I've been an Apple products junkie ever since I got my first Macbook after college. Although I didn't buy an iPhone right away, I converted a few years ago and got myself an iPad 2 last year. Yes, I'm drinking the Apple-flavored kool-aid and it tastes delicious.
Because of my slight fangirldom, I've been anxiously waiting for the iPad 3 announcement for the past week. I've played with my iPad 2 some more this week (to remind myself why I love it), looked up cute iPhone stands that I might want to get to spruce up my home and held my breath for the big reveal earlier today.
There's __some cool new features but, I have to be honest, the most exciting one for me was the voice dictation–__which allows you to speak into your keyboard while the device types up what you're saying. That sounds awesome for the busy mom, except that it doesn't support Spanish in its list of 6 languages. Um, WHAT?!
Read more ¿Qué más? iPad 3 is coming soon–pick up these cute stands!
I don't know what Steve Job's successor Tim Cook was thinking, but how could he possibly not include one of the fastest growing languages on the planet? In particular when it's certainly the second most important language in the US, where Apple is based. This seems ridiculous to me.
Instead, the "new iPad" (the official name, not the iPad 3 or iPad HD as it was rumored) supports English, British, Australian, French, German and Japanese. I can understand supporting British and Australian, since it's probably easy to do different variations of the English language. Japanese definitely makes sense. French and German? Well, okay. But NO SPANISH? I just don't get it.
Granted, although I am comfortable speaking it, I never learned to write in Spanish. But one of my big dreams is to be able to be truly bilingual and I was hoping that the new iPad would help me do that. The voice dictation in Spanish could have helped me learn to practice speaking my native tongue and then see how it is written, not to mention all of the Spanish language learning apps that could have been created thanks to the new feature.
Read more ¿Qué más? WOW! There is SPANISH on the cover of Time Magazine.
But sadly it looks like my dream is not meant to be. At least not with this new version of the iPad. Perhaps next year Apple will wise up to the tremendous opportunity it's missing out on by not including Spanish as one of its voice dictation languages. In the meantime, I'll just keep playing with my iPad 2.
Do you plan on buying the new iPad? Are you sad that it won't have Spanish as part of its voice dictation feature?
Image via Apple
