iPad
The iPad has arrived. It has a name, it has been shown, now we wait and see what the world makes of it. The press event that Apple held today (Wednesday January 27th) was almost entirely focused on this new device. Many of the features and speculation about this iPad (right down to the name) had already been guessed and now that we know for sure what this thing is, it’s time decide if this is a worthwhile product.
Here is my take on some of more important aspects of this product to me.
Hardware
When I first saw the iPad, the first thing I noticed is that it seems like an over sized iPhone. Maybe that is what Apple wanted us to feel, since they are clearly trying to leverage all the knowledge people have over iPhone OS and the iPod Touch on this new platform. They want you to be able to pick this thing up, and know exactly what to do with it.
That being said, the iPad itself rotates and orients itself to the way you are holding it, portrait or landscape, which is expected. You can turn this thing around and around and it will keep adapting the display. One neat trick is that you could flip the iPad end over end to face someone in front of you to show a picture and it will orient itself to show them.
I had a bit of trouble dealing with the rather thick border around the iPad. It seemed distracting and out of place but I see the reason. If you think of how you are going to hold this thing, your thumbs are going to have to use the sides so they are going to need to rest somewhere. This is a minor point and is probably just a shock factor more than anything and really it’s the screen you should be focused on.
That brings me to the screen. So now we have an LED back lit display. I am eager to see how bring and vibrant this is. The iPad has a large 9.7 ” screen which sounds like a good size to me, more than a lot of the netbooks out there. It’s about a half-inch thick so it’s basically the thickness of an iPhone. It weights a pound and a half which from what I’ve read already feels solid and weighty in your hands.
There is a few choices for storage capacity. I like this because it offers more price points (more on price later). You can get 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes. For me the iPhone I have at 16 GB is sufficient, but I can really see me putting hundreds of songs on this, some video, my picture collections and maybe some documents so I feel that 16 just won’t be big enough and I kind of feel that 64 GB will be the flexibility I need. Chances are I will settle with 32 GB to save the $100.
It’s nice to see an Apple device that supports wireless-N networks. The iPad itself has 2 models, wi-fi only and wi-fi / 3G hybrid. I already pay for data with my iPhone so even if up here in Canada we can get the no-contract prepaid plans for data access, I really feel that wi-fi is all I need since I can picture this as being our home device, and if I travel with it I will likely have what I need right on the iPad. What I would really love to hear is that the iPad can connect via Bluetooth to an iPhone for tethering your 3G connection. I doubt this will happen, but it would go a long way to sell the iPad for me. On Bluetooth, it will pair up with my wireless keyboard for the iMac which I was glad to hear.
There is no camera on the iPad at all. I found this a little disappointing. I never imagined I would be taking photos or video with this, but a front facing camera made sense to me so that you could do video calls with people. Perhaps because of VOIP calls requiring net access, the lack of them currently on the App Store, and the fact you can rotate the iPad however you want were enough for Apple to not put a camera in. We can always hope the next iPhone will have one!
Software
It looks like Apple has built either iPhone OS 4.0 or just iPad OS which is an off shoot of iPhone OS. It’s still unclear on this point. At the presentation nothing was revealed in this regard and we likely won’t hear anything until the Apple developer conference in a couple months.
The built in apps get an iPad refresh here and I must say for the better.
I like the mail app on the iPhone, and I use it with Google and ActiveSync in order to get push email just like Exchange. This works great and I expect that this will still be supported. This wouldn’t be a deal breaker because I could use Gmail online, but even though they didn’t say anything I don’t think they would leave this out.
In landscape mode you can see your inbox on the left and message on the right, this is my preferred way to view email and is pretty standard in Outlook and Thunderbird, and even Mac OS X’s mail app. It is a nice touch that you can rotate to portrait and then get a full screen view of the message, useful when you get email newsletters or large images.
The compose box is like a smaller new window that appears and a virtual keyboard slides underneath it. When I see this window it is clearly a recycle of the current iPhone compose window, but with a bigger box to type your message. I almost expected the whole screen to be used here for mail composition.
Calendar and Contacts
Amazing! I love the rewrite here. They have a lot more room to play with and they take advantage of it using a full size calendar, and a side bar with current day details. It really looks like a day planner in that regard and it kind of makes me jealous that the OS X iCal doesn’t look this good. For busy and full calendars this looks like it will handle them no problem. Again I hope Exchange support is present here.
The Contacts app looks more like an address book now with a page on the left and contact details on the right. I do like the extra room here to see all the contact details without any scrolling.
Maps
Still using Google maps which is awesome to begin with. On my iPhone I use maps all the time for directions, street view, GPS, etc. What I like here is you can take those maps and see more of them at once, including the satellite 
pictures. The street view will look amazing as well on a big display. The specs don’t list a GPS chip so I suppose it could use 3G and wi-fi to pin point your location, but really if I can plan my trip at home with wi-fi, and then cache those results when I go on the road, my navigator can easily use the maps there to get us to our destination. Sounds like for this purpose getting the 3G model is the way to go, or simply stick with my iPhone for directions.
iTunes, YouTube, Video, iPod
All of these apps have been designed to take advantage of the bounty of real estate there is to offer. This is great because I find myself always moving through menus and scrolling on the iPhone. When going through the music collection especially this is the case. So iPod having more navigation options up front with little to no page transitions is a plus for me. It seems that the iTunes and App Store interfaces also follow this design. With YouTube it feels more like the YouTube website, where you have the video up front and alternate video and selections all around you.
The video app appears to be the one you see on iPod Touch devices. Not much to say here other than video looked great on my iPhone so having it a higher resolution will be awesome. I did read that the aspect ration was 4:3 so that will mean letterbox and no full wide screen. Not much of a choice I suppose when you can still rotate from portrait to landscape.
Photos
I really like iPhoto on the Mac, and it seems that Apple has taken the best to offer there and put it on the tablet. I can see myself moving over all my photos so that I can have them handy at all times. You can toss up a slideshow to music as easy as you can in iPhoto which is great for showing off. Having all the Faces information come over is cool to. What I’d like to know is if you can do Faces management here, tagging people in photos and having all that sync with iPhoto on the Mac.
iWork
I was hoping something would be announced about the Apple productivity suite and there was: iWork will be on the iPad! This is great, editing documents and spreadsheets on this will be a great feature. Having those sync to your Mac or some online storage will be even better. These are standalone apps for the iPad only it seems at about $10 per app which is something I would pay for Pages and Numbers.
iBooks
As many suspected, the iPad will now have eBooks. This was a logical move for Apple and I can see them dominating this market. Having the colour display of the iPad behind the books and the ease to get at their iBookstore and get new material will be a good sell, it worked for the Kindle and other devices so the advantages here will be the hardware and software powering this.
The page turning effects look great and work as you would think, just swipe to turn the page. What I didn’t see is if the pages can go landscape and show 2 at a time like reading a normal book. I like that you can on the fly (and rather smoothly it seemed) change the font and font size. I’m sure there must be some provision for bookmarking as well.
Like how I don’t buy music anymore, I can see myself taking the iPad, finding on the store the new release on the day it comes out, downloading it and reading the first few pages in a couple minutes. I would actually prefer this over the bookstore when I know what I want to buy, I’ll just buy it online and get it now without traveling.
Apps
It appears as though all iPhone OS built apps will work on the iPad. When I first saw this it was a tiny box in the middle of this big display which I had a bad feeling about. Adding the X2 button to double the size was a good idea, but I would have to see how well it does on some apps. The advantage is with the development kit (SDK) going out to developers today they can rewrite their apps to work with the native screen of the iPad. I suppose then they would be filtered out of the App Store that iPhone and iPod Touch owners would see.
Price and Availability
Apple has broken the iPad into 2 groups, those with wi-fi only and those that are hybrid with optional 3G connectivity.
The wi-fi only ones, which I suspect will be the most popular and replace a lot of those iPod Touch devices out there, are priced at $499, $599 and $699 for 16, 32 and 64 GB sizes respectively.
The hybrid ones come in the same sizes, but priced at $629, $729 and $829.
I think the $599 wi-fi only version will be pretty popular and I think it is the choice I would go with. Of course these prices are in US dollars, and I am hoping that here in Canada we will get the same price but with consumer electronics we always end up paying more. Since this won’t be sold by carriers it’s hard to say. I don’t know how the 3G versions will work, they take the micro SIM cards so maybe you can buy it from the telco or Apple and then get a chip from the telco? It sounded like the devices are sold unlocked so you can take them where you want to. It’s unclear how the 
arrangement is going to work outside of the US.
In the US, the data plans for 3G is going to be handled by AT&T and as an interesting note they are offering a contract free prepaid usage of either $15 for up to 250 MB in a month or $30 for unlimited use, you can cancel when you want and activate it right from the iPad! Now if only phone where that easy!
The wi-fi only versions were said to be shipped in 60 days worldwide, so likely by April. The 3G models in 90 days. Until 3G deals are worked out it is hard to say when anyone outside the US will get those models, but for me looking at the wi-fi only model I could be visiting an Apple store this spring to play!
Conclusion
Apple was very eager to share their new creation, and the industry demanded that they give up something. I get the feeling that there may be more to the iPad experience coming as Apple has more time to work on the final version of the OS and finalize a possible iPhone 4.0.
It seems like all the core functionality is there and the hardware is nailed down so its just a matter of working out any kinks, finishing whatever needs to be finished, making deals with more publishers, phone companies, etc.
I have been debating on a laptop for a while now to supplement our computer compliment at the house. I have tried to take stock of what I think the laptop would do for me, and I find I’m answering more and more internet based apps and activities. traveling with movies, sharing pictures, etc. All of these things as Steve Jobs put it today the iPad does extremely well. So it’s cheaper than the laptop, does the things I want to do, and is in a form factor I prefer.
I really need to sit with the news and wait over the coming months but I feel that when I’m ready for that laptop, the iPad may make more sense then shelling out money for a generic PC or even a MacBook.
