Hasta La Gadget!

The iPad was supposed to change the face of computing, to be a completely new form of digital experience. But what Steve Jobs showed us yesterday was in fact little more than a giant iPhone. A giant iPhone that doesn’t even make calls. Many were expecting cameras, kickstands and some crazy new form of text input. The iPad, though, is better defined by what isn’t there.

Flash

Many people will bemoan the lack of support for Adobe’s interactive software, Flash. It wasn’t mentioned, but eagle-eyed viewers would have seen the missing plugin icon on the New York Times site during yesterday’s demo, and given that Apple clearly hates Flash as both a non-open web “standard” and as a buggy, CPU-hungry piece of code, it’s unlikely it will ever be added, unless Apple decides it wants to cut the battery life down to two hours.

Who needs Flash, anyway? YouTube and Vimeo have both switched to H.264 for video streaming (in Chrome and Safari, at least — Firefox doesn’t support it), and the rest of the world of Flash is painful to use.

In fact, we think the lack of Flash in the iPad will be the thing that finally kills Flash itself. If the iPad is as popular as the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flash-capable browsers will eventually be in the minority.

OLED

One of the biggest rumors said that there would be two iPads, one with an OLED screen and one without. But as our own Apple-master Brian X Chen pointed out, an OLED panel of this size runs to around $400. Add in the rest of the hardware and even the top-end $830 model wouldn’t be making Apple much money.

OLED also has some dirty secrets. It may be more colorful, but it uses more power than an LED backlit screen when all the diodes are lit up (white on black text is where OLED energy savings shine). It is also rather dim in comparison, and making an e-reader that you can’t use outdoors would be a stupid move from Apple.

USB

The iPad is meant to be an easy-to-use appliance, not an all-purpose computer. A USB port would mean installing drivers for printers, scanners and anything else you might hook up. But there is a workaround: the dock connector. Apple has already announced a camera connection kit, a $30 pair of adapters which will let you either plug the camera in direct or plug in an SD card to pull off the photos.

The subtle message here is that it’s not a feature for the pros: the lack of a Compact Flash slot in that adapter says “amateur photographers only.”

Expect a lot more of these kinds of accessories, most likely combined with software. How long can it be before, say, EyeTV makes an iPad-compatible TV tuner?

GPS

Apple put a compass inside every iPad, so you’d think that there would be a GPS unit in there, too. The Wi-Fi-only models get nothing, just like the iPod Touch, but more surprising is that the 3G iPads come with Assisted GPS.

Assisted GPS can be one of two things, both of which which offload some work to internet servers and use cell-tower triangulation. The difference is that some AGPS units have real GPS too, and some don’t. We’ll know which the iPad has as soon as we get our hands on one.

Multitasking

From the demonstrations at the Jobsnote it appears that, like the iPhone, we can’t run applications in the background. This will annoy many Wired readers, but it will not matter at all to the target user, who will be using the iPad to browse and consume media. In fact, this user will benefit, as the lack of CPU-cycle-sucking background processes is likely a large part of that ten-hour battery life.

If you are authoring content, like this post, then multiple browser windows, a text editor, a mail client and a photo editor all make sense. If you’re reading an e-book, not so much.

Keyboard

Nobody really thought the iPad would have a physical keyboard. That won’t stop the whining, though. The difference, again, between the iPad and a MacBook is that one is a multi-purpose device and the other is a media player.

The fact that Apple actually has made an optional keyboard for it is the biggest surprise (apart from the iPad’s base $500 price). In fact, this little $70 keyboard will mean that, despite its simplified nature, the iPad is enough laptop for many people. Why bother with a $400 netbook when you can have this instead?

Camera

No video camera, no stills camera, and no webcam. The first two will likely never make it into a future iPad, as we all have our iPhones or actual cameras with us, too. But the lack of a webcam is odd, as it closes off the possibility of using the iPad as a videophone.

I figure this is a cost-saving measure on Apple’s part. Too bad, though, as it is the only thing that stops me buying an iPad for my parents, whom I talk to on Skype. There seems to be no other reason not to have a webcam in the bezel other than price. We expect to see one in v2.0.

Verizon

iPhone users hate AT&T, but the only alternative is T-Mobile, whose coverage isn’t as good. Until Verizon switches to the world-standard GSM SIM card, don’t expect to see an Apple product on its network. You can forget all those Verizon iPhone rumors right now.

16:9

The iPad screen is a relatively square, by today’s standards, with an old-school 4:3 screen aspect ratio. This is not ideal for watching widescreen movies: you get a thick black “letterbox” bar top and bottom. But take another look at the hardware: the Apple on the back, and the position of the home button both tell us that the iPad is meant to be used in portrait mode, at least most of the time. And a 16:9 aspect ratio in this orientation would look oddly tall and skinny, like an electronic Marilyn Manson.

It’s a compromise, and a good one. If you really do spend most of your time watching movies on the iPad, maybe you should think about buying, you know, a big TV.

HDMI

There will be video out, likely through the dock connector, as Jobs said during his presentation that you’ll be able to hook the iPad up to a projector. But no HDMI out? How do you hook it up to your HD monitor?

The short answer is that you don’t. The maximum audience for an iPad screening is two. You want more? Use your laptop and hook that up, or your desktop machine. Remember, there are two kinds of people who will buy the iPad. One, nerds like you and me, who care about things like HDMI and also already own a computer that can do that.

And two, people who are buying this instead of a computer. Those people will probably still have DVD collections, or even VCRs. They don’t even know what HDMI is. I think I can guess what Apple thought about putting another expensive connector into the machine just to please a few geeks.

Photo: Jon Snyder

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• Would You Buy an iPad? Wired Readers Weigh In
• With iPad, Apple Still Has a Fatal Attraction for AT&T
• Can Apple's iPad Save the Media After All?

The iPad might have iBooks, but if Apple’s built-in iPhone apps are anything to go by, then it will likely be gorgeous but limited (the Mail app, anyone?). We think that it’ll be the third party e-book readers that turn the Moses Tablet into the Kindle Killer people so obviously want it to be.

Ironically, the Kindle application will be among those that will run just fine on the iPad as it is, and Amazon is likely to update it. But the first third-party e-book announcement is from Kobo, the maker of the fine iPhone app of the same name. Kobo will run on the iPad as is, but the team is already working on a larger version.

In the screenshots, you can see that the bookshelf metaphor is there, as we presume it has to be with all future e-book applications, but it has been joined by a navigation list at the side, like the new Apple Mail application for the iPad. It’s fine, but little more than an amalgamation of two existing screens in the iPhone version.

What we really like is the reading screen. Instead of lamely aping the pages of a paper book like Apple’s iBook, the entire screen is available for text. A page-curl animation made it in, but you can switch that off, and the progress bar along the bottom is genuinely useful, like that on the Kindle only easier to read.

The one thing these reader applications will need is in-app purchasing. Not because Apple will necessarily demand it – Kindle for iPhone uses content bought at Amazon – but because the consumer will want it. Faced with a separate login, adding credit card details and having to navigate to a separate web site, most users will just use the simple, quick, built-in iTunes book store.

The iPad Is Finally Here And Kobo Is Ready!) [Kobo. Thanks, Nick!]

For some of us, amid all the hubbub about revolutions and whatnot yesterday, the most significant announcement on hand was Apple’s supposedly custom A4 CPU. Alas, in the cold and brutal light of the morning after, we’re hearing that it is in fact a system-on-a-chip driven by a Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU “identical” to the one found inside NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, while besting the iPhone 3GS significantly with its 1GHz speed and multicore architecture. The A4 is composed of that Cortex barnburner, an integrated memory controller, and the Mali GPU, making it an all ARM affair — though we still don’t know how much Apple and PA Semi did in terms of arranging and integrating those components within the silicon. While still not 100 percent confirmed, it would seem there were no revolutions on the iPad’s processing front — just a rebranded bit of well engineered hardware.

Apple’s A4 chip is ARM Cortex A9 with an ARM Mali GPU? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple didn’t give us a great amount of time with its newly unveiled iPad today, and as you’ve likely seen, we spent the bulk of our allotment touching the unit itself. Lost in the proverbial shuffle were a number of the unit’s launch accessories, including the admittedly intriguing keyboard dock ($69), case ($39), iPad Dock Connector to VGA adapter ($29) and camera connection kit ($29). Each of these doodads seem to look and feel exactly as you’d expect ’em to, though we’re still baffled by Apple’s decision to make you pay extra for access to the world’s most widely accepted connector. We’re also somewhat appalled (but not surprised) by the $39 price tag purportedly attached to the stripped-down case, and while the $69 MSRP on the keyboard dock is apt to cause some grumbling, at least there are a few iPad-specific keys on there to make it (marginally) worth your while. Dig in below for more on each.

Read – iPad keyboard dock hands-on
Read – iPad case hands-on
Read – iPad Dock Connector to VGA adapter hands-on
Read – iPad camera connection kit hands-on

Apple’s iPad keyboard dock, case and other accessories get the hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Apple iPad won’t be out for another 60 long days for us mere mortals, so we’ve got our hands on its SDK — it’s the next best thing for now, as you can see in the gallery of screenshots below. Strangely, the emulator’s bezel is a tad thinner than the real thing, but we’ll get over it. Enjoy!

Apple iPad’s user interface in pictures originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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