A New Way to View
I have always been a big supporter of Apple since I first started using a Macintosh as a kid. Their products are sleek eye candy, their operating system has always been sturdy and easy to use, and pocket-tech like the iPod and iPhone are a pleasure to use.
And now the iPad.
I've been hearing a lot of complaints from the internet. "It's just a big iTouch." "It's xbox huge, why would anybody want to carry it around." Why wouldn't you just carry around a laptop?" And these complaints all seem reasonable. It's questionable if Apple has really produced anything special or new here.
It doesn't really do anything that existing products don't already do it's large there is no multi-tasking and the price... Starting at $500.00 and topping out at over $800 is a little prohibitive.
So who is this product for? Certainly not for someone who just wants an eBook reader the Nook and Kindle are cheaper. The price tag excludes the average iPod owner. Certainly it's not for someone that wants the real power of a laptop. So it must be for someone else.
There are people that love their iTouch and their iPhone's and their eBook readers. That gets to be a lot of technological riff-raff floating around in your bag or your pockets. The way I see it the iPad condenses this mess into one gadget. That is where its strength lies.
With 10 hours of battery life it's significantly more resilient than a laptop, while still allowing you to stay connected to the information superhighway. It has useful applications, it has your phone, and a giant screen for viewing documents on an actual screen. Do you like scrolling through documents on your phone? I don't.
With all the forms of media available there are a million different gadgets out there to view them with and the iPad keeps them all in one easy to carry and easy to use tablet.
And it does it while looking good.
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My problem with this new product (and I am an iphone lover), is that it is more for media viewers and not for media creators. No camera, no connections for uploading content and such - makes it limited. As an ebook, as you said, way too expensive and it simply means yet another ebook format on the market that cannot play well with other ebook readers - waste.
ReplyDeleteOf course, my question is this - how can we connect this product to the general understanding of technology, politics and social media? Will it have a role to play or not? How about an article on Buzz - could have an impact like Twitter has for politics. Rebecca
This release is vintage Apple. Release a new product-line with minimal features, listen to everybody trash it "but it doesn't have this, that or the other thing!", then rake in the money as the product settles in and takes off.
ReplyDeleteIt's a brand new product with no apps and no accessories developed specifically for it. Give it some time. The support for inputs (USB) is in the OS, and it shouldn't be difficult to manufacture a USB adapter for the dock connection; it'll come. And once the apps start coming that take advantage of the larger screen and faster processor...then watch out!
Sure it's twice the price of a basic Kindle, but it's only $10 more than the more-comparable Kindle DX. They both have the exact same screen-size, but the iPad's screen is color, it has more power, it's a touchscreen, it has 4x the storage, plus Apple's iWork suite of apps, and a huge marketplace of existing apps that'll work on it.
And it uses an already existing, non-proprietary ebook format (epub). The iPad may not kill the basic Kindle, but the Kindle DX is dead in the water.