A British View.So, Apple’s newest product has been announced and it’s slightly surprising. First off, it’s called the iPad; maybe one of the few names I hadn’t heard suggested or rumoured. To be honest it’s got me hyped up. It’s got e-book capabilities, their own book store, HD video, gaming, e-mail; it’s pretty much what everyone wants it to be.
“Using this thing is remarkable — it’s so much more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone.”
So the actual announcement/demonstration was OK. Steve Jobs told us all how amazing the product was, showing us how everything works and with extremely creative descriptions attached. Having various windows and tabs open was slightly stressful on my computer, making sure I hear everything. The presentation itself included a lot of Fanboy-Applauses, but the content was there. To be honest I’m surprised they didn’t have an official Apple Ustream or something, but I guess they knew the fans would do that for them.
The App. Store: Every single current application in the store should work instantly, out the box. This can either be as they are, or scaled up to their 9inch screen. Moving on from this, the gaming looks amazing. They demo’d a first person shooter an it’s promising, the video looks fine and they even showed a HD YouTube video which is really promising.
Looking at the stats, a basic run down: It’s 0.5inches thin, a 9.7inch screen, weighs 1.5 Pounds, 1Ghz processor (Apples own, they call it The A4), 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and finally a choice between 16, 32 or 64 GIGS of Flash Memory. And probably one of the most impressive parts: 10 Hours of Battery, and over a month of standby.
The new App, pretty much the main reason why I would buy the tablet: iBooks. Referencing the Kindle, Steve Jobs explains how they’ve made an iBook store; they’ve already got Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and the Hachette book Group working with them, planning to get more publishers later today. iBooks is laid out like a bookshelf, it looks quite nice and the demonstration for buying books seems quite easy. Considering that I’ve not used either, comparing the Kindle and the iPad, Apple’s one definitely seems better; a reliable and proven touch screen, nice and smooth reading and nicer to read from.
iWork is fairly standard, I mean they talk it up a lot but it’s mostly just the usual iWork. Considering what the product is, it is quite impressive, but compared to just any regular desktop it’s nothing too inspired. I’m not really going to be sold on any of this until I get to try out the soft keyboard myself. Although, it does look better than most touch screen devices and much better than the basic note options found in a few of the e-book readers. iWork and other similar applications will cost $9.99.
It looks like the sort of thing which I would really want, but whether or not I would actually use it is slightly unsure. I’ll give it back to Steve to sum up for me:
“Email is fantastic. Great for enjoying your music collection. Video is phenomenal. It runs almost all of the 140k apps on the App Store as well as a whole new generation of apps designed specifically for the iPad. And the new iBooks application with the iBooks Store. And the iWork suite of apps.”
Now for the super amazing surprise:
Sold. Done, mother fucking SOLD. Are you kidding me? $499? Done.
Also, the additional stuff looks pretty cool, like the add on keyboard and such. (I did write up more but accidently lost it, oops. It wasn’t majorly important, just the extras. It’ll all be on the Apple site soon enough.) Also, I know this is tomorrow’s post but I just had to put it up now. Had too. (And the images are a bit dodgy at the top, but ‘ehh, let me be; I’m supposed to be working and Apple just stopped me in my tracks.)
The images were taken from: http://live.gdgt.com/2010/01/27/live-apple-come-see-our-latest-creation-tablet-event-coverage/
EDIT: Further linkage, Apple have it on their site already: http://www.apple.com/ipad/
