Apple iPad confirmed

I think the name could have been different, but i really cant wait to get my hands on it, im in Dubai in April- Maybe by chance there will be some there!!
 
while i want one of these, i'm more excited about what future products this will spawn from competitors and apple itself. the iphone was brilliant at making touch screen mobile phones the defacto mobile media device to have. hopefully the same will happen for this kind of product/device.
will wait and see what comes from it.
 
so what's the deal with e-ink?
i thought everybody was sold on it.
now everybody's suddenly able to read on an oled?
methinks it was never in the eyes and was always in the mind...
 
broken1 said:
I am also a little underwhelmed.

A great internet device. Will I watch movies on it? Probably not. I have a 50" plasma. Will I listen to music on it. Probably not.

Will I take it as a internet device on holiday? Sure thing!!

It should have had a camera
It should have had an SD Slot
Does it have a file manager?
Can it play DivX or mvk? If not...it's useless to me as a video viewer as most of my vids are DivX and I cant be bothered to recode things.
Click to expand...

I don't mind the lack of camera - small CMOS cams suck anyway.

It won't play DivX or MKV or rather, it's not a container problem but a codec problem. It's a weak device - it can only play back Main Profile at L3

H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
Click to expand...

It's not powerful enough to do H.264 Advanced Profile and higher bitrates or res above 720p which Intel GMA 500 (with right drivers) and Ion can do easily. This means that all the video you download or have from your camera or editing suite (XDCAM HD 1080p30 in my case at 35Mb/sec), you'll have to convert and that's a PITA. It's designed obviously to favour iTMS video and music buys.

The screen is nice but it is low res. My cell phone has an 854 by 480 16.7 mil colour AVS LCD screen and that's a tiny screen - this will look very dull and boring. It's also closed - only Apple apps - and NO way to run OSX apps. Also NO FINDER.

What's nice---

Screen is nice quality (but low res)
Aesthetically cute
Can run iWork - you can do all of that and iWork is cheap = $10 - MS Office go to heck.
rest sucks.... :)

Oh well - let's wait for the competition or Rev B. :)
 
murraybiscuit said:
so what's the deal with e-ink?
i thought everybody was sold on it.
now everybody's suddenly able to read on an oled?
methinks it was never in the eyes and was always in the mind...
Click to expand...

That screen is NOT OLED. It is LED backlit IPS LCD.
Screens with backlighting suck for reading text - you can do it - but it's not comfortable.

It's not a KINDLE Killer for that reason.
 
PeterCH said:
That screen is NOT OLED. It is LED backlit IPS LCD.
Screens with backlighting suck for reading text - you can do it - but it's not comfortable.

It's not a KINDLE Killer for that reason.
Click to expand...
I manage to read a computer screen all day :confused:

I have to get back to watching caprica (divx) on my iPhone now. ;)
 
bwana said:
I can already do these on my iphone so I dont see the ipad being any different. And who is to say what apps will be ready for the ipad when it actually launches?
Click to expand...

It's not app dependent. The video playback is hardware dependent. The CPU and chipset on that thing is optimised to hardware accelerate h.264 in MP 3.1 and below as well as MPEG4 at SP. No app will be able to play back say MP4 in MP or H.264 in advanced profile or higher bitrate.
 
bwana said:
I manage to read a computer screen all day :confused:

I have to get back to watching caprica (divx) on my iPhone now. ;)
Click to expand...

And it's not comfortable. Obviously we all use LCD screens but real paper and e-ink is much easier on the eyes. The other option is transflective display.
 
I really was looking forward to this, but now I see that it seems it also cannot multitask. When I got my first pda and found out that I can only open one internet site at a time, I was very p!ssed off. Now 8 years later I can only open one app at a time? I will wait a bit more.
 
PeterCH said:
And it's not comfortable. Obviously we all use LCD screens but real paper and e-ink is much easier on the eyes. The other option is transflective display.
Click to expand...
I'm going to hold off judgement of how comfortable or uncomfortable reading on it is until I've had the opportunity to actually read on it.
 
It remains to be seen how it does for reading. What's interesting is that the IPS screen apparently needs a brighter backlight so it could cause more pronounced eye fatigue.
 
bwana said:
I'm going to hold off judgement of how comfortable or uncomfortable reading on it is until I've had the opportunity to actually read on it.
Click to expand...

It's well known that LCD screens are not ideal for reading small text for long periods of time such as when reading textbooks or novels. IPS screens are not new technology either - they've been around for a long time - I use an S-IPS screen at home for example. While some people are less prone to the effects than others, most people find LCD backlights - be they CCFL or LED fatiguing after prolonged periods - while the same is not true for paper, e-ink and transflective technologies. Reading text is different to watching movies, photos or browsing websites where your eyes wander all over the places and are not constanly scanning small black text on white display. To say that the iPad is superior to an E-ink device for reading is an outright lie.

Secondly judging may not be easy until you get to spend an hour or two reading actual text with the thing.

The issue is worthy of further studies:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...serid=10&md5=2dd1eb0639c53f4aac38b7cd399538c9
 
Maybe with Tegra, slates will become interesting, but right now I can't rightly see a gap in use that would make anyone say, "I need this for X." It seems to be the ultimate technological indulgence. It's not doing anything you couldn't otherwise do with a netbook or smartphone, and can't replace either of them.

The only one I've seen that looked somewhat useful was one at CES. It was a clamshell with an ereader screen and a normal touchscreen. For anyone who needs to be able to read documents and jot down notes, or look up references, etc (i.e. do work) while on the move, that is something sincerely useful. An ordinary slate, not so much.
 
What's so great about Tegra? This already has a VERY fast ARM based CPU, as well as a decent GPU, with 10 hours battery life & 1 month standby.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X