Machines that go Bing!: Apple iPad — its a great big iPhone!

Posted: 27 Jan 2010 02:23 PM PST

The day has come and all the Apple Tablet rumours that have built up over the last decade will finally be justified — or dashed as many rumours before.

Concept

Apple had two conceptual roads that they could have gone down. They could design the iPad to be a larger version of the iPhoneA closed system on which you can only run apps which come pre-installed with the product or which you download from the AppStore. Or they could simply make it a laptop with a virtual keyboard. Well, it’s pretty clear from the above image which way thy went!

Introduction

Steve Jobs comes onto the stage to rapturous applause — a little older looking but fill with contagious excitement as he ever is at these events. First he briefs us with some corporate numbers and comparisons with competitor companies but then he gets to point… the new Apple device. An image of a tablet appears over his head very similar to images leaked by various sites in the past few months:

“So, gonna give you a little overview. It’s very thin — you can change the homescreen to whatever you want. What this device does is extraordinary. You can browse the web with it. It’s the best web experience you’ve ever had… Way better than a laptop, way better then a phone. You can turn it any way you want. To see the whole page is phenomenal.

Phenomenal for mail. Album, photos… you can look at all of them, flick through them, it’s a wonderful way to share. Calendar… months…”

Interface

The interface is reminiscent of an enlarged iPhone and the interface while similar to the iPhone OS features some new drop-down interface features and a large on-screen QWERTY keyboard.

The Desktop view is similar to the iPhone grid of App icons and includes YouTube, Safari and many others.

Slide to unlock — just like on the iPhone.

Steve plays some movies and they look awesome on this screen.

Safari

A contextual menu drops down from the top of the page and Steve is browsing the New York Times site. The scrolling is very smooth.

Steve demonstrates that turning the iPad automatically changes the orientation of the screen.

While browsing the site a missing plugin icon is visible denoting the lack of Flash in this version of Safari.

Steve takes us to a similar visit at Time magazine followed by lots of his other favourite sites.

Mail

Mail looks very slick and benefits from the same contextual menus as Safari. It’s very similar to a mail application on a laptop or desktop machine: message list on the left, Massage on the right.

“Now if I want to send a message, I hit compose — up pops this gorgeous keyboard.”

“Next, photos… this is what photos looks like. I can look at everything as a list of photos. I can tap on it…”

He flicks and gestures just like on the iPhone:

“If I’m on a Mac, I can get events, places, and faces from iPhoto here.”

Other Apple Apps

Steve then shows us a number of other apps including Google maps, iPhoto and Calendar.

“It just all works. And of course videos… we’ve got movies, TV shows, music videos.”

Movies

Steve then shows us a clip from Star Trek.

Some Specifications

Steve tells us that the new iPad is half an inch thick and 1.5 pounds. The screen is 9.7 inches diagonal with full capacitive multitouch gesture recognition.

The iPad is powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip and will be available with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

Battery life is up to 10 hours and Steve claims:

“I can take a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole time.”

App Store

Scott Forstall tells us about the App Store. He tells us that customers have already downloaded 3 billion apps.

He says the iPad can run all iPhone apps unmodified out-of-the-box as well as the specially modified apps Steve has demonstrated. The iPad can also ‘pixeldouble’ and play apps full-screen.

He shows Facebook which just looks lonely in the middle of the screen and blown up to twice the size doesn’t help.

“Gaming obviously will handle this better, but a text heavy app looks lonely or weirdly huge.”

He opens an OpenGLS game and it looks impressive on the iPad screen.

Scott tells us that if developers take the time to modify their apps they can take advantage of the larger display.

He then invites some developers to demonstrate their apps on the ipad. First Brushes:

Brushes is a very popular painting app which in its iPad incarnation takes advantage of the higher resolution of the iPad and uses the contextual menu interface we saw earlier in Apple’s own apps.

Travis Boatman then demonstrates ‘Need for Speed’:

“When Apple invited us to come on site, we couldn’t have been more excited. But we wanted to check out this device’s performance as gamers.Building for the iPad is a little different — it’s kind of like holding an HD display up to your face. It’s really cool.”

More Apple Apps

Steve then returns and announces the launch of iBooks. Essentially an e-Book shop and an ideal match for the iPad. Steve tells us that Apple has Five partners in this initiative: Penguin, Macmillan, Simon & Shuster, Harper Collins and Hachette.

The iBook store is very similar to iTunes. It has the same sample functions and the page display is nice. You can change the font, size “or whatever you want!” says Steve. Apple is using the ePub format to distribute its books and this may mean that there arelimitations on the eBook stores ability to sell any publications where layout is important such as technical eBooks.

Steve surprised us by announcing that iWorks has been re-written to work with the iPad. That means you can now use Keynote, Pages and Numbers on your iPad — and they only cost $10 each.

More facts from Steve

Syncs over USB just like an iPhone
WiFi only
WiFi and 3G using GSM microSIMs (unlocked)
Two mobile payment plans via AT&T in the US:
- 250MB per month: $14.99
- Unlimited: $29.99
No Contract (pre-paid)

International deals should be in place in the Summer

Price

So what are the price points for the iPad?

Last Summer we predicted a price of between $500 and $800. Well that wasn’t a bad guess — here are the actual prices:

16GB: $499 ($629 with 3G)
32GB: $599 ($729 with 3G)
64GB:$799 ($829 with 3G)

Shipping will start around 25th March (25th April for the 3G versions).

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