Tablets... Game, yes. Work? Not so much.

Mo' blogging options, writing on the run

Even though the iPad market alone is worth like $20B (USD) and tablets are finally being taken seriously, even with millions of apps available on the App Store and Android Marketplace — with millions of people buying apps and downloads every second, still no one has released a decent (or better than) blogging app. There are serious gaps in mobile software.

Mobile gaming is different; there, there's at least six of everything. Anyone know exactly how many tower defense games are available for iOS? I've seen hundreds; maybe a few dozen great ones, twice as many good rip-offs of those great ones, and a plethora of crap. How many versions of Angry Birds do we need? Ten different racing games with the same cars, a dozen FPS offerings, hundreds of sudoku apps... seriously?!

Also, this micro-transaction, in-app purchases (IAP) business is frankly ridiculous — especially the pay-to-pwn model in certain games, such as Glu's Gun Bros. and its clones. The best items cost around $200 USD, and there's really no other way of getting those items other than spending cash. I understand the freemium model; make a game, offer it free, and people can pay for it in increments based on how much they enjoy it. Often, these games have no end, much like MMORPGs — the game is updated to add more, so to continue enjoying the game, players need to spend a few more dollars. Time management freemium games (farming games, building games, restaurant sims) usually offer some IAP that speeds up the process by offering instant gratification. "This plant will take 48 hours to grow, but for $2.50, you can have it now!" This is how hard-earned money is being blown spent.

Freemium is one thing, and some are fair enough that you can play without spending any money. But now there are premium games offering IAP "cheats." Example: Angry Birds offers an instant-win item for $0.99 — an Eagle that automatically clears any level. EA's Dead Space has a in-game store offering power node and credit pack IAPs.

The iPad is clearly a fantastic portable game console; dual processors, large multi-touch screen... there are Android devices with NVIDIA Tegra2 chips that have similar power. Beyond the toy factor, there are a lot of cool utilities and productivity apps. Also, mobile blogging has changed; people use the Facebook wall, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr to share media. That is blogging, though people might not realize it.

There's a market for and a demand beyond casual, social network blogging, however. There are some decent writing utilities for the iPad and some blogging services have released apps (WordPress, Squarespace, LiveJournal), but many of these apps are problematic and lackluster. The Squarespace app is the most complete that I've used (for blogging), but still far from perfect. None of the apps take full advantage of the capabilities of the services and formats. For writing/word processing, Apple's Pages comes close. I could've used it for work far more often if the app supported vector graphics.

I was on the fringes of the Tablet PC community that existed prior to multitouch displays, iOS, Android, Vista and Windows 7. People had inkblogs and used slate and convertible Tablet PCs as primary work machines. On the few occasions that I interacted with some of the GottaBeMobile guys and other tablet enthusiasts, I got the distinct impression that for some, the slate wasn't a passing trend, it was the Grail.

The iPad is my primary computing device. The iPhone 4 has filled my portable point-and-shoot camera desire. With the right software, the iPad could replace notebook computers; it's fast, has front and rear-facing cameras, wireless internet, decent memory and capacity, a good screen and keyboard support. Of all things, it's the apps (and lack of) that retard it.

Mail supports HTML, but it's only usable via copy/paste. The email editor is weak. Safari is restricted to nine windows as a form of tabbed browsing; this might have something to do with memory, but the iPad can run Infinity Blade and Safari with nine pages.

There are some great iOS apps; I've shared and reviewed a few, and with time, I hope this rant becomes irrelevant. ThinkBook is phenomenal, and I'm enjoying Writing Kit, Daedalus, Day One, iA Writer, Penultimate, Wunderlist and Idea Store. Evernote and Dropbox also work well, despite iOS limitations. I can do just about everything on the iPad... but where's Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator for iPad? Where's ecto or MarsEdit, Scrivener or Storymill? Where are the programming tools and font designers? Where's Firefox?!

It's great that the tablet market has made it possible for two-man teams to create and sell apps... I just hope some established developers start taking these devices seriously for something other than gaming.