The iPad should interface with the iPhone directly.

by WyldKard on March 29, 2010

As we checked out ’s latest guided tours for the , it occurred to us that since the is capable of grabbing photos off digital cameras and memory sticks thanks to the Camera Connection Kit, it should also be able to grab photos from an without having to rely on an intermediary computer. After all, some people’s digital camera is an , and they should be able to transfer pictures to the just as easily as everyone else can.

Yet as we watched these guided tours, we also realized that the ’s Photos app, as cool as it is, doesn’t seem able to do a lot of other things we’d want, such as the ability to tag faces, perform basic editing functions, et al. In other words, the Photos app isn’t mobile replacement for iPhoto as much as it is a way to simply view photos on the go. And that’s a shame, because the shouldn’t be a second (or third) mobile device in one’s bag, but a non-pro notebook replacement.

seems somewhat unsure of just how to market the with this philosophy in mind. For example, while the Photos app seems to suggest that users stick with iPhoto for tagging and editing, they’re told that the versions of the iWork suite are perfect mobile replacements for their normal OS X counterparts. Why the inconsistency?

Productivity-wise, it’s even a bigger shame, because we generally have more time when traveling to address tasks such as tagging, album management, etc, than when we’re at home or at work. The reality is that such photo organization simply doesn’t happen for us unless we’re on the road, and for the immediate future, that means we’d rely on the for these types of tasks. To even argue that an expanded Photos app, with these features present, would somehow threaten iLife sales is laughable, and yet is holding off on adding (or revealing?) such features. Might they release an AppStore-distributed mobile iPhoto app for more money?

Understandably, relying on the normal OS X version of iTunes for synchronizing things likes movies may make sense to a degree (though not for movies taken with an ), but for smaller files, such as music purchased through the iTunes store, users should be able to synchronize the directly with an , else the iTunes store should be changed to allow users to re-download material they’ve already purchased. The AppStore already allows this, but iTunes media seems to be an obstacle for this happening with multimedia.

So unless releases a dock-to-dock connector for synchronizing two mobile OS X devices, we may have to hold out for a media-in-the-cloud solution from , else the long-sought-after wireless synchronization feature people have called for since the ’s debut.

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