14 DAY TRIAL // Pundit John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, picked up on a story by Wired’s Brian X. Chen on the default applications that should have been present on the upcoming iPad. Actually, the pundit claims, it’s not a technical issue, but rather a design problem. We agree.
Wired’s guy acknowledges that, “The iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos.” Chen is surprised at Apple’s decision not to add these apps to the iPad’s home screen, claiming they may become available as free downloads from the App Store, in the future.
Gruber has a different opinion, and one that resonates much with our thinking. Softpedia noted in the past that the iPad would have to deliver more than just iPhone apps scaled up to fit its screen, should it live up to its name. Here’s the pundit’s take on the matter.
“Actually, it’s sort of the opposite problem. It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.”
Gruber adds that, “There is, alas, no secret ‘widget’ mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either,” and that Apple's tablet is not just a big iPhone, ultimately pointing out that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps will follow in on the footsteps of Classic apps for Mac OS X. Evidently, Gruber is suggesting there’s much more to the iPad than meets the eye, and Apple is likely to confirm this soon.