iPad wishes

iPad

Here’s what’s to come …. or not.

With the iPad staging its international debut today, from London to Tokyo – don’t bother, they’re all sold out – it seems like a good moment at which to speculate on what the next model might bring.

Here’s my wish list:

Hardware:

  • A 5″ version for the gaming market for $150 less. Not for me but great for the stock price.
  • A 17-21″ version for the art/photography/fashion/wall display markets. Framed pictures are so yesterday.
  • An SDXC card slot in the 10″ model. Face it, the Camera Connection Kit is an ugly afterthought.
  • A web cam for iSight. A slam dunk that one, as the July 7, 2010 announcement of the iPhone Version 4 will include this.
  • A matte screen option. Dream on.
  • A third iPad for our home as I cannot get mine away from our boy.
  • Production volume. This device is rarer than straight Catholic priests.

Software:

  • Printing. The need for integrated printing is high and Steve Jobs has intimated it’s coming.
  • Multitasking. It’s not that exiting an app to check email or whatever takes long, it’s just a pain to do and lacks the elegance which otherwise defines the device.
  • A variant of Lightroom which can access your server-based photo catalog and makes full use of the touchscreen technology for photo processing on the road. This could access your home server using wifi much as LogMeIn remote desktop can.

Content:

  • Interactive magazines. It’s amazing to me how slow the publishing business has been to create iPad versions of magazines with interactive content. Most of what is out there is simply a scan of the paper version with a few links thrown in.
  • Subscription pricing for magazines. Who in their right mind is going to pay $4.99 for one issue of Wired or Vanity Fair when a 12 issue paper subscription can be had for $10? Right now sales will remain a one-off curiosity thing, in the absence of subscription pricing.
  • Streaming TV and a DVR remote access capability. We are seeing one or two apps out there which can stream TV already. And why can’t I access my DVR recordings from my iPad, AT&T, on my AT&T Uverse Internet based TV box? All I can do right now is see the recorded list and delete selected recordings using the clunky Uverse iPhone app.
  • A baseball or cricket bat with which to address the movie industry. Why on earth is only 5% of Netflix’s movie catalog available in streaming format? It’s not like there’s any shortage of demand. Just double my monthly subscription and stop sending me discs in the mail.
  • More books in the iBooks store. iBooks is so much better than Kindle on the iPad that it’s frustrating how small the book library is.
  • Someone at Project Gutenberg to get off their ass, make proper cover art for their huge catalog of public domain books and craft a lookup system that actually works.

Though we will have to wait until Murdoch is buried for the WSJ’s content to improve.

Not a big list for so revolutionary a device, which is already close to perfect out of the box.

Disclosure: No AAPL position.