Why The iPad Won't Work for India

29 Jan, 2010, 11:22 am IST | by Shayne Rana

The iPad will have to offer a lot more to make it big in India.

Why The iPad Won't Work for India

Websites and blogs have been quite busy the last couple of days and are still filing stories on Apple’s tablet the ‘iPad’. Quite a few of the rumors and apparent leaks that came before the unveiling were wrong so the device came as quite a ‘surprise’ to the technology community. Unfortunately for Apple, not in a good way. Like the iPhone before it, there’s a certain uncertainty, for lack of a better term, about how and where the device is going to be beneficial. The mobile computing community seems to be generically enraged by Apple’s choice of features.


To understand the device a little better in this respect, let’s look at it from the Indian perspective, after all we’re as tech savvy as the next country and are always open to new technology. But here’s why Apple would find it quite hard to sell the iPad in India -

The Cons -
  • 3G technology still seems like quite far ahead into the future and the micro SIM isn’t even here yet. So we can stick to Wi-Fi of course but hot spots still aren’t very easy to come by.
  • The iPad also doesn’t support tethering so it’s not like you can connect your iPhone or other handset to the device to use EDGE or GPRS.
  • In this country we love cameras. Taking pictures is a big deal. If an expensive handset like the iPhone could incorporate a 2MP camera, why isn’t this one equipped with one.  
  • The Keypad is not optimized for the MultiTouch display. It’s such a large screen so it could have had a full keyboard like UI and have the use of Shift+ or Ctrl+ functions enabled.
  • Quite a few Indian sites incorporate the use of Flash technology, including ours. Apple’s browser doesn’t support this content.
  • The Pen drive and portable hard drive is a very necessary tool for us and with a device like this that has no USB ports or memory card slots it’s just not going to work.
  • Let’s face it, the Indian mentality is to get as much done as we can in a given time, multitasking is therefore part of our personality. The iPad isn’t capable of multitasking. No wonder reports are talking about how quickly things open and close as the processor isn’t really doing too much, except running one thing at a time.
  • The worst part is that it’s going to be tied in with iTunes, which means each device can only be synced to one computer. So if you're thinking of getting stuff from your office PC to your home the iPad is not the solution.
  • This may be a neat looking device but it’s not something you’d see an Indian businessman whip out at a meeting. It's fine for pictures of his family, but presentations I doubt it. It’s not professional enough.

But it isn’t all bad of course, so here are a few of the positive points.

Tags: Apple , iPad , Touchscreen , Tablet

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