Apple Launches iPad - enters tablet computing market segment to mixed reaction.
In San Francisco Apple announced the new iPad - Steve Jobs made the "special announcement" at the Moscone Centre in downtown San Francisco 27-Jan-2010 (PST). Reactions have been mixed and these are our early thoughts on the latest product to join the Apple family.
The Jury is out about the Apple iPad. Announced today, the blogs and twitterers are hot with comments and, it appears, at these early hours of the 2010 special announcement in San Francisco, mostly negative.
image courtesy of Apple
Our first impressions from faraway in Australia:
Pluses:
- New processing power of the A4 yields fast processing and application execution
- Reworked applications: iCal, Contacts, iWork and new iBookstore.
- Two models: one with Wi-Fi (N series) and one with both Wi-Fi & 3G
- Good range of memory options for first release product: 16, 32 and 64Gb
- Rich, colour 1024 x 768 resolution 9.7-inch, LED-backlit display
- Acceptable weight and, as always, superb Apple style.
Minuses:
- All glass front panel - fingerprint magnet and extreme care on the road needed
- No camera and doesn’t appear to have any support for third party cameras
- Battery life. Quoted 10 hours but we’re very skeptical about this claim
- Apple opted for 4:3 aspect ratio rather than widescreen format for video but this is good for books
- 3G in Australia is already terrible and consumers pay extortionate amounts to use it now
- Keyboard on the screen doesn’t appear to be ideally user friendly - wouldn’t want to use this for too long; just getting over that RSI!
The iPad uses the same software as the Apple iPhone called iPhone OS 3.2. Using this software, a number of comments have suggested that the iPad is just a larger iPod or iPhone. If you step back and critically review the iPad market position one would tend to agree that the functionality of the iPhone/iPod has merely been extended into a more workable and appropriate model.
We see that the eBook functionality of the iPad to be promising. The crisp and well designed graphical presentation of books, the library shelf and left/right page turns lends itself to win over doubters of eBook popularity and as close likeness to an actual book. Coupled with the iBookstore it will be an excellent sales channel of digital books to users - much to the relief, no doubt, of major book publishers!
What we didn’t hear is about are magazines and text books. We’ve long been vocal advocates of the digital textbook for business, schools, university and post-graduate work. How do we annotate, mark, record and share digitally e-inked books from Apple?
We now refuse to buy textbooks. They take up too much room, restrict our home and offices (if you are lucky to have an “office” anymore) with more clutter and they date too quickly. But we need and use books as reference materials. We write on them, dog ear them as we learn from those pages. We want to see intelligent annotation and searching capabilities to help us in our learning processes.
With the iPad, we could not see anything compelling in the video, music or photos options. True, the photos album and search capability is a software improvement but it is not the massive technological improvement as suggested.
2010 is certainly the year of the eBook. Apple has now well and truly entered it with their hybrid Netbook-eBook contender - the iPad version 1.
The Apple iPad - let’s watch how it progresses and let’s not “write” it off just yet. M
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