Some stuff about the iPad
Instapaper’s iPhone app is going to be great on this thing.
If you don’t like the prices in Apple’s iBook Store, just use Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad.
No 3G? No contracts? (Might be saving this for last/later.)
I’m looking on the photos of this thing and there doesn’t seem to be a camera, video or otherwise.
The iPad appears to be a device that you use sitting down. Can you type on it while holding it standing up?
Ok, there’s 3G. $15/mo for 250 MB of data. $30/mo for “unlimited”.
iPad is unlocked. International SIM cards “will just work”.
Price: $500. Boom. That’s for the low-end model with no 3G.
Ooh, keyboard dock. If they could outfit that with a hinge and some sort of latching device, I wonder what that kind of thing would look like? (Will the keyboard work with the iPhone — er, iPad nano — as well?)
Will there be an iBook Reader/Store app for the iPhone?
Oh, from earlier: Jobs repositioned Apple as a “mobile devices company”.
Right at the end, Jobs showed a street sign marking the intersection of “Technology” and “Liberal Arts”. I guess that means that kottke.org is now in direct competition with Apple, Inc. YOU’RE GOING DOWN, STEVE!
Watching AAPL’s share price live: the moment Jobs announced the iPad’s base price ($499), Apple’s market cap increased by $5 billion.
The iPad page is up on Apple’s web site. Nothing on the store yet.
The iPad makes the Kindle look like it’s from the 1980s.
Amazon’s stock price is up…it dipped a bit when the iPad’s price was announced but recovered shortly after. I have heard more than a few people say that the Kindle is “dead”. But one minus in the iPad column is that readability in the outdoors is not going to be so good…the iPhone in the sunshine might as well be a stone for how useful it is.
If you watch the video on Apple’s site, there are now (at least) three different keyboard interactions people need to know to use Apple products. There’s 10-fingered touch typing on analog keyboards, thumb typing on the iPhone keyboard, and (about 2:30 into the video) the really odd 4-fingered no-thumbs way of typing on the iPad.
Thinking ahead to the iPad 2, they’ll add a video camera, right? What else?
Whoa, the zooming on the Google Maps apps (@ 3:45 in the video) looks incredible. The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?
The orientation on the keyboard dock is wrong…it should be horizontal, not vertical.
Gruber gleefully reports that there’s no Flash on the iPad. Which is a genuine bummer because this thing is perfect for playing all the (free!) addictive Flash games that I so love.
iPad is not a good name. Too close to iPod for one thing. But mainly just blah.
If the iPhone is any indication, this thing is going to be great for kids. Ollie likes playing games and looking at videos on the iPhone but the larger screen size of the iPad allows for more collaborative play…one kid + one adult or two kids using it together. The iPhone is for solitary use; the iPad can be collaborative (or at least collective). Later: Sippey calls the iPad the family computer:
It looks like a great machine to travel from the living room to the kitchen to the kids room to the bedroom. We’ll search the web on it, read the news on it, the kids will do email on it, play Brushes and Bejeweled on it, and it’ll be the perfect complement to the Sunday afternoon TV football ritual. We’ll use it to control the music in the house, and do some quick bet-settling during dinner. I’m sure we’ll eventually enjoy some multiplayer “board” games on it, or read a book on it, or watch a TV show on it. And the kids will argue with each other over who gets it next. (Dad will.)
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