Top Stories for the Week of January 25 – 29, 2009
Yes, there was other news this week. President Obama remind Americans why they voted for him in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie may be headed for the rocks. Tiger Woods is itching to get back on the golf course. And the lineup of commercials to air during the Super Bowl may include a controversial pro-life ad in which Florida quarterback Tim Tebow makes us contemplate life without him. But the news burning up blogs this week comes from San Francisco. Apple Gazette calls it the End of an Era–the glorious age of speculating about the Apple tablet. Now, “after nearly a decade of rumors and speculation, Apple’s finally unveiled the iPad,” explains Engadget. Fast Company says the iPad’s biggest innovation is its price, starting at $499, Analysts think it’ll “sell millions,” reports 9 to 5 Mac.
Woo hoo! Alright!! At last! So…hate to ask, but…what’s it for? “The simplest way to explain the iPad would be to call it an overgrown iPhone,” FastCo says. (but it won’t make calls.) Sync joins among the many calling it an “iPod Touch on steroids.” All of which means apps, apps galore! “It can run any of the 140,000 apps in the AppStore and uses the iPhone operating system,” VentureBeat says. So as Gizmodo assures: “Don’t worry, friends! The hundreds of dollars you’ve spent on fart apps will not have gone to waste
with the iPad: it can fart, too. Just smaller, and in the middle of the
screen.” (Apps can run in iPhone size or “pixel doubled” to fill the
iPad). O’Reilly Radar
says “what really jumped out to me…is that the device is clearly
built for media consumption. Movies, music, books, news–the bread and
butter content that keeps iTunes humming. ” MTV Movies agrees that’s the ticket: “fresh ways to consume video, from HD movies to full-screen YouTube clips to web footage on The New York Times Web site.” Wowie. TNR goes so far as to say the iPad usners in a new era of computing and the PC is dead.
Oh,
yeah–did we mention Kindle Killer? Eh, maybe. The iBooks app does look
cool, and five large publishers (Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan,
Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) announced support, says The Apple Blog: “I think the biggest advantage that Apple will bring to the e-book reader market is a reading experience that is on par with the Amazon Kindle, but on a multi-purpose device that will have wider appeal.” But VX50 says it’s no Kindle killer–yet. iReader Review
says no way, Jose, the iPad as a Kindle Killer is pure hype. “Apple did
not target the Kindle or reading..Apple is assuming that people will
prefer a device that can run movies and play games and read books over a device optimized for books….The truth is, Apple is behaving exactly the way someone who doesn’t read books would.”
In fact, the whole deal has left some folks unimpressed. The Unofficial Apple Weblog
notes that even turned sideways the screen serves up 2000-and-late 4×3
dimensions, not the widescreen 16×9 shape of our HD movies of the
future. “Watching a movie on the new iPad will not be as pleasurable experience as you might think,”
TUAW sez. “It turns out that 16×9 will give you big honking black bars
at the top and bottom of your screen.” Anyone else got a gripe? ReadWriteWeb says lack of a camera is an iPad Killer. Edible Apple thinks no multitasking is bad news. “A real disappointment.
All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No
multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you’re working in Pages…
It’s a real setback.” Bottom line, it’s a big yawn, says Business Insider.
“Steve didn’t show off any must-have features or applications…. It’s
probably going to sell in the range of a few million units this year,
much closer to one of the company’s Macs than its runaway hits like the
iPod and iPhone.”
Then there’s all the immature craziness about the name. “With iPad Sounding Like a Feminine Hygiene Product, Will the Jokes Ever Stop?,” asks Daily Finance. Seriously? Gizmodo reports from the front line: “There’s no escaping the iTampon, iMaxiPad, iMenstruate quips. Hell, they’re a trending topic on Twitter at this point and the gals at Jezebel are having a blast with them.” Hopefully this will pass. “My seven-year-old could come up with a cleverer comparison,” writes Kara Swisher at All Things D. “But Silicon Valley being what it is, this is exactly what you get.” She quotes Steve Jobs saying “You forget, but they made fun of iPod name when it came out.”
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