Taking an iPhone app, and turning it into a useful iPad is, or can be, a pretty big undertaking. The iPad has 5X the number of pixels of an iPhone, and you really need to fill them in some way that makes sense to the user, is engaging and atttractive. It’s a far harder problem to adapt a UI from iPhone to iPad than from iPhone to Android, for example. Or from a desktop app to a web app even.
When we made our iPhone app, we had to scrunch our brains into a tiny 480×320 box, and hundreds of decisions were driven by this constraint. Since the constraints no longer exist on the iPad, almost all of those decisions become wrong. Way wrong.
So we really had to design another app, almost from scratch. This is why the iPad app is flights only for now, because it was just too much to rethink a year’s worth of work in 60 days.
Ultimately, the two apps do pretty much the same thing, and hopefully both feel natural in their respective hardware. As for booking the flights on these interfaces: we are hard at work, and hope to launch it soon. We’ll have a lot more to say about it in 4-6 weeks. Did you get your iPad yet? Download the KAYAK iPad app and tell us what you think @KAYAK.
