One of the key benefits of living entirely in the Apple ecosystem is the company’s ability to tightly integrate all of its key products and services together. The iPod became a success because Apple was the first to offer a good MP3 player, a great1 music playing/organizing app, and an integrated music purchasing experience. Calendar and contacts sharing works best on the iPhone when tied together with MobileMe. In general, everything just works better with a Mac compared to a Windows PC.
One area where Apple does absolutely nothing to integrate the experience is between the iPhone and iPad. Outside of both sharing an iTunes installation there is no easy way for an iPhone and iPad to natively talk to each other.
Most evenings I keep my iPhone at my desk to charge overnight and have the iPad with me while I am catching up on my TiVo. With my iPhone on the desk, though, I miss several text messages and the occasional phone call. Given that both my iPhone and iPad are connected to the same WiFi network it only makes sense that there’d be a way to pair them together so that I could designate text messages or even phone calls to forward to my iPad where I could handle them.
Apple has recently started doing a bit of integration with an iPhone and the iPad 2. If you connect your WiFi iPad to the personal hotspot created by the iPhone, it will be able to piggyback on the GPS receiver on the phone to get more accurate geocoordinate data.
There are other ways the two iOS devices could integrate, but most of the ideas I can think of would only appeal to the nerdiest of nerds. Being able to handle calls and text messages between and iPad and iPhone seems like something that would have universal appeal.
Maybe iOS 5.
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At the time↩