January 27, 2010, 2:35 PM — That sound you hear is Apple rumormongers finally breathing a sigh of relief, as the tablet -- sorry, we can now start calling it the iPad now -- has finally arrived (though it won't arrive in stores for approx. 60-90 days), and they can spend time obsessing over something that at least kind of exists. What is this brave new device that will be mandatory for all humans soon, and what does it do? At last, we have some answers. (Your faithful blogger was not invited to San Francisco to see it, so he followed the live-blogging from Endgadget, Ars Technica, gdgt, and MacRumors.)
The presentation itself took place on a stage featuring a table and a chair -- perhaps to emphasize the homey settings in which you'd curl up with a tablet? Jobs appeard to great applause, and referred to the new product he'd be introducing as "magical," which, wow. They're buying their own hype now, I suppose. He boasted of iPod sales (250 million total) and App Store sales (3 billion downloaded), and asserted that Apple was the "largest mobile device business in the world today." He also said that Apple invented the modern notebook, which, I suppose you could argue. Have they invented the next big thing?
Jobs started by taking on criticisms of the sort I've been making head-on: That the tablet will be a third category of thing, between the smartphone and the laptop, and to justify itself must be "better than a laptop at browsing the web, enjoying and sharing photos, videos, enjoying music, playing games, reading e-books." He paused to sneer at netbooks, saying "The problem is netbooks aren’t better at anything. They’re just cheap laptops." What's Apple's answer? The iPad.
The iPad: Looks and specs
The look -- well, you're seeing it everywhere now, but it does in fact look like a big iPhone, with a good-sized bezel and yes, just that one home key button. It's "incredibly thin" and has the iPhone's orientation-swapping gimmick. Jobs called it "the best browsing experience you’ve ever had." And the keyboard is, as expected, on-screen -- looks awful big to me. (Jobs called it a "dream to type one" -- hmm -- and typed with it on his lap, no thumbs. The whole thing is "more intimate than a laptop, and more capable than a smartphone."
While the UI definitely looks more like the iPhone than the Mac, you can do two things at once -- Jobs demonstrated writing email (the windows take up only part of the screen) while the Time Magazine site lurked in the background.
Jobs wasn't kidding when he said it was thin -- it's half an inch thick, and weighs a pound and a half, "thinner and lighter than any netbook." Screen is 9.7 inches, and yes, there's multitouch. The first really wow spec of the day: 10 hours of battery life, supposedly! Even watching video! And a month of standby power. And there's 16 to 64 GB of flash memory to hold your data.
Apple normally doesn't tout the guts of its iPods and iPhones, but they did at least mention the 1 GHz "Apple A4 processor" inside -- presumably the brainchild of the PA Semiconductor acquisition.
Oh, yeah, and remember all my grousing about a keyboard? Well, you can get one, from Apple, that turns the thing into a little mini-iMac. (No word on the price on that.)
Content and Apps
Of course, the iTunes store is built in. Jobs showed off how the iTunes LP artwork looked on the screen confirming the view that this format was designed with this device in mind.
You can sync your photos with your computer -- and that computer can be a Mac or a PC. If you're using a Mac, you can also get a lot of metadata information from iPhoto. The photo app also integrates with the (Google-based; no Apple-Google divorce yet, apparently) mapping application, so you can see where your photos were taken.
YouTube and TV shows and movies are also available. Safari looked good in the demos, as you might expect.
There's a calendar app, as you might expect, with a slick UI that makes it look like a physical day planner. Though there are several different views you can get, it's essentially just a souped-up iCal.
The maps app connects to GPS, and the street views are honestly kind of eerie at this size and form factor.
HD video is pretty slick. The actual screen dimensions are a bit squarer than HD's typical widescreen, but it looks good.
And what about all those iPhone apps? Well, they run on the iPod "right out of the box" -- either at native resolution in a box on the screen, or full-sized with pixels doubled. But of course, there's a new SDK released today that will allow developers to build iPad-native apps or port iPhone apps as well. A number of app developers came on stage to demo apps that they had converted from iPhone form in just a few weeks.
Phil Schiller was given the task of demoing the iPad version of iWork, which took substantially longer to create than the few weeks for the other app developers, thanks the completely reworked UI. Schiller demonstrated putting together a Keynote slideshow with predefined elements (a lot of dragging and dropping); with Pages, you can scroll through documents, and when you tap on text, the keyboard pops up. The question is (and sorry to keep harping on this), how easy is that on-screen keyboard to type on? Schiller called it the "most beautiful word processor you’ve ever used" -- but is it the most convenient? Obviously the hardware keyboard goes a long way towards fixing that problem, assuming you're someplace where you can set the thing up on a desk. Numbers too looks gorgeous, but again usability is hard to tell from demos. Each app will cost $9.99 through the App Store -- huh! Is Apple undercutting itself now?
The iPad saves print?
Next came the print people. The New York Times showed off a native iPad app that they said "captured the essence of a newspaper, but so much more." The formatting is similar to the physical paper, but you can skip around, change the column widths, watch video, and so on. It looked great, but no word on the pricing of what too many people who should know better claim is somehow going to save journalism.
Jobs introduced an app called iBooks, which is, essentially, the iTunes of e-books. With a hat-tip to the Kindle, he proclaimed that Apple would "stand on [Amazon's] shoulders and go a little further." The interface looks -- well, pretty much like a book (there are even little fake pages on the sides), and you can see your available books on a fake shelf, which to my mind is too cute by half. As rumored, there's an iBook store, with all the major publishers lined up to provide content for it. Prices seem to be on the high end -- Jobs bought the Ted Kennedy bio during his demo for $14.99. You can change the font, change the size, look at photos, etc. Books are in the open ePub format.
Connectivity
All iPads come with 802.11n, as one might expect, and Bluetooth. There's also the standard dock connector, for powering the iPad and connecting it to peripherals (Schiller mentioned a projector) and computers. Some models also come with 3G from -- HA! GET THIS! -- AT&T, with a $14.99 plan for 250 MB a month, and unlimited for $29.99. (For the record, that's half what an unlimited data plan for the iPhone costs, though you get discounts on family plans.) You also get free access to AT&T hotspots, and, in an interesting twist, don't have to sign a contract: it's all paid up front. And what abou non-USAns? Well, all models are unlocked and use GSM micro-SIMS; Steve says your SIM card may "just work." (Yes, they are working on deals with international carriers too.)
The iPad syncs over USB via iTunes, pretty much the way the iPhone does.
Price and availability
Oh, right, we're going to have to pay for this, aren't we? Well, for me the hugest news was the price: the base 16 GB model with no 3G connectivity is $499. That's still pretty pricey, but it's nowhere near the $700-800 a lot of folks were expecting, and goes a long way for me to making this a more realistic purchase for people. 3G costs $130 more, and there's obviously price bumps for the extra storage; the 64 GB model with 3G comes in at $829. The pay-as-you go option for 3G connectivity is also an extremely intriguing angle; it makes it possible to meter your usage of the connectivity, and reduce the overall cost of owning the thing. Will that equal more people owning it? We'll see in March, when the Wi-Fi-only version hits stores. (The 3G version will be available a month after that.)
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