So yesterday saw Steve Job, CEO of Apple announce a new product which turned out to be the widely expected tablet device. Like many others, I was hoping for at least an update to the iPhone OS also if not a new iPhone to be announced and normally these speeches tend to cover one or two products and then have a little surprise at the end. In this case the surprise at the end was that they managed to spend an hour and a half talking about just one product.
So onto the product itself, dubbed by Apple as a revolutionary and magical device, named the iPad (and opening up to a large number of iTampon jokes that actually managed to trend on twitter above anything actually to do with the device or Apple). Ok I haven’t had one in my hands yet but to me it seems that what Apple have done isn’t revolutionary or magical. Indeed this device has been around for nearly three years already and is called the iPod Touch. Because what Apple have done is taken their existing iPod Touch, blown it up to 4 times the size, put a faster chip in it and created some word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software for it.
A lot of people are slating the device because it cant multitask, much like the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Personally, I cant see the appeal of multitasking on a device like this. On my PC currently which can support multitasking, I have the following open
- Thunderbird – as the mail app on iPad can be set to poll automatically or even push if supported, there is no need to keep mail open on the iPad
- iTunes – the iPhone will continue playing music even if you exit the iPod app. As the iPad is based on the same OS as the iPhone/Ipod Touch there is no reason this wont still be the case. And I have iTunes open but aren’t even listening to music so no idea why its open
- Firefox with 12 tabs open – Safari supports multiple tabs on the iPhone so presumably will on the iPad. Of the 12 tabs open half of them don’t need to be, I just haven’t bothered closing them yet
- Sticky Notes – Fair enough the iPad wont support notes on the desktop BUT of the sticky notes I have the majority of them serve no purpose anyway and there’s no reason they cant be hidden away in an app
The price of the device whilst looking reasonable is unlikely to translate well to the UK as is the normal case with Apple devices. For example based on the US price, the iPod Touch 64GB retails for $399. This should translate to a UK price of £246 but it actually costs £60 more than that.
Based on the US prices, the UK prices of the iPad should be
| 16GB | 32GB | 64GB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wifi | £308 | £370 | £431 |
| Wifi + 3G | £388 | £450 | £512 |
We’ll see how well that translates over into UK apple money. As for if I’ll be buying one, I can see this device replacing my netbook which as Steve Jobs pointed out is slow and not better than anything BUT that will depend on if
- The price translates over to the UK well
- If the Wifi only model will support tethering to the iPhone, something which strangely never got mentioned at the keynote last night
The iPad, whilst being a large iPod touch, probably isn’t too bad a device. I’m just disappointed there was nothing else announced like a new iPhone (though this could be because I was hoping for new iPhone as I have an upgrade due next month)
Oh and anyone buying this as an ebook reader who doesn’t live in the US may want to check the small print at the bottom of THIS PAGE
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