gdgt

One would expect that a company like Apple, with its brand image deeply rooted in user experience innovation, would once again leave the technology world in awe with its "latest creation". Whereas the iPod and the iPhone exceeded expectations or introduced the unexpected when they were announced, the iPad underdelivered on the speculation and agitation that preceded its launch.

This isn't a matter of missing features or lower-than-expected specifications. The most significant expectation the iPad failed to deliver on is *surprise*. Feature-guessing would never have brought us to accurate depictions of the iPod or iPhone prior to their announcements, and yet one has only to scour the collective guesswork of technology bloggers, podcasters and reporters and trim a tidy amount of "excesses" to envision the iPad. The product landed in the "red ocean" of public expectation, which is a letdown for a company that consistently and repeatedly introduced us to "blue oceans".

Recent concepts and prototypes, such as Bonnier's Mag+ (www.bonnier.com­/en­/content­/digital­-magazines­-bonni...), were an indication of what was possible with technology that is essentially already available. One would expect that Apple would meet, if not exceed, the inventiveness of these ideas. However, the implementation of "page-turning metaphors" in the iPad's reading interface is commonplace, conservative and uncreative, a stark contrast from the ingenuity that is expected from the company.

Granted that these innovations might only take software updates and applications, but even with 140.000 applications in the iTunes App Store, there have been no innovations on the iPhone that can spark our amazement the way platform itself did.

The iPad may be "far better at doing some key tasks", but it has failed to astonish as a new product.