Yesterday, Apple unveiled the iPad.
That’s it on the left, with a Kindle 2 on the right. It’s not hard to fall in love with the iPad. What’s hard is figuring out what market Apple is shooting for, and what to do with it once I (inevitably) buy one. Although my gut reaction was to compare and contrast the iPad against Amazon’s Kindle, Apple has made it clear that the iPad is not only set to compete in the e-reader market, but against the netbook market as well.
The iPad (and let’s just get this out the way — it sounds like a feminine hygiene product) will set you back a minimum of $499, but that’s for a 16 gig model. Add $100 for 32 gig of storage and another $100 for 64 gig. The iPad comes with WiFi, but if you want 3G access you’ll need to add it ($130 for the modem). And, for 3G, two monthly data plans have been announced: $15/month for limited bandwidth, $30/month for unlimited. While the $499 being touted sounds good, the biggest model with 3G is going to run you $829 plus $30/month.
When compared to the Kindle, it’s not clear as to which is the victor. The iPad’s full color, multi-touch screen is obviously blows away the Kindle’s 16 shades of gray display out of the water, but it does come at a price. The Kindle uses e-ink technology, which is much easier on the eyes than an LCD screen (especially when reading for long periods of time). E-ink technology also gives the Kindle an astounding battery life. Mine lasts somewhere between two and four weeks before it needs recharging. The iPad is expected to get around 10 hours of usage between charges, and we all know that 10 hours really means 7 or 8 if you’re using wireless.
The Kindle’s lifeblood is Amazon, where users can buy e-books online and have them wirelessly delivered to them via the Kindle’s 3G connection. For the iPad, Apple has announced the iBookStore. Apple has already shown that they know how to run an electronic online delivery system (iTunes), and I wouldn’t expect any less from iBookStore. Books will be delivered to the iPad in ePub format. The good news is ePub is a free and open source format, so at least Apple isn’t reinventing the wheel. The bad news is, ePub supports DRM, which I fully expect them to implement. Both the Kindle and the iPad can also display PDF files, but I can tell you that, at least on the Kindle 2’s 6″ screen, it’s a miserable experience and one I gave up on after about three tries. Assuming the iPad contains the same “pinch and expand” gestures that are included on the iPod/iPhone, the iPad would win the PDF reading contest, hands down. The iPad also surely has to win the mp3 playing contest. The Kindle’s mp3 player is so watered down and simplistic that it seems like it was added on as a joke, while the iPad will contain the iPod’s music system. No brainer there.
The iPad also plans on taking on the netbook market. Netbook users can be divided into two categories: light users, and heavy users. Light users are those who use netbooks to check e-mail and surf the web, while heavy users are those that use them like any other computer (programming, remote administration, etc.) I’d say the iPad would work as a replacement for the first category, but not the second. As I stated the other day, most of what I do “on the road” that I used to do with a laptop, I can now do with my iPhone. That includes e-mail, getting news and weather updates, updating Facebook and Twitter, and so on. The iPad appears to be running the same OS as the iPod/iPhone, which means you probably won’t be coding applications for it anytime soon. If you have custom scripts or applications you use on your netbook, I doubt you’ll be able to replicate that on the iPad. And while I’ve complained at length about my netbook’s cramped keyboard, I can’t exactly imagine cranking out the next great American novel on the iPad’s virtual keyboard, either.
To me, the iPad feels like something from the future. Like, when we were kids and they promised us flat screen computers in the kitchen to help us cook and video tablets with which we could chat with virtual simulations of dead relatives or something … this is what I was imagining. We’ll have to wait until 2010 to see if the iPad makes a dent in the netbook and e-reader markets or if people will be confused and wonder what exactly to do with this thing. At $829 for a loaded model, I could buy both a netbook and a Kindle and have a few hundred dollars left over.
In the meantime, is anyone interested in buying a slightly used Kindle 2? :)
Something I forgot to mention: the iPad lacks GPS and a camera. A camera would make this the perfect video Skype solution, and a GPS would make this the perfect in-car entertainment solution. Maybe in the iPad 2.0?
Unfortunately, iPad 2.0 is colloquially being referred to as the Max-iPad, which will hopefully also have multi-tasking. The more features I think it could use, the more I realize that what I’m asking for is a netbook, which this thing isn’t.
As to GPS, the 3G variety apparently has AGPS, which uses Cell-phone triangulation (like the first-gen iPhone), which doesn’t completely suck. It’s also possible that the AGPS could have real GPS, but if it did I would have thought it would have been mentioned.