Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Why A Dumb iPad Would Be A Great Device



As smartphones are ubiquitous and tablets are becoming more and more common, we frequently find ourselves configuring two different devices with nearly identical settings. It just seems to me as an awful waste of time and CPU.

I love my iPhone and my iPad but I hate to configure them and keep them up to date. I don't need an iPad with a slightly faster CPU than my iPhone and most importantly I don't notice the difference. What I want and has yet to be released is a totally dumb iPad which only purpose would be to mirror à la Airplay the content of my iPhone on a bigger and more comfortable screen.

As many apps are universal (i.e. contain the code for both the iPhone and iPad version), it wouldn't be complicated to scale them to take advantage of the iPad display.

What I want is simple :
- An easy way to pair my iPhone with my dumb iPad using either bluetooth or Wi-Fi (iBeacon ?).
- Once they are paired, I want the iPad to automatically mirror the content of my iPhone on its bigger screen scaling apps to take advantage of the iPad screen estate.
- An Easy way to unpair them (time-out after 5 minutes and/or a gesture).

This would be awesome and allow for sharing the same tablet amongst a household. It just doesn't make any sense to me to have a full-blown ultimate specs iPad with the same apps than on my iPhone. I don't want to download, install everything twice and I don't need twice the memory storage. I just need a device that has enough horsepower to mirror my iPhone content.

Please Apple, make a Dumb iPad!