My Thoughts on the iPad

Almost a decade ago, Apple released the iPod Clas­sic. It fea­tured a black and white screen and a 5 or 10 Giga­byte hard drive and the only oper­at­ing sys­tems com­pat­i­ble with the device are Mac OS X. The com­pat­i­bil­ity soon expanded to Win­dows almost a year after.

The iPod Clas­sic inven­tion rev­o­lu­tion­ized the music mar­ket. Peo­ple started switch­ing from Music CDs to MP3 and related file types. Apple started devel­op­ing bet­ter iPods – such as the iPod Shuf­fle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch. Even­tu­ally, this lead to the iPhone that is so pop­u­lar these days. If you go onto a pub­lic bus, there will be at least one per­son with an iPod or iPhone.

Last week, Apple Inc announced the Apple iPad. It is sched­uled to be released in March 2010 for WiFi edi­tions and April 2010 for 3G+WiFi edi­tions. For most peo­ple, they just saw it as a 10-inch ver­sion of the iPod Touch. With all the rumours that have been going around prior to the announce­ment, I was dis­ap­pointed when they announced its fea­tures. I have been a fan of Apple prod­ucts – but this time they have let me down. Even my Black­berry or Net­Book have more fea­tures than the iPad and it is more portable than the iPad.

The iPad is a portable device that fea­tures a 9.7-inches LED-backlit IPS LCD dis­play. My Mac­Book is 13-inches and my Tablet PC is 12.1-inches. The whole iPad is 0.5-inches thin and is 1.5 pounds (1.6 pounds if you are opt­ing for the iPad 3G). The device is almost as thin as the iPhone and heav­ier than the iPhone 3GS. The weight of the iPhone 3GS is only 0.3 pounds.

It runs in a 1 GHz Apple A4 Chip. A reg­u­lar iPod Touch and iPhone has an 833 MHz Chip that is under­clocked to 600 MHz. If you do not under­stand this, this means that the pro­cess­ing power of the iPad is almost twice as fast as in iPod Touch or iPhone. I have used my friends’ iPod Touch and iPhone before. When I oper­ate those gad­gets, I usu­ally crash the device within an hour. The iPad will be able to run all the apps seam­lessly with­out any lag.  The best part about this is that it has a 10 hour bat­tery life!

The iPad comes in 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB solid state hard dri­ves. The mem­ory on iPods and iPhone are using Flash Mem­ory tech­nol­ogy. This means that the iPad will be able to read and write the data faster than the iPod and iPhone.
The iPad has every input fea­ture that an iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd gen­er­a­tion has, includ­ing: Multi-touch touch­screen dis­play, head­set con­trols, prox­im­ity and ambi­ent light sen­sors, 3-axis accelerom­e­ter, dig­i­tal com­pass
The iPad has the same WiFi con­nec­tiv­ity fea­ture as the iPhone 3GS, except for the fact that the iPad can con­nect to 802.11a and 802.11n. Just like the iPhone 3GS, the iPad has HSPDA tech­nol­ogy on it thus it will be able to use the 3G fea­tures that Bell, Rogers, and Telus cur­rently operate.

The iPad will have all the stores that the iPhone 3GS has, except that it will also have access to the iBook­Store. Patrons of the iPad will be able to pur­chase books, nov­els and text­books from the iBookStore.

Apple is not try­ing to make a Net­book. Apple is not try­ing to make a cel­lu­lar phone either. What Apple is try­ing to do is to make an eBook reader – sim­i­lar to the Sony Reader and the Ama­zon Kin­dle. Com­pared to the Sony Reader and Ama­zon Kin­dle, the device is way better.

If you look at the Sony Reader and Ama­zon Kin­dle, they only fea­ture a black and white screen and the only task that you can do is read. Apple is mak­ing a sim­i­lar device that allows you to also watch movies, play games and do some word pro­cess­ing. (You can pur­chase iWork for $9.99 per product).

If I were to buy a keyboard-less Tablet, I would wait for the HP Slate or Asus EEE Tablet to come out. The HP Slate is pow­ered by Win­dows 7 and the Asus EEE Tablet is pow­ered on Google’s new oper­at­ing sys­tem, Google Android. I would much pre­fer the HP Slate as I know that Win­dows 7 sup­ports mul­ti­task­ing, which none of the iPod, iPhone or iPad prod­ucts support.

Usu­ally Apple prod­ucts do not have a pos­i­tive feed­back dur­ing its first gen­er­a­tion release.  I am expect­ing that Apple will release their sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPad next sum­mer, with more fea­tures.  If you are plan­ning on buy­ing the iPad, I would rec­om­mend you buy the HP Slate or wait till next sum­mer to see what happens.

Edit: And one more thing, Apple has to be more cre­ative in their nam­ing process. The name “iPad” shows how out-of-touch they are with our society.

Here is a funny video to watch.  If you get offended eas­ily, do not watch!

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