iPad

Is this thing just a big iPhone? Touch?

QUAERITUR: battery life?

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25 Comments

  1. dtb says:

    It’s basically a giant iPod touch. Battery life is 10 hours, playing video the whole time (according to Steve Jobs’ keynote this AM). One month of standby.

    You can get Wi-fi only starting at $499, or a 3G-enabled one starting at $629 and pay AT&T $15-30 per month.

    I’m not terribly interested at this point. I already have a MacBook Pro and iPod touch, and don’t see what the iPad offers that I don’t already have.

  2. MikeM says:

    It’ll be interesting to see if this cuts into the e-book market.

  3. stgemma_0411 says:

    It is a bit different from a laptop and an iPhone. It is meant to bridge the gap to the point where it houses a new set of apps. First is iWorks, which is essentially an Office suite. It also functions as an e-reader to replace the kindle. They already have 4 major publishing houses on board with them as well as the NY Times, National Geographic, Major League Baseball, Google, and many many others.

    As for battery life, Mr. Jobs reports that it has a 10-hour battery life, stating that you can fly from San Francisco to Tokyo, watching movies the entire time, and not run out of battery life. It also has a 30 day standby feature where if you leave an iPad sitting on the desk, in standby mode, when you go to open it 30 days later it will still have enough charge to startup and tell you to plug it in before shutting off.

    It is a bold move to create a new medium for newspapers, e-books, and a way to nudge out netbooks and kindles (or whatever other e-reader you use). It is a solid state flash memory of up to 64gb and is 1/2″ thick” It also plays movies and video in HD.

    The biggest thing about it, is that it will be reasonably priced (as higher end tech is concerned) with the basic iPad being $499 and the highest end being $829. It will be wi-fi, bluetooth and (optionally) 3G enabled. The best part is that they have data plans that are pre-paid. For 250mb (which is what you get on iPhones) it only costs you $14.99/month. For unlimited data, it only costs $29.99/month. The reason they can make it so low is because you are pre-paying on the service. So they have immediate investment on the data stream, which allows them to collect a lot more interest on the amount than if they were to collect it after service rendered. I think they said something about AT&T exclusivity, but it was unclear who you pay your monthly data payments to.

  4. MargaretMN says:

    I can see some people buying this. If you spend 80-90% of your time on the computer reading or reading the web, this is the device for you. You don’t even need a laptop. Or people might start dividing up their “working” on a computer vs. reading on an Ipad. Looks like it has a lovely screen to watch movies too, for kids on car trips and flyers. You can certainly do all of those things on an Iphone or Touch, but it’s not all that pleasant to do, on such a small screen, especially for those of us with middle aged eyes. The price will need to get lower but eventually I think this device or one like it will become ubiquitous and will replace the laptop for the general public. People who write for a living or do spreadsheet calculations will probably still need the power and durability of a laptop.

  5. Agapified says:

    Jeffrey Tucker at NLM had an interesting take this morning:

    “It will permit tens of thousands of pages of chant and polyphony to be downloaded for free and carried anywhere in a form that can actually be used.”

    Not only that, but the same device can hold audio of the sacred music as well.

    Personally, I’m most excited about the ability to combine the power of the iPad with Logos 4.

  6. jas548 says:

    It doesn’t have a camera, it doesn’t support Flash, you can’t multi-task, and I doubt iWork is going to be as effective as using Office.

    Count me underwhelmed.

  7. jpjackson says:

    I don’t think it’ll be good for ebooks. What makes the ebook readers special is the e-ink or e-paper screen (I wish there was a more creative name for it), which is much, much easier to read than a backlit LCD.

    The technology behind e-paper is fascinating:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper

  8. jt83 says:

    I read that it has a 10-hour battery life

  9. Mary Bruno says:

    My first thought when I got Apple’s email about it was that it might be their version of a Kindle. I didn’t read the email that closely and didn’t realize how big it is.

  10. Incaelo says:

    A friend of mine called it the new world religion, judging by the massive elation at the thing’s release. And he’s right, it does all seem a bit over the top, no matter how nifty a machine it is.

    But, I know next to nothing about this kind of thing, so my opinion would count for exactly nothing ;)

  11. ipadre says:

    It’s iPhone on steroids! Can’t wait to test drive one. Either this or v. 2 will be part of my library of Mac stuff. It will be great for travel. 10 hours of battery life is pretty darn good. I also like iWork for the iPad – all touch based. I have both MS Office and iWork. Just can adjust to Office and it’s been years. iWork is much more intuitive. This things is going to make a home run, big time! I also like the name, iPad. Much close to iPadre! lol

  12. Amerikaner says:

    Considering all the hype Apple was pushing this week, the reveal of an oversized iPhone was a real let down. After the initial Applemaniacs put in their orders, I don’t think the product will have much traction.

  13. Frank H says:

    I understand some are referring to it as the iTampon. (pad, tampon, get it?!)

  14. Marcin says:

    Frank H,

    Boy, that’s so bad :D

  15. Jacob says:

    The tech people I know (tech geeks, serious first adopters, etc.) are all of the opinion that this iPad, lacking basics like OSX or a USB port, is just a money making scheme by Apple to coast along on its iPod/iPhone tech and putting out another product that will have people buying media from proprietary Apple outlets like iTunes.

  16. JohnE says:

    I suspect it will cut into the Kindle/eReader market quite a bit, since you can do a lot more than read material and its bigger screen is better for watching video than the iPod/iPhone. It’s less clunky and more portable than a laptop or notepad, but I don’t think it has a DVD drive. It has a virtual keyboard, but I probably wouldn’t want to use it if I had to do a lot of typing or needed a lot of processing power. I’m considering getting it for my wife who pretty much just uses the computer to check email and watch online videos. The lack of a DVD drive makes me lean toward getting a notebook or laptop though.

  17. nhaggin says:

    Count me underwhelmed as well. I’ve never been a Macophile, even though I am an amateur photographer; Ubuntu Linux is my standard desktop environment. (I’m also a Unix sysadmin by trade.) The iPad has tremendous potential that I fear cannot be realized given Apple’s choice of processor, operating system, and external interfaces.

  18. Salvatore_Giuseppe says:

    jas548:

    I have been using iWork on my Mac for two years now(mostly for Pages, the equivalent of Word) and rarely have any problems. The one thing that I (very angerly) discovered was that it does not have a restore function, so if the program quits, your work(in this case my 3 page paper) goes with it. However, that time was once out of maybe 2 or 3 times in those two years that the program has quit, and it has never done so after I updated to ’09.

    It exports to a .doc format very well, and to a .pdf flawlessly. So there is no problem with shareability with a PC (I know longer know why anyone ones one anyways).

    The reason I want the iPad, is it would be less bulky for note taking in a classroom, although the keyboard may take getting used to. It would be the only eReader to get me into eBooks, as it does so much more than just books, and a devoted reader is just too much for a function I may find I do not use a lot. Plus, they are saying there will be docks for it that will function as a charger and a keyboard, so you could set it up almost like a desktop at that point.

    alas, it will be some time before I get $499 saved up.

  19. Laurinda1230 says:

    I spend most of my time online reading blogs and replying to emails. My computer is an old ibook G4 that I bought in Jan 2005 so I’m thinking of buying this as my replacement. My soon to be hubby has a desktop that I can use at home for typing up my thesis. I do not have an ipod touch or a internet on my phone so I think something like this could be of better use for me.

  20. chironomo says:

    No less than Leo Laporte had said last week that this thing was going to have to be something incredible and totally revolutionary to live up to the hype they were producing. His exact quote was “If it’s just an oversized I-Pod, or some kind of I-Phone/ I-Pod hybrid it will be a tremendous flop”. I have to agree with him. Other than it’s “coolness” factor, it really offers nothing new.

  21. Bryan says:

    It fills a niche market right now. And I say this being a technophile going back to my original 4-function calculator I bought with paper route money for 99.00 at Radio Shack in 1973…right before TI came out with the SR-10 for half the price. Sigh.

    I can’t wait to get my hands on it and see. No doubt the naysayers and doubting Thomases will poo-poo it. But, in a large way, it changes a dynamic. Ebook reader? Check. Email? Ditto. Cruising the web? Yup. Portable (as opposed to luggable or limited keyboard or slow)? Check (it’s smaller than most netbooks which everyone seems so enamored of…probably because of the price…but you’re still in thrall to whatever Microsoft does with their OS).

    Oh, subscription for media? Yes. No one says that there’s a right to have free access to the intellectual property of another. You pay for newspapers, magazines, books, music. Charging a nominal amount to provide access on a screen, while it seems to go against the thought that electronic information should be free, in reality, commercial content providers are not non-profits (well, most of them…). If they don’t produce content worth the sub, the market will take care of that. But, I’m sure that Time or any of the other old guard would love to have Apple’s problems of accepting the revenue stream from iTunes right now.

    I can see some neat applications that would fit this form factor. The tech market is still coming up with solutions in search of problems (iPhone is a good example…it too was derided when it was announced in 07…8.6 million were sold in the last quarter of last year. There must be something other than the ‘cool factor’ at work.)

    Versus the Newton (yeah, have one of those, too…and it still works….), I’m sure Jobs will force Apple to stay the course and segue all those iPhone/iPod Touch apps into being able to use a larger screen size/almost 2x faster CPU. May not be there on first deliveries…but, I’d lay odds that within the next 6 mos to a year, you’ll see them in the hands of the post-fanboy consumers doing things you never expected, Apple’s stranglehold (control?) over the distribution channel notwithstanding.

    (besides, who would have thought in 07, that you could stream live video from the iPhone to Ustream…)

    Just my $.02.

  22. Bill in Texas says:

    It’s a media consumption device. It is not, and never was intended to be, a general purpose computing device.

    It will support content creation for weblogs and audio podcasts, and users will be able to do photo editing on it (although getting photos onto the iPad will take at least one more step than it would if only there were a USB port or an SD card slot — or if they’d just put a camera on it — Steve, what were you thinking?). You can also email documents you create with it. Apparently the video out connection (extra bit of hardware required) will let you display a slideshow through a projector — in VGA, not HD resolution (Steve, what were you thinking?). If you download the existing iPhone apps that allow you to print via WiFi connection through your desk/laptop computer, or if you have a WiFi/Bluetooth-equipped printer, you will be able to print directly from it.

    I don’t think it’s a Kindle-killer. It will fit into some niche uses, and the analysts are predicting sales of about 4 million iPads the first year.

    Battery life is “up to” 10 hours. I think that’s really optimistic.

    I write about e-Learning and edit a magazine on the topic. You can read my thoughts about the iPad in that regard here: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/370/apples-ipad-what-does-it-offer-for-e-learning

  23. Luke says:

    A full and in-depth view of the iPad can be found at Ars Technica:

    http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/ars-ipad-reax.ars

    Btw, I would disagree with the above commenters view of it being a niche player, but am simply too weary of playing the role of Apple apologist to mount my own arguments. Ars Technica does a good job off offering a fair-minded review.

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