Apple’s iPad, announced last week, appears to be the perfect device for consuming different kinds of media: video, the internet, text, games.
Which is why I won’t likely be getting one.1
Mike Melanson, at Read Write Web, noted, for instance, the lack of a camera in iPad and suggested it was a huge problem. I, myself, in private conversation, have said that the lack of a camera is one of the reasons I’m not that interested.
But where would a camera go? Facing towards the user, it would make a great camera for video chat, but that’s less than ideal if you’re going to be taking picture (or video) of someone else.
That being said, as I laid down last night, I was startled by a random thought: what if one could use their iPhone, tethered to the iPad via WiFi or Bluetooth, as a wireless camera?
Wouldn’t that be awesome? Stream the video to the iPad, which then saves the video or streams it off somewhere else? You can point it towards yourself, or the scene around you, where you like.
I thought that, since Apple is now allowing Bluetooth keyboards on iPad, that they would loosen up the restrictions on Bluetooth on the iPhone, too; for the moment, only Bluetooth headsets are allowed on non-jailbroken iPhones.
However, Mike Bissell looked into it and, apparently, all one can do is access files via Bluetooth, or so he said to me on Twitter.
That said, the tools to do almost this may already be available: right now, using the Ustream Broadcaster app, one can stream video from iPhone to a website, which one could watch on their iPad. Not quite the same thing, but close.
And I’m sure there will be more solutions available as the iPad starts to appear in the world.
1 Note that I’m not saying iPad isn’t going to be a hit, or that it’s broken somehow or stupidly designed. It’s simply not for me. I’m not that interested, as long as I have my iPhone for mobile consumption and my MacBook Pro for mobile creation.