Close on the heels of Apple’s quarterly results, which wowed everyone with their billion dollars of revenue, Apple releases the device that sits at the middle of their iPod Touch/iPhone and the Macbook.
The device comes in the form of a tablet, just as everyone speculated, but is called an iPad, instead of the rumoured iSlate or iTablet. Frankly, iPad is such a lousy name for an Apple product!
Anyway, don’t be turned off by its name.
The iPad is a 0.5in thick, 9.6in x 7.5in, 1.5/1.6 lb. tablet with 9.7 in LED-backlit display with full multi-touch capability. The resolution, however, falls short of wide-screen, at 1024×768.
And similar to the iPhone, the touchscreen has fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating.
Its similarities with the iPod Touch don’t stop there – the iPad has an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and comes in 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of solid state storage.
And it runs most of the apps on available on the iTunes App Store! Yes, that means your iPod Touch/iPhone apps will work – except those that require a camera or a phone, of course.
Running applications that were designed for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen, however, will get automatically scaled to allow it to be displayed in full screen.
Awesome, huh? Imagine, Super Monkey Ball on that gorgeous screen! Multimedia capability, audio/video playback, speakers, headphone jack and mic, comes standard on this tablet, even allowing you to connect it to the TV or projector, using an optional cable.
What is different on the iPad, as compared to the iPod Touch, is the optional support for 3G. The 3G version comes with full location-aware functionality (WiFi, Digital Compass, Assisted GPS and Cellular), as opposed to WiFi and Digital Compass support on the WiFi only, non-3G model.
And oh, the 3G connection is not locked to one provider. Apple, however, is negotiating with carriers to provide affordable pre-paid packages for data.
The iPad also comes with its own store – the iTunes App Store works, but the new store is the iBooks store. iBooks now mean electronic books, instead of the old portable laptops that Apple used to make.
This puts the iPad in direct competition to Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.
Funny, though, with ebook readers from Amazon and B&N having iPhone/iPod Touch versions, the iPad can now automatically render books bought from both stores. How cool is that? Imagine having access to all those three bookstores!
The iPad comes with optional accessories, such as Dock Connector to VGA/Composite/Component cable adapter, the Dock, Camera Connection Kit (to let you retrieve photos from your digital cameras), an iPod Keyboard Dock (Dock connected to a keyboard) and a case.
Two surprises that came with the iPad – 1GHz Apple A4 Processor and the price. The processor is the first high-performance, low-power SoC designed by Apple.
This may be from their acquisition of PA Semiconductors not too long ago. This signals that this same chip will probably run the next generation iPhones and iPod Touches.
The price came as a surprise, too. The WiFi-only 16GB iPad is pegged at $499, with the 32GB at $599 and 64GB at $699. The WiFi+3G models are USD130 more. Not bad, I’d say.
Sounds great on paper, right? There are quite a number of questions that can only be answered when the device ships in 60 days.
Personally, the 10-hour battery rating claimed by Apple is equivalent to how many hours in actual real world scenarios.
Usually, when Apple say seven hours, you’d get five. Does this mean that, on average, we get from six to eight hours on the iPad?
The iPad obviously runs on the iPhone OS, does it mean that there is still no multi-tasking on this version, iPhone OS 3.2?
Will the WiFi-only version tether with the iPhone? How much RAM does it come with (considering the iPhone 3GS comes with 256MB and the Google Nexus One comes with 512MB)?
I cannot wait for TechNews Lab to get its review unit (unless I get one first, of course. hahaha).
So, if you want to see the iPad technical specifications, features, etc., go to http://apple.com/ipad.