January 27th, 2010, 11:48PM in Mobile, Technology by Marc LequimeView Comments
Will be updated tomorrow. (Just as a note, this is not a review. This is simply explaining the products features.)
Right, so it’s finally here. The tablet that will destroy the computer, save the world and cure all illnesses. Well, maybe not that far. In fact, I doubt it’s gonna do any of those things collectively, but something it sure as hell will do is provide a challenging market in the eReader zone. Unusual, however – the iPhone left everyone in the phone market virtually crapping their pants, while I’m not so sure the iPad will do the same to the eReader market, being an unusually small and yet fast-developing market. Even though the iPad is bloody cheap ($499), it needs a computer to sync – and there’s no file storage. It’s more eReader/Desktop accompaniment than standalone tablet computer.
The iPad runs in a similar fashion to the iPhone, 4 columns of apps on multiple screens, a big difference being a dock at the bottom more similar to the Mac dock, yet only in appearance – it also allows for desktop backgrounds. You can add apps or websites to the pages, similar to an iPhone. The desktop backgrounds is a nice touch.
The browser, much unlike the iPhone, has a full web rendering engine that easily shows a full website when portrait, with a 1024×768 resolution. The large resolution makes it easier to read the web, and it presumably loads faster than the iPhone’s slow-as-ass browser.
In other terms of its UI, it has some useful friend-organization tools, such as a new contact page that heftily resembles an actual address book, and shows the contact list and the contact image side-by-side. This could be useful, this could be useless. I am a banana.
It has something interesting though – full iWork for the iPad, which will make using it to actually write and do work possible – better than the iPhone, much. This will allow Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents to be saved onto the iPad then either directly presented or printed or moved to a Macbook for presentation.
The thing’s able to display books in a unique app called ‘iBooks’ (what a surprise). And it truly might be something that could outplace the Kindle, showing pages with an attractive UI resembling a bookshelf.
As for prices, here’s a list:
16GB – WiFi: $499; 3G: $629;
32GB – WiFi: $599; 3G: $729;
64GB – WiFi: $699; 3G: $829;
Some claim being remarkably cheap for an eReader, the prices seem a little unusual, especially with paying $130 extra just to use 3G… which you pay $20 a year to use. What’s up with that? I suppose things will sort out soon.
The iPad cannot multitask, which is definitely not a boon to its sales.
Just for humour:
Origin unknown.
More on this tomorrow.
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