For more than a decade, nobody, not even a deep-pocketed
company like Microsoft, has successfully cracked the tablet market.
Apple, based on the tests over several days, is likely to be the
first. The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable
electronic-reader rival for Amazon's Kindle. It gives portable game
machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very
least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet
computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.
Back in 2001 when Microsoft first got into tablets, Bill Gates
predicted that within five years tablets would be the most popular
form of PCs sold in America. That obviously didn't come to pass.
Apple's roots with the tablet form of computing date at least to
its ill-fated Newton, an early 1990s personal digital assistant
pushed by then-CEO John Sculley and later killed by Steve Jobs. The
Windows-powered tablets that appeared as early as 2000 - chunky
machines operated with a stylus - are instead footnotes in tech
history. The tablet era is only now beginning, and Steve Jobs at
Apple is the one defining it.
The half-inch-thick, magazine-size iPad is thin and, at 1.5
pounds, light with a gorgeous, glossy, backlit 9.7-inch multitouch
display. The fingerprint-resistant screen has an exceptionally wide
viewing sweet spot for a movie and is terrific for showing off most
of a Web page. The device resembles an iPhone on growth hormones.
It shares many of the smaller handheld's design elements, down to
the lone home button below the display. As on the iPhone, you can
have up to 11 screens of icons.
IPad has the same kind of smart sensors that change the
orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape, depending on
how it's rotated. (It's always right side up.) And, like the
iPhone, it takes its cue from your fingers, whether you pinch to
zoom in or out on Web pages, location-based maps and pictures - or
flick to scroll up or down a page. You can easily search across all
content.
The iPad will run just about all of the 150,000-plus iPhone or
iPod Touch apps sold (or available free) in the App Store,
presenting boundless "there's an app for that" possibilities. If
you own an iPhone or Touch, you already have a stable of programs
to work on the iPad.
None of this is lost on Apple, which is encouraging developers
to write for the bigger screen. Apple expects more than 1,000
iPad-specific apps to be available at launch.
The iPad's splendor and power may be best shown by The
Elements: A Visual Exploration The $13.99 program is more
electronic book than traditional app, but it's not like any e-book
you've seen. The periodic table of elements comes to life when you
touch your finger against any element. Handsome photographs of
objects spin around so you can observe them from all vantage
points.
The iPad is not so much about what you can do - browse, do
e-mail, play games, read e-books and more - but how you can do it.
That's where Apple is rewriting the rulebook for mainstream
computing. There is no mouse or physical keyboard. Everything is
based on touch. All programs arrive directly through Apple's App
Store. Apple's tablet is fun, simple, stunning to look at and
blazingly fast. Inside is a new Apple chip, the A4.
What does a successful iPad launch mean for traditional
netbooks? They'll have to adapt or disappear - especially since
their price advantage compared with the entry-level iPad isn't as
great as some might have thought it would be. "You can use the
iPhone as the blueprint for how this will play out," Munster
says.
Early buyers (and those who were among the first to reserve
the iPad online) can get one Saturday at Apple Stores and certain
Best Buys. Those who preorder it now online must wait until April
12 because of apparent shortaages.
The iPad has its share of Version 1.0 inadequacies. It doesn't
multitask, save playing iTunes music in the background. There's no
webcam for those of us hoping to do video chats. The battery is
sealed. It's too big for your pocket.
Videos failed to play at Hulu and ESPN, among other Web
destinations. Why? The Safari browser on the iPad doesn't support
videos based on the popular Adobe Flash Internet video
standard.
The issue may be alleviated over time. Apple is backing an
emerging video standard called HTML5. Brightcove, whose video
technology is used by many media companies, said it plans to offer
HTML5 video streaming to its customers. The iPad can also display
video at YouTube (there's an app for that), Vimeo and the White
House website, whitehouse.gov.
Some will decry the absence of a USB port or other connectors,
which might let you hook up a printer or bolster storage.
Everything comes through the standard iPod-like dock connector on
the bottom of the iPad. You can purchase a $29 iPad Camera
Connection Kit, which lets you connect a USB camera or import
photos via an SD card. Meanwhile the absence of CD-ROM may also be
a disappointed part of iPad, if iPad users want to play their
movies on iPad, in order to cover the shortage, they need the help
of
movie converter for iPad
software which supports movies converting.
Many people will still need a more traditional computer. You
can't edit video on an iPad. And the virtual onscreen keyboard that
pops up when needed is fine for e-mails or scribbling notes, but I
wouldn't want to regularly write articles using it.
You can employ a wireless Bluetooth keyboard, and Apple sells
an optional $69 iPad Keyboard Dock. It's a full-size keyboard that
connects to the dock connector. Apple sells a $39 soft microfiber
case that doubles as a stand for watching videos and slideshows.
You can bank on third-party companies to provide other accessories
and how-to tutorial.
So many third-party software development companies have
already set their sights on this huge potential market and aimed at
the profits this iPad can bring. Since this revolutionary and
innovative iPad is running on the iPhone operating system
(currently, version 3.2), users cannot transfer files to iPad
freely. In order for iPad users to transfer dvd to iPad and work
better to enhance iPad users enjoyment between iPad and any other
portable device. Many how-to tutorials have been created, like
how to convert dvd to
iPad.
The iPad has built-in notes, calendar and contacts
applications, and Apple sells slick, redesigned versions of its
iWork productivity applications - $10 each for the Keynote
presentation program, the Pages word processor and the Numbers
spreadsheet. Still, for most folks, the iPad is more about
consuming content than creating it.
Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad, though
there's certainly room for improvement. Nearly three years after
making a splash with the iPhone, Apple has delivered another
impressive product that largely lives up to the hype.
Jobs unveiled the avidly anticipated gadget on Jan. 27 at a
highly choreographed event in San Francisco. Onstage in front of a
rapt audience, he coyly asked if there was room for a new computing
device that fell somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. "We
think we've got something," Jobs said. "We call it the iPad."
With those words, Jobs sent nearly every major consumer
technology company scrambling to create its own version of the
iPad. Apple was already the innovation leader in mobile hardware
thanks to the iPod and the iPhone, but the iPad has cemented that
position. The media tablet market, which research firm Gartner Inc.
projects will grow by nearly 700% over the next three years, is one
Apple essentially enjoys all to itself for now. More significantly,
the iPad's success is a growing threat to the companies that
dominate the personal computing industry, such as Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard and Intel.
The iPad phenomenon has surprised almost everyone. At release
time, the tech community was underwhelmed. "I think this will
appeal to the Apple acolytes, but this is essentially just a really
big iPod Touch," Forrester analyst Charles Golvin told The New York
Times. Another analyst wrote in a research note, "On balance, we
view the iPad as a modest disappointment." There was no camera, no
Flash capabilities, and it could run only one program at a time.
Worst of all, it wasn't clear why anyone would pay $500 or more to
carry it around.
Such criticisms were forgotten soon after the iPad appeared in
stores in April - and sales exploded. "Our initial thoughts were
that Apple would sell 3.5 million iPads in the U.S. in 2010," says
Sarah Rotman Epps, a consumer electronics analyst at Forrester
Research. "That was really, really wrong." She now estimates
between eight million and 10 million will be sold in the U.S., and
more than 15 million globally. In the first 80 days alone, Apple
peddled roughly three million iPads, more than triple the sales
pace of the iPhone when it debuted in 2007. That gives the iPad the
fastest adoption rate of any tech gadget in history, according to
New York's Bernstein Research.
In seeking an explanation for the iPad's success, it's natural
to point to Jobs's uncanny instincts. If Apple operated like other
companies and conducted focus groups to gauge demand, perhaps there
would be no iPad. But Jobs pursued his own agenda, and it was only
after the iPad appeared that the public realized they did indeed
want such a device. "To create a brand new product category, it
takes a pretty ballsy company," says Andrew Brown, director of the
wireless enterprise group at U.K. research firm Strategy
Analytics.
