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iPad
Apple announced their new iPad yesterday.
It looks like a pretty nice piece of kit, but there’s just a couple things it needs – and they need to market it better.
Here’s the commercial I would propose for it – and I’ll point out the things I think it needs at the end.
Opening: Living room, person getting up getting breakfast. Camera pans over to TV showing morning news and at the side of the TV, the iPad looking like a digital picture frame alternating pictures, switches to a graphical weather forecast for the day easily readable from across the room, then on to more pictures.
Person picks up the iPad and switches over to the newspaper while eating breakfast. A calendar appointment reminder pops up – it’s someone’s birthday! Switch over to email and type up a quick “Happy Birthday” email, then over to a generic eCommerce site and order a gift/flowers/whatever.
Fade to scene in office. Sitting at office meeting an email notification pops up “Hey – come over and see the new house – we just moved in at 123 Main Street” – click the address and switch over to Google full screen maps and plot the route.
Fade to housewarming party – “Hey did you guys see that video of the Pants on the Ground song?” – pull out the iPad and set it up on the counter and everyone watches the video. Guest – “mind if I check my email?” – logs in as guest and checks email. Host says “sorry we don’t have the cable hooked up yet so we can’t watch the show”. No worries, bring up streaming TV on the iPad of the latest sitcom.
Fade to – back at home. Pop the iPad back into it’s dock, canera zooms into picture of iPad photframe mode now cycling pictures from the day’s events.
Now in reality the device needs a few more features. First it has to support Flash. Streaming video from sites like Hulu just needs to work. Flash is very prominent and is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Second it needs a camera, or at the very least a simplified way to get pictures from camera phones.
Third it needs a good dock for using in “digital photo frame mode” and needs to be able to stream at least 720p video/audio through dock connector or preferably wirelessly a dongle that hooks up to your TV. Having people crowd around a 9.7″ screen isn’t too bad, but for movies, streaming video, picture slide shows it should support viewing on the big screen.
Lastly it needs that app – a fully customizable “smart frame” app that can cycle through pictures, headlines, weather, stocks, sports scores, video highlights, pics and video from friends or from your mobile phone, all cycling through at preset intervals and easily readable from 6 – 10 feet away. The relatives should be able to send or upload pics to it, you should be able to upload pics or video from your phone wirelessly, it should be able to pull from preselected flickr or picassa pages, get news or other info from different websites, aggregate RSS feeds, etc. Soudn should also be configurable – be it audio of the video clips or alarms, notifications, text to speech of headlines or sever weather alerts if needed, etc. Should also work as a message board for people to leave notes to each other in the house, or upload notes from the office/road. Configurable to either cycle along with other media, scroll as ticker at bottom of screen or for important messages “always on top” until clicked as “read”.
Another “nice to have” feature would be support for streaming media from a server – similar to how the PS3 and 360 work. The iPad would be more expensive than the 360, PS3, or a set top box, but would be portable. I could see people with no interest in a gaming console using this instead.
