hardware isn't far off. Maybe but it will come to iPad for the same reason it came to laptops, it offers better trade offs between performance and power.

Yes but it also needs a hardware revamp tobe able to effectively deliver some of those features we all want in iOS 4.x. Also the only the large screen is a good reason to use iPad, but for portability iPhone is still king.

Well it is early Sunday morning so I'm not thinking to hard. I'm titally convinced that running iOS 4.x on iPad, as it is currently sold, will be like running 4.0.x on iPhone 3G. Yeah it works but leaves you wishing for more everything. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if some functionality is limited on the current iPad.

This is why I suspect that iPad will get a RAM boost soon. Either that or Apple delays the iOS upgrade until the next generation hardware is ready. IPhone 4 demonstrates clearly that a RAM upgrade is possible and even desirable.

It would be neat if every thing was rebuilt with CLANG and LLVM. That hopefully to better optimize performance and also reduce the bugs significantly. Even better would be finding a version of MacRuby in the SDK. Oh about those bugs, Apple has been pushing out really crappy software in the name of iOS. They need to get back to a stronger focus on quality.

Speaking of quality Safari has really been a big irratation of late. It isn't just bugs but the implementation of strange concepts/behaviours. The address bar officially sucks.

IWork is a nice start but where is a viable database program from Apple. That is an app you can use directly on iPad to create and manipulate databases? IWork needs a simple tool for this sort of thing. I've actually considered that numbers should be imoroved to handle this task. Not in the way excel does it either. The idea isn't to replace real database systems but to give users quick and reliable means to manage modest databases. In any event this is to far into app territory and not iOS related.

Clocks! I don't really care if it is an Apple program or not but a click with alarms and such is needed. Apple needs to supply the underlying demons to realize the clocks though. This may end up being the domain of widgets but Apple still needs to supply the functionality to realize the widgets and get things like alarms and background timing to work right. I'm actually surprised at my usage of the stop watch functionality on my iPhone.

Maps could be excellent on iPad or even iPhone for that matter but needs improvements. Native with lical storage to start. Like it or not keeping a connection while on the road is a pain. Storage of preplanned trips would be nice. Ideally one could download maps as needed with workd wide coverage. In any event I'm hoping Apples recent purchases imply that maps is getting a major reworking with one goal being functionality on and off line. IPad (and iPhone) deserves something really good here. That isn't the current maps app.

Facetime! Yeah I know no camera but it is my understanding that Facetime can do voice only. This has changed my view of Facetime significantly. In effect Facetime becomes an easy to use VoIP system. Now if only it would work on 3G on iPad. The more I comtemplate Facetime the more I like it. It needs to be built into Mac OS/X too but that is a different thread.

Quicktime and by association Safari get updated to support more video codecs. This might irritate Apple and their sensibilities but there is a lot of video out there that iPad doesn't support. There should be no shame in support other common video formats.

The photo app should have an automatic backup feature to the cloud. That is one should be able to enable back up to an iDisk directory with the confidence that those photos will be safe from an iPad failure. Since this might happen over 3G it needs to run in background. Notice I'm calling this a back up, it is not the same thing as an organized picture album on your public directory.

I could go on but this is enough for now.