Opinion: The iPad is here, but where's the shock and awe?

The iPad, if we’re brutally honest with ourselves, is a little underwhelming. There, we said it.

It’s not that the iPad is a disappointment - far from it - it’s just that throughout the many office conversations we’ve had about the iPad since its unveiling last night, there’s been a tendency towards adopting the role of iPad apologist.

The iPad is far too much like an iPod touch with gigantism to silence critics. For those already sceptical about Apple’s ability to deliver a product that lives up to the hype (an admittedly impossibly feat) the new device and its punnable name will no doubt see it become a popular target for brand trolls on forums far and wide over the next few months.

But what of the potential? Cast your mind back to January 2007, when Apple unveiled the original iPhone. The iPhone 2G, though more immediately impressive due to its breakthrough nature, didn’t come into its own as a device until Apple unleashed the App Store on the world and allowed third-party applications to join the fold.

Location, location, location

As a starting point, the iPad has all the right pieces, and its usefulness will be decided by the developers over the next year. One of the most intriguing aspects of the iPad, though, is its sense of place in people’s lives, especially where gaming is concerned.

Playing handheld consoles on the couch or on the toilet is nothing new, but the crucial element of handheld gaming so far has been that hardware can be used anywhere. The iPad is not what you might describe as 'bus friendly'.

Apple is positioning the iPad as a home games console that doesn’t need to be resolutely tethered to the living room centerpiece or the office desk.

This is the couch gaming revolution - you heard it here first.

It's in the game

Another interesting point to note about the iPad’s gaming credentials is the fact that there can be no confusion platform-wise about the fact that it is, among other things, a games machine, plain and simple.

The iPod touch is a handheld games console bearing an almost identical resemblance to the iPhone, so that detractors have been able to rubbish the iPod touch and iPhone as mere mobile devices unworthy of serious consideration in the console realm.

In spite of whatever forms of connectivity The iPad houses, it is definitely not a phone and hence can stand on its own two feet as a gaming platform. The thousands of games already compatible with the device, via some very clever pixel-doubling upscaling, will mean that early adopters will have plenty to play with.

The question on every gamer’s lips right now, however, is this: just what is that custom Apple A4 chip capable of? The demos of Need for Speed Shift and N.O.V.A. from EA and Gameloft shown during the event were indeed slick (and there's a raft of other titles coming too), but they were carved out of existing code designed to run on the iPhone.

What's in the box?

To be fair, this is possibly indicative of Apple’s Fort Knox secrecy. Cupertino may have only allowed developers access to the SDK a short time before the event to minimse the danger of leaks and resulting in game demos that don’t necessarily illustrate what the iPad’s pixel pushing powers can muster.

We know that the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor at the heart of Apple’s custom A4 chip is nearly double the clock speed of the 3GS’s less advanced ARM processor (the iPad runs at 1GHz against the 3GS’s 666MHz), but besides that gross oversimplification of the complexities of processor architecture it’s hard to know how much more oomph the iPad’s guts have got.

So the iPad isn’t the holographic, wind-powered warp drive device that many speculated it was - it’s a big iPod touch with a beefier processor and a beautiful screen. Indeed, the coupling of these hardware features has the potential to really wow the games industry further down the line on the software end.

It’s just a shame Apple didn’t have something ready to illustrate the iPad’s unique gaming potential at the announcement. It's also a shame that the hype was so overenthusiastic for the new device, causing it to slam into a wall of unmet expectations.

There we go again, apologising for the iPad. Hopefully, we won't feel compelled to do that for long...