Apple iPad is innovative, but not without its drawbacks
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, believes iPad fille a niche other products haven't
Greg Schulte
Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: Features
Apple has done it again. The company that started by rethinking the personal computer and then evolved to music players and smart phones, has now moved on to its next target - portable readers and netbooks.
Last week, Apple released the prototype for its newest wonder - the iPad. The device is nearly half-an-inch wide and is lightly designed (weighing a mere pound and a half) so that it can be carried everywhere. Essentially, the iPad is a larger version of the iPhone, just minus the phone and camera part.
It has a similar interface that consumers interact with-the same virtual keyboard that pops up when you need it. It also has the same applications, like iTunes, along with all the other 140,000 apps that are available to the iPhone.
Likewise, the iPad has many of the same limitations the iPhone carries, such as the inability to run more than one application at a time, and it has trouble handling Flash video, which could make it difficult to view video footage and clips from many popular sites like Hulu.com.
The shape of the iPad looks much like an iPhone that someone has sat on. The screen is nine and a half inches tall, which is a hair smaller than the average netbook screen.
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said he believes the iPad will fit somewhere between peoples' laptops and their smartphones, filling a niche that essentially has yet to be filled by other products, except, perhaps, by Amazon.com's Kindle.
The iPad comes with Apple's A4 chip, which is one of the company's more innovative processors. It can also be purchased with three different sized hard drives: one with 16GB, one with 32GB or one with 64GB.
Apple has fixed the iPad so that it has the longest battery life of any Apple product, extending for more than 10 hours with more than a month of standby.
For instance, if you "lost" your iPad in some nook or cranny, after a while it will go into sleep mode, and when you come across it hidden beneath your dirty clothes pile nearly a month later, it can still be revived for a quick Facebook stalk.
Last week, Apple released the prototype for its newest wonder - the iPad. The device is nearly half-an-inch wide and is lightly designed (weighing a mere pound and a half) so that it can be carried everywhere. Essentially, the iPad is a larger version of the iPhone, just minus the phone and camera part.
It has a similar interface that consumers interact with-the same virtual keyboard that pops up when you need it. It also has the same applications, like iTunes, along with all the other 140,000 apps that are available to the iPhone.
Likewise, the iPad has many of the same limitations the iPhone carries, such as the inability to run more than one application at a time, and it has trouble handling Flash video, which could make it difficult to view video footage and clips from many popular sites like Hulu.com.
The shape of the iPad looks much like an iPhone that someone has sat on. The screen is nine and a half inches tall, which is a hair smaller than the average netbook screen.
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, said he believes the iPad will fit somewhere between peoples' laptops and their smartphones, filling a niche that essentially has yet to be filled by other products, except, perhaps, by Amazon.com's Kindle.
The iPad comes with Apple's A4 chip, which is one of the company's more innovative processors. It can also be purchased with three different sized hard drives: one with 16GB, one with 32GB or one with 64GB.
Apple has fixed the iPad so that it has the longest battery life of any Apple product, extending for more than 10 hours with more than a month of standby.
For instance, if you "lost" your iPad in some nook or cranny, after a while it will go into sleep mode, and when you come across it hidden beneath your dirty clothes pile nearly a month later, it can still be revived for a quick Facebook stalk.
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