Apple iPad: The moment of truth

The moment of truth

Well the time has come for Apple to reveal the tablet that every­one has been wait­ing for. Even Bill Gates said that

“the future of com­put­ing lies in the small genre of portable com­puter called a ‘tablet PC’.”

back in 2001. In an inter­view in 2007(at around 3:28) on the Daily Show with Jon Stew­art he went on to say that he uses a tablet in meet­ings. But I digress, the Apple Tablet is here and now.Apple is a game changer and there’s no doubt in my mind that the game will change in some way. The tablet, based on the iPhone OS, which in itself rev­o­lu­tion­ized the mobile phone indus­try, is bound to have the same, if not a greater impact than the iPhone. The tablet indus­try has been awfully clumsy and filled with really expen­sive devices. Devices that offered noth­ing spe­cial when com­pared to other com­put­ing devices, only com­pro­mises in an attempt to cram a lot of tech­nol­ogy and power into a very small space.

Tech­nol­ogy has evolved over the years. A quote from a Pop­u­lar Mechanic’s arti­cle on of James Cameron’s Avatar movie applies to tablet com­put­ers up to now:

“the project was so ambi­tious that it took 10 more years before Cameron felt cin­ema tech­nol­ogy had advanced to the point where Avatar was even possible.”

Under that same light, tech­nol­ogy has advanced to a point where tablet com­put­ers can be. That is in terms of sev­eral fac­tors includ­ing com­put­ing and graph­ics pro­cess­ing power, price, bat­tery life and more recently, purpose.

E-book read­ers have really taken off as evi­denced at CES 2010 and with the pop­u­lar­ity of prod­ucts such as the Ama­zon Kin­dle and the Barnes and Noble Nook. This mar­ket is still rel­a­tively young but promis­ing. Most pop­u­lar e-book devices use E-Ink tech­nol­ogy and there’s really no per­fect e-book reader out there. That’s not to say that Apple’s tablet will be per­fect, but it will change the land­scape and rede­fine what peo­ple expect from e-book readers.

An inno­v­a­tive and attrac­tive user inter­face and a mas­sive appli­ca­tions store, cou­pled with sup­port from major media pub­lish­ers such as McGraw Hill and others, guarantee that Apple’s tablet will live up to the hype. There have been many attempts before it, dat­ing back to the 90’s and even beyond that. Recently, it was the Crunch Pad, which had crashed and burned before it became the Joo­Joo and the slates demon­strated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES 2010. All these are inter­est­ing devices, but Apple dif­fers in how much pas­sion, inno­va­tion and hard work they put in their devices.

There’s no point in doing what we’ve always been doing with books/news papers/magazines etc. on this new tech­nol­ogy. The inno­va­tion brought by Apple will cre­ate a whole new fron­tier in con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion. That’s the key. It could poten­tially change all these indus­tries as we know them forever.

At the end of the day, the suc­cess of the device is out of Apple’s hands. It depends on whether these indus­tries can adopt to the changes, if they want to adopt to the changes and most impor­tantly whether or not con­sumers are ready.

The Apple iPad

Spec­i­fi­ca­tions: 9.7″ 1024 x 768 res­o­lu­tion capac­i­tive display

16GB to 64GB storage

1 GHz Cus­tom A4 processor

Bluet­tooth 2.1 + Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)

Assisted GPS + Dig­i­tal Compass

3G UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz) + GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz)

Run­ning a more advanced iter­a­tion of the iPhone OS

Sup­port for all iPhone/iPod Touch apps

Video play­back up to 720p

Intro­duc­ing iBook Store

You can get more infor­ma­tion from the iPad web­site.

The best part is, it’s start­ing at just $499. $499?!?! Wow.

Awe­some