Vegard Langås

Apple iPad

Yes, it is that bad! Now first let me tell you why the press seems to think the opposite:

Today, January 27th  announced Apple it lates addition to their line of mobile devices; the iPad. It is a tablet device using what is basically the iPhone OS. It has a 10″ LED screen featuring multi-touch as we have become use to with the iPod touch and iPhones. It is wireless connected with both AT&T 3G (the same 3G network as in all of Europe), and  N high speed wireless wifi. It has a special designed Apple A4 processing unit, running at 1 ghz. The Apple A4 is a system on a chip, with low power consumption and built in graphics processing, giving the iPad abilities to be a serious hand held device in the gaming market. During the keynote were I given the impression that this could have the potential to compete with regular gaming consoles, or pc style gaming. Another advantage to the powerful processing unit is ability to play high quality videos (720p h.264) and even youtube in HD, a feat only few of todays netbooks are able to. It has manny hardware similarities to the iPhone 3Gs, featuring a digital compass and GPS. It will come in 2 different models, one with only wifi, and one with wifi, 3G and GPS. There will be 3 storage alternatives for both of the models; 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. It will sync everything via iTunes, or over the air iPhone style (e-mail, address, contacts). The design of the device is stunning. It has a MacBook Pro style aluminium backplate and glass front, with the same stylish black border as on all Apple screens.

The iPhone OS have been heavily modified for this device, maybe giving us a sneak peak into what might be coming up on iPhone OS 4.0 for iPod touch and iPhones. It utilizes the larger screen size to improve calendar, e-mail and photo viewing. The large screen also gives you a keyboard that by the looks of it might be wieldable with 2 hands, touch typing. This ability to write text is apple utelizing with putting Pages, Numbers and Keynote in the application store, allowing you to create and edit your spreadsheets, documents and presentations on the device. To improve this even more are Apple creating a keyboard docking-station allowing you to use a real keyboard when writing in the general OS. Other accessories available to the iPad at launch is camera connectors, allowing you to transfer pictures from your usb camera or SD card.

One of the big news with the iPad was the launch of a bookstore called iBooks. This is one of the killer features of this device, allowing it to compete with devices like the amazon kindle. The iPad have a huge advantage over the amazon kindle because it is a multi function device with a color display. This allows all books, from colorful visual magazines to heavy black and white sci-fi novels. It will allow school children and students to carry all types of literature with them in a small light weight format.

What? But thats to good to be true! Indeed it is. Like online movie and tv purchase or rentals are the Americans keeping it to themselves. This makes it a flop by default. It have absolutely zero to add to the World market, infact, it is worse than the iPhone being that you are unable to call with it. It is the same story with the apple tv. It is nothing more than a fancy brick, with cool buttons. And the media functions are less appealing as you are unable to put in in your pocket and carry it with you everywhere. This would require you to have a purse or a murse with you, explaining the name iPad.

However, this is a step in the right directions. Preparing the iPhone OS and the app developers for a high resolution screen, and a powerful processor is a change that will need to happen to the iPod touch and iPhone sooner rather than later to be able to compete with android with its snapdragon and oled screen. And how Apple could forget to put a front facing camera in it, is to me a mystery.

I would like to thank the regualar suspect for allowing me meta-covering this event: TWiT Live, Gizmodo and Engadget. Congratualtions to TWiT Live that hit over 140 000 live viewers during their broadcasting of the event.

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