Apple has just unveiled its very latest product on the 27th of January 2010, called the iPad. It looks like a bigger version of the popular iPhone, Steve Jobs displayed the iPad at an event held in San Francisco. So what is the best thing about it? Well. It is powered by an Apple processor, called the A4, and the most shocking prospect is the price. Now the easiest way to describe the iPad, is hold your iPhone in your hands and stretch it until all the sides has a 9.7" multi-touch display, change the plastic back with an aluminium cover, and then you will have a iPad! Technology wise, it is a lot more interesting. The iPad is powered by a 1Ghz Apple A4 chip, and has a battery life of around ten hours, and includes a whole month's worth of standby time.
It only has a few ports (dock connectors), but WiFi and BlueTooth make up for that, some of the iPads models are available in 3g as well. The iPads come with either 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of storage space. Applications from the iphone will work well on here, there is no need to change or modify, as The iPad can either run iPhone applications in a small iPhone-sized window in the middle of the screen, or press the 2x button, that will change it from small to fit the whole screen.
One application which fills the full screen on the iPad and looks incredible, is an application which allows you to have videos embedded within the iPad, so it is made to look like a real newspaper! -photos can also enlarged when pressed. For text inputting on the iPad, this is very similiar to the iPhone which has a small keyboard for you to use and on the iPad, the same process has been applied but in a bigger version, which in effect is not very comfortable and easy to use, because you have to hold the iPad in one hand whilst typing with the other. Not very thoughtful of apple l must say.
I think the iPad software is not very good, frankly speaking. Everything looks a bit geeky, because basically all they have done is taken the iPhone's main interface and supersized all of the widgets. some of the applications have a Microsoft feel to them, The Contacts application looks like a real address book, just like Microsoft, so no prizes for originality there. But still a very good feature for this product.
The main screen, is filled with the same number of image icons just like the iPhone, and those images are even still the same size so there a loads of little white spaces in between each icon. Now one of the main factors of the iPad, if not the most important factor is the E-book aspect, so Apple showed off aspect called iBooks. You can buy, read, and organise your e-books in these feature and the store currently carries books from Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Amp; Schuster, Macmillan, and it even uses the e-pub format!
They also have created what is called "iWork" for this product (USD 9.99 per iWorks applications). In other words, they have created iPad-specific interfaces for Numbers, Pages, and Keynote, These interfaces, have some truly annoying chrome colours and choices of patterns. Also mentioned earlier, there is the 3G function as well, and Apple has negotiated a special deal with At&T for a price of USD 14.99 per month for 250MB of data, USD 29.99 per month for unlimited data, and both options include free use of AT&T's WiFi hotspots. These are pre-paid; you can cancel any time you wish. International deals will be in place by June, but since all 3G iPads are unlocked and support micro SIMs, you can get them to work anywhere.
And here's the big shocker...
Apple will sell the cheapest iPad for only USD 499 - which will have 16GB, and no 3G. The first batch of iPads will begin shipping in 60 days these are the ones without the 3G function, The iPads with 3g built in will be shipped around 30 days later. The accessories for this is a regular dock, and a full sized keyboard.
Now the bad part ha ha...The iPad does not have a camera on the back or front!, so multi-tasking is out of the window, there is a closed eco-system inplace, just like the iPhone. So this will be no good for personal needs, in other words you cannot download and intall codes to watch you favourite TV programs! In all this is a problem I think the iPad, because at USD 499 you would want it to make your dinner as well!
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