It is only hours later but already many blogs are saying the iPad is not all that it is cracked up to be. It is apparently a large iPod Touch or maybe it is more than that depending who you read. Whatever it is or not it seems a little too early to be pouring so much cold water on the launch.
People are saying some really nice things and voicing some disappointment. That was bound to happen. The hype was out of this world.
The tablet was going to save the publishing industry in terms of books, magazines and newspapers and now they don’t seem to think so, but they don’t know this for sure as it is all too early and no one has really seen the content. It is as if we had the speculation and then the launch and now the second wave of speculation like some endless carousel.
It is the content that will make or break the iPad. Okay, price as well, but we kind of already knew that. Apple does not do cheap, but it has also sold 250 million iPods; it is a $50 billion company and the biggest mobile app firm in the world. Nice numbers. What is certainly true is that the iPad is beautifully designed and great to use and you don’t get that cheaply. What you get cheap is a make-do bargain netbook PC and they do a certain job.
What they don’t do is even half of what an iPad can do even at this stage, but it is definitely a pricey luxury product and not the universal piece of tech that will quickly create a solid revenue stream for content providers.
People are saying it might take a year. Well that makes sense. If this is after all a device that will have a revolutionary impact (rather than being revolutionary par se) then it will take time for that content to be created and come forth and for that revolutionary change to take place with predictions of three to four million selling in the first year (let’s not forget the famous Slashdot comments writing of the iPod).
As for content. It seems almost like people have not had the time and maybe this was all rushed. People were under whelmed by the New York Times app. Clearly they wanted to be part of this, but the iPad seems more about what the paper will do with its paid content system and that isn’t arriving until 2011 and by then one imagines the app will have been better developed and finessed.
HERE’S WHAT THE BLOGS HAVE TO SAY — THE GOOD
It’s fast and beautiful
BusinessWeek The half-hour or so I spent playing with the iPad at its San Francisco unveiling yesterday was much too short a time to evaluate it authoritatively. What I can say is that it’s fast, beautiful and loaded with potential. I was struck by its speed and responsiveness. In the photo application, for instance, I could race through hundreds of photos in a blur.
Boy is it light
Wired.com The iPad’s really light and thin, weighing only 1.5 pounds and measuring half an inch thick. It was like holding a chubbier iPhone with a prettier face. You can tilt the iPad any direction, even upside down, and the screen will flip to display an upright image.
Great for browsing
Wired.com If you thought the iPhone’s browser was nice, you’ll love the tablet’s version of Safari. It’s been blown up and some of the buttons have been rearranged to better suit a larger screen.
It is just cheap enough
BusinessWeek “At that price, they’ll sell millions,” said Hakim Kriout, a portfolio manager at New York-based Grigsby & Associates, which owns Apple shares. “It’s very, very affordable for what it does. This is going to add a huge revenue stream for Apple.”
Ideal for that novel
Valleywag The silver lining for print media was in books. Jobs showed off an “iBook Store,” an iBook app for e-books, deals with five huge book publishers (Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillian and Hachette) and a format based on the open ePub spec. Jobs even said that textbooks would be a big part of it.
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