The Apple iPad: What Does It Do, and Why Would I Want One?

A couple of days ago, I wrote a short piece for this site about what I expected the then-mythical Apple “tablet” to be. In a nutshell, my prediction was that this would be not an earth-shattering device but rather a familiar, logical, and surprisingly handy compliment to your existing technology setup. And that you’d want one. Well, I wasn’t far off.

One of the biggest surprises turned out to be Steve Jobs’s acknowledgement of the feverish rumors surrounding today’s announcement. Upon taking the stage at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, and following a brief introduction covering Apple’s iPod sales and recent rise to $50 billion status, Jobs displayed a giant slide depicting Moses and his tablets, accompanied by a quote from the Wall Street Journal’s Martin Peers: “Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” Thanks to 250 million iPod sales, the huge success of the iPhone, and the fact that most Macs sold today are notebooks, Jobs was able to claim that Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world. “Bigger than Sony, bigger than Nokia, even.” Today, he said, it would take that a step further.

So what exactly is the iPad, and why might i want one?

02-handson.jpgThe rumors were true: it’s essentially a giant iPod touch, allowing you to use all your existing “apps,” a movie and music player, a photo display device, and a rich e-book reader. The latter will likely be the much-expected “game-changer,” since it takes the e-book, made famous by Amazon’s Kindle reader, into the 21st century.

iBooks, as Apple is calling them, are sold and downloaded directly onto the device through the iBook Store, whose interface is nearly identical to those of its iTunes and App Store sisters. Purchased books live on your personal bookshelf, wood effect and all, and when a full-color cover is touched, the iBook opens—literally the cover opens up—onto your screen to the first page. As if you hadn’t realized by now, this is a long way from the Kindle’s dull black-to-gray flashing screen. The pages of the books even have an off-white coloring and a visual representation of paper texture. Fonts can be scaled up and down for easier readability, and the typeface itself can be changed to your taste, should you be dying to read Stephen King in Helvetica. Rotating the iPad into landscape view, utilizing the famed accelerometer also found in the iPhone and iPod touch, brings up a two-paged view of the book, complete with a shadowed seam down the middle. A simple touch turns the page, or you can search content, look up a word in the dictionary, or flip to the contents page and back again. It’s simple yet clever, and I’m eager to see a magazine interpreted in a similar fashion. I had the opportunity to speak to Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, as to whether we could expect magazines to appear on the iPad soon, and whether they'd be in the iBook Store or through stand-alone apps. His simple and expectedly vague answer was simply: "We're focusing on books right now."

Obviously, the iPad is more than just a glorified e-reader. A standard iPod connector allows you to attach an external keyboard, route video to your HD TV or projector, and upload photos from your iPhone. Web browsing is fluid and simple, although, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, there’s no support for Adobe Flash. The battery life sounds sturdy: “typical use” will grant your 10 hours of life from a full charge, and up to a month of standby time when not in use. As Jobs said in his presentation, “I can watch movies non-stop from San Francisco to Tokyo and not run out of battery.”

The iPad will sell at an entry price of $499 for a Wi-Fi model with 16GB of internal solid-state storage. Storage may be doubled to 32GB for $100 extra, and then doubled again to 64GB for an additional $100. If you’d like to use it outside of a Wi-Fi zone, each model has the option of 3G connectivity, for $130 more. Data plans will be served by AT&T (an announcement met with groans from the event attendees) for $14.99/month for limited use, and $29.99/month for unlimited use.

The event concluded with Jobs claiming Apple is motivated by its position at “the edge of technology and the liberal arts,” understanding the way we consume media, striving the enrich that experience. The reception among the events attendees seemed wildly positive, and most of those assembled seemed to feel that there really is a place for a device sandwiched between smart phones and laptops. A hands-on fingerprint-frenzy followed, attended by Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jonathan Ive (the iPad and iPod’s industrial designer), and even Twitter’s famous son Stephen Fry. Handling the device was almost underwhelming, because it’s so intuitive and familiar. I felt at home with it right away.

That said, I did overhear someone asking if it will come with a mouse—perhaps not everyone thinks the future is at his fingertips.

SOURCE : http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/01/the-apple-ipad-what-does-it-do-and-why-would-i-want-one.html