Apple's iPad

So the badly kept secret is finally out and Apple announce their shiny new touch-screen tablet dubbed the iPad. So firstly isn't that name a touch close to the iPod - iPod, iPad; iPad, iPod. They could have gone for iTablet, but that's two syllables and we know they don't like that and iTab? Well Tab is a drink so that'd be confusing. Pad makes sense it's just a little too similar to my mind.
Another delightful problem is that the word iPad is a trademark by Fujitsu; Apple do seem to like picking names already owned by other companies as they did with the Cisco owned iPhone.

So what is the iPad? According to Apple it's the "Best way to experience the web, email, photos, and video". So why is everyone comparing it to the Kindle or the Sony eReader, why all the demonstrations seem to show how you can read buy and read books on it?

There's a reason people don't read novels on a computer screen and that's because your eyes get tired. The majority of screens emit light whereas the majority of objects in the real world reflect it; sounds dumb after all light is light; but in the real world the intensity varies producing the shading that our eyes have evolved to cope with. Staring at a screen is like staring at a light bulb or the sun.

That's why the Kindle et al didn't kick off until a method was discovered to emulate this reflected light, in their case magnetic ink swimming in a naturally white background. At the moment though they can only work in shades of grey so no colour and that's what Apple obviously wanted. So they're using an LCD screen just like most computers today.

So you're not going to sit down and start reading a book on your iPad. So as they said use it to show photos and video and browse the web; except I can do that with the iPhone and make calls with that, so why switch?

The other problem with a bigger and light emitting screen is that it uses juice all the time it's on, the Kindle and others only draw power when the screen changes. They claim a 10-hour life using the same batteries for the iMac; were those the batteries that were built-in and couldn't be changed without going back to the shop?

Well it's bigger with a 9.7" screen, so you can really see photos and full web pages and yes that's a good point, except that being bigger means that it's well... bigger. It's not something you can pop in a pocket and pull out and consult easily when you're on the move or settling a bet in the pub.

So what's it for? Well I can see this is for use in office meetings. No need to set up a laptop, just prop up your iPad and get all the documentation on screen to read, at the same time you can make notes using the built-in handwriting recognition tool; oh silly me it doesn't come with that and when I mean that I don't just mean the ability to write things on screen, I mean reading a document and making notes, because it's not multi-tasking.

So it's not something you can carry around, it's less use in an office than a laptop so um is this something that's going to be sitting on the coffee table and used for browsing the web or showing off photos rather than sit around a computer? Possibly but with the cheap options available to hook up computer to TV why would anyone want to spend $499 for that?

It'll still sell out though because it's Apple and it looks so yummy, but those who do so for that reason probably already own an iPhone and an iMac and I bet they'll be turning back to using that and the iPad will just gather dust.