John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting story about the absence of certain iPhone apps – Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos – on the iPad.

It seems that these apps, when scaled up to iPad’s bigger screen, simply didn’t look good enough to Steve Jobs, so he decided to scrap them. Writes Gruber:

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps.”

If true, it would be a pity, because these are quite basic, no brainer apps that everyone uses, especially Clock, Calculator, and the Weather. On the other hand, if these simple apps don’t look good enough scaled up, how will all those thousands of third party apps look? As far as apps go, the iPad experience (at least in the beginning) might turn out to be something that Apple otherwise struggles to avoid: good enough, but far from perfect.