[scottjl]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Well, they don't market their product as ebook readers, which Apple certainly has been doing. People are going to expect to get decent ebook reading support out of the box. They shouldn't have to buy another application, and when, e.g., a perfectly valid ePub doesn't display right on the iPad, the customer may well think it's a problem with the book rather than their software.

Apple does not market the iPad as an ebook reader, it is a media device that also does ebooks. I can read any of my 500+ stored eBooks with little difficulty, so I'd say it's got decent support out of the box. So customers shouldn't have to buy other applications? Then why have the App store? Should I expect Apple to cater to everyones whims and include every application I can think of bundled into the OS? Oh wait, Microsoft did that and got investigated for being a monopoly. My Mac didn't come with a word processor or spreadsheet, I really should go back and complain to Jobs about that.

But comparing them to other companies isn't really relevant. Microsoft's level of incompetence is beyond the pale. With Android, it's mostly open source, and anyone can develop for it, so if they came out with a device with similar problems, it would be a problem anyone could contributing to fixing. Apple products are so closed that you couldn't even fix the problem locally on your own device even if you knew how.

Wait, so you expect Apple to include software that does everything you want, perfectly, but no one else has to meet that obligation? A tad bit unfair I'd say. You excuse Microsoft because you say they are incompetent, maybe they are, but look what happened last time they tried to include the kitchen sink. As for Android, so you expect mom to go and code up her own open source application because Google didn't include it? As I said, funny how you have different standards for different companies.

The "US character set"? What's that? People in the US don't speak languages other than English? They don't do mathematics? Yes, actually, we do. Last I checked, I live here too.

The iPad is only available in the US at this time. The US has one official language, English. English has one character set. Apple met their obligations to include this character set in the US available iPad. Actually they do include support for several other languages as well, but I don't know the extent of that support because I use my iPad in English. What you speak at home is irrelevant. When the iPad comes out for a foreign market you'd certainly have the option to by the iPad targeted specifically at that market if you wanted to run natively in another language. Did you really expect Apple to include a rosetta stone in the box? Be happy with the Apple stickers. As for a math font, well, go email Jobs and see if you can get him to include it. A mathematica type application might do pretty well on the iPad. I'm happily still using my HP48.

I've never understood the obsession some have with fonts.

To each their own I guess. Text is text to me. Any of the standard fonts are fine by me.

For most people out there, I strongly suspect the iPad is all the eBook reader they will need.