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Apple iPad revealed

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Anyone here have a Kindle DX? How does that handle PDFs? That's really the main selling point on these things for me, since I have tons of books and documents that I would rather have living on a reader of some sort.
 
avaya said:
What I wanted wasn't even really setting the bar high. I want multitasking and ability to play flash/embedded video. Is that so hard? Yet it fails miserably.

By all means be let down by multitasking, but don't expect me to feel it's some major issue. The real world applications for it are few, if you ask me.

That said, bitch after 4.0 rolls around if it's not included then.

As for Flash, you have only yourself to blame. Expecting Apple go that route is silly, for App store reason, and for their personal beef with Adobe on the matter.

And again, I'd even argue that the demands people have on Flash is far less than people make it seem. Yes some people are let down, but Youtube's covered. Sorry -tube porn fiends.
 
MThanded said:
battery? I use my ipod constantly and have never had any battery issues,

What kind of life do you get? Because that was a serious complaint agains the earlier models, and a reason why they always advertise their (much improved) stats ever since.
 
cjelly said:
I wonder why they are stalling at announcing international pricing...

probably want to wait for 3G deals with their partners.

Good news is that I would expect in the UK for a data plan to subsidise the cost of the 3G part, which would be in line with operators' netbook subsidies. That might make a 3G model the same price as a wifi equivalent, if you're willing to pay the data cost.

I'd be happy with wifi only, although its a shame they didn't include GPS in that one.
 
Smiles and Cries said:
I use netflix on my macbook first thing it does is install silverlight on my OSX so why not an app from netflix?

Well even OSX has Flash, but the iPhone and iPad don't. I assumed similar limitations would apply but I was wrong about Apple rejecting silverlight.
 
Tobor said:
Why does it have to replace anything? There are valid use cases for a supplemental device.

Supplement what? Why would you need this? Seriously? What is the market? Can't imagine it being very big at all.

I'm trying to be open minded but it seems like a very pointless device. I know I want something like this so I can sit in front on the couch and trade/gamble on sports. Most people would just do that with a laptop, I just don't want to.

You are going to walk down the street with this huge thing? What need does this fill that an iPhone or a regular smartphone doesn't fill?

It's a product in the middle of no where. The hystreria behind it is absolutely comical. It's a product borne out of hysteria rather than need.
 
Dagon said:
Anyone here have a Kindle DX? How does that handle PDFs? That's really the main selling point on these things for me, since I have tons of books and documents that I would rather have living on a reader of some sort.
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2009/06/16/kindle-dx-first-impressions

If you have diagrams to read i think a dx is the only way to go. Also there is no "zooming". You can zoom in by going into landscape but thats it.

cjelly said:
I wonder why they are stalling at announcing international pricing...
They want to find some possible 3g discount deal for the device to launch it with in other countries.

avaya said:
Supplement what? Why would you need this? Seriously? What is the market? Can't imagine it being very big at all.

I'm trying to be open minded but it seems like a very pointless device. I know I want something like this so I can sit in front on the couch and trade/gamble on sports. Most people would just do that with a laptop, I just don't want to.

You are going to walk down the street with this huge thing? What need does this fill that an iPhone or a regular smartphone doesn't fill?

It's a product in the middle of no where. The hystreria behind it is absolutely comical. It's a product borne out of hysteria rather than need.
Reading research papers on the go and being able to zoom and move around on the page. Doing this without a laptop is sort of impossible right now.
 
Ignignort said:
If Apple have issues with Adobe why don't they use html5?

Um, they do. They just need the rest of the internet to catch up. You can't magically make flash based .flv players transform into <video> tag HTML5 media players.
 
It's really a gadget only an apple fanboy can love. The amount of shortcummings this thing has is crazy, especially for Apple.

People will buy it because they're stupid. Unless they do some major fixes it's just a gimmick product with no real 'need'. Sure it can supplment your phone, pc, netbook, and kindle...but why? Do you really need to be lugging this brick around for any reason other than vanity?

It's sad that it couldnt even make the Kindle look like dated technology. 1.5 pounds..have fun reading with that. Not to mention the eye strain you're going to get with the brilliant in your face awesome screen.

P.S. this thread title fails almost as bad as the hype did for the ipad.
 
Ignignort said:
If Apple have issues with Adobe why don't they use html5?

Flash technology uses a proprietary FLV (not supported by <video>) format for video. SWF requires a proprietary runtime to work.

Both of which will not be supported on the iPhone or iPad.

YouTube content works because it converts uploaded video into not only FLV but also H.264/MPEG-4. Mobile OS can also support other formats through QT media capabilities.
 
MThanded said:
me. I wanted something that can read pdfs that was about book size but was more functional than an ereader. This is the only thing that fits this void.
If that's the only real selling point and people are this nuts over it, I weep for humanity. Whatever they are charging for this could not be worth it. I'll defend the iPhone to the death but I can't see anything positive about this. It almost literally is just a large iPod.
 
Tapiozona said:
It's really a gadget only an apple fanboy can love. The amount of shortcummings this thing has is crazy, especially for Apple.

People will buy it because they're stupid. Unless they do some major fixes it's just a gimmick product with no real 'need'. Sure it can supplment your phone, pc, netbook, and kindle...but why? Do you really need to be lugging this brick around for any reason other than vanity?

It's sad that it couldnt even make the Kindle look like dated technology. 1.5 pounds..have fun reading with that. Not to mention the eye strain you're going to get with the brilliant in your face awesome screen.
Nice trolling. Hopefully you wont be going on forced sabbatical.
 
I'm not even sure this thing will be good for reading. It's a frickin LCD screen. Outside of reading web pages, I need to read reviews on how reading long books (or long research papers in my case) holds up on the device. It's a better value than the DX, but I'm hoping Amazon drops the prices now that this has been announced.

The geek in me still wants this, but I know I have no practical need for this, and the ebook excuse just doesn't hold up for me right now. The lack of flash and multitasking are going to be pretty impossible for me to rationalize away. Dammit, I wanted this to be awesome. I had 1k in my budget set aside and everything. :(
 
avaya said:
Supplement what? Why would you need this? Seriously? What is the market? Can't imagine it being very big at all.

I'm trying to be open minded but it seems like a very pointless device. I know I want something like this so I can sit in front on the couch and trade/gamble on sports. Most people would just do that with a laptop, I just don't want to.

You are going to walk down the street with this huge thing? What need does this fill that an iPhone or a regular smartphone doesn't fill?

It's a product in the middle of no where. The hystreria behind it is absolutely comical. It's a product borne out of hysteria rather than need.

Again, I can only speak for myself, but an iPhone with a larger screen is really what I want. I want it to read books/comics, browse the web, and run app store games and apps optimized for the larger screen. That's worth $500 to me. If it was a $1000, I'd be on board with you. /shrugs
 
MThanded said:
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2009/06/16/kindle-dx-first-impressions

If you have diagrams to read i think a dx is the only way to go. Also there is no "zooming". You can zoom in by going into landscape but thats it.


They want to find some possible 3g discount deal for the device to launch it with in other countries.


Reading research papers on the go and being able to zoom and move around on the page. Doing this without a laptop is sort of impossible right now.

Excellent link. Thanks.
 
I think people also serious underrate the ergonomics of a laptop for anything involving typing. The iPad is going to be awkward compared to even the chintziest netbook. And unlike a phone, you won't be able to type while holding this while standing up (unless a soft keyboard the replicates all the keys near the edges comes out).

There's a reason those UPS tablets have stylii.

Perhaps the worst thing is how much ammo the Fanboys give every anti-Mac Fanboy out there-- I already hear how stupid I am for liking Mac OS X machines over other machines "for marketing reasons only," and a lot of you are making that case harder to refute.
 
I should be doing hw said:
If that's the only real selling point and people are this nuts over it, I weep for humanity. Whatever they are charging for this could not be worth it.
You come and read a crap ton of research papers and you will understand.
 
Tapiozona said:
It's really a gadget only an apple fanboy can love. The amount of shortcummings this thing has is crazy, especially for Apple.

People will buy it because they're stupid. Unless they do some major fixes it's just a gimmick product with no real 'need'. Sure it can supplment your phone, pc, netbook, and kindle...but why? Do you really need to be lugging this brick around for any reason other than vanity?

It's sad that it couldnt even make the Kindle look like dated technology. 1.5 pounds..have fun reading with that. Not to mention the eye strain you're going to get with the brilliant in your face awesome screen.

P.S. this thread title fails almost as bad as the hype did for the ipad.

Hi there. How are you today?
 
xbe2df.jpg

:lol :lol
 
Arrgghh, too many iPad threads, getting confused.

To reiterate, I'm a little disappointed the iPad is 'just' an iPhone tablet/e-reader, with nothing miraculous built in, but I'm not surprised.

I will still want this device to show off photos.

No doubt this will sync with iPhoto as the iPhone does, but what will it do with resolution? As far as I know the iPhone photo sync causes small 640x480 images (sometimes smaller) to be made. These will be inadequate for the iPad. Hopefully it goes through and remakes them or has its own cache.

The way it runs iPhone apps is also disappointing, but like the original iPhone, it's early times. Can't wait to see what people come up with for a bigger screen.
 
The more I look at it, the more I don't like it. It's a giant iPod Touch. I'd have felt better about it if it ran on a more traditional Mac OS, but maintained the touch/motion possibilities.

I mean, it's kinda neat, and the price is honestly better than I thought it would be, but it seems to be competing with other devices rather than being it's own, new, revolutionary thing. Which is when Apple is at its best.

And for the love of god, will somebody think about the Stylus?!
 
mrkgoo said:
It's probably a fair bet that there's the default notes application.

That said, this device isn' the device like the iPhone that you bring down to the grocery store. It's a bit more of commitment device.

I'm thinking more a program you can write down notes in for class and then export to word or pages or some other program or pages itself supporting handwriting.

Also, I don't understand the disappointment at iBook pricing since with the appstore you can still download the kindle app and read and all that at the cheap price that you are looking for and I'm sure their prices will come down with some time especially since you can use the kindle app instead. I can understand reasons to like the kindle more if you want a e-reader type device but pricing of books between the two shouldn't even come into consideration.
 
Belfast said:
The more I look at it, the more I don't like it. It's a giant iPod Touch. I'd have felt better about it if it ran on a more traditional Mac OS, but maintained the touch/motion possibilities.

I mean, it's kinda neat, and the price is honestly better than I thought it would be, but it seems to be competing with other devices rather than being it's own, new, revolutionary thing. Which is when Apple is at its best.

And for the love of god, will somebody think about the Stylus?!
You can use this http://tenonedesign.com/stylus.php
 
Tapiozona said:
It's really a gadget only an apple fanboy can love. The amount of shortcummings this thing has is crazy, especially for Apple.

People will buy it because they're stupid. Unless they do some major fixes it's just a gimmick product with no real 'need'. Sure it can supplment your phone, pc, netbook, and kindle...but why? Do you really need to be lugging this brick around for any reason other than vanity?

It's sad that it couldnt even make the Kindle look like dated technology. 1.5 pounds..have fun reading with that. Not to mention the eye strain you're going to get with the brilliant in your face awesome screen.

P.S. this thread title fails almost as bad as the hype did for the ipad.
Hehehehehehehe.
 
One thing I'm interested in is the speaker quality.

Most people have the common sense that the iPhone is
not a proper movie viewing experience but this screen lends more credence to doing that. However not a fan of the screen size being oddly constrained.

So Apple needs to beef up is sound card and power. Hmm.
 
Don't love it, don't need it, and probably won't buy it.

The price is just impossible for me to justify. I'm eager for something like Star Trek pads to come out, and this seems like it fits that bill, but they aren't something I see as 'precious'. It's not as functional as a netbook, not as functional as an iphone, not as functional as a macbook, and doesn't really merge the functionality of those three types of devices in any meaningfully special way (ie. the sum is not greater than the parts). Basically, it's like a Nintendo DS that's just $300-500 too much.
 
I hope they at least have an Adobe CS4 app for it, I always wanted a mac tablet to work on artwork...

but it's an over-sized ipod touch... soooo...

I'm guessing I'd be better off with a tablet pc, or wait for an actual Mac Tablet.

:/ oh wells
 
Shogmaster said:
Comparing ARM and X86 is rather foolish. For instance, one is powerful enough to do Flash, but other runs a lot cooler and longer. If you are carrying around a 10" device, then you're already carrying a bag. Is a spare battery gonna break your back/shoulder?

But that's what I think the audience needs though - a thin slate that does everyday tasks in an easy way. If it's too heavy or too hot or I'm swapping out batteries, it fails. I need to treat it like an artbook or magazine and not like my DV6, if you see what I mean.

Obviously, if I need a pro tablet or laptop for the road, I'll be looking at different avenues.

Shogmaster said:
BTW, my current HP 2730p is hella lot brighter than my old R25, and it gets me 10 hours with a slice battery. So you can get long battery life these days on X86 tablets. X41 goes back to the days of Pentium M. That's ancient history in computer terms.

10 hours of video though? I'm not sure I've seen a regular laptop lately that could do that. At least, not without manually cutting out Wifi, 3G, BT and dropping the brightness. (Not that the iPad will do the connectivity stuff at the same time either, clearly.)

At an HP Slate size I think the concerns about battery size and type have to be real. If it's not LiPo than I guess they just add another half inch of thickness into the frame somewhere though...

Shogmaster said:
You don't need ION to run Flash. Sure, you won't be doing full screen Flash on Atoms, but you can do Flash in a window with Atom

Kind of a bad idea with small, high DPI displays though. I think CUDA support for Flash is a godsend for portable devices. Not really willing to look at a netbook again without it.

I mix up Tegra because of the devices that use that versus CUDA though, my mistake.

Shogmaster said:
You can easily set the display settings for bigger icons, handles, boxes, fonts, etc...

My problem is the interface though - bigger icons is fine, but as far as Windows as concerned you're still just steering a two button mouse around. If at any point I have to use the back end to trigger a right click text menu, it has pretty much failed as a pen OS.

Now, if the media-center like interface was standard and let me launch everything from there, that would at least be a start. But there's still years of things for them to learn from how the iPhone handles menu systems.

Shogmaster said:
TIP doesn't care which handed you are. TIP does care that you write in normalish manner. If you write in cursive backwards, it will be all confused for sure, but if you write normally, it gets it frighteningly right.

Also, if you're relying on HWR, you didn't get the point at all. You can search your handwritten scribbles. The point is to leave things in your native handwriting.

Scribble support has definitely improved, don't get me wrong. But it's stuck there. And my problem with HWR is that even on W7, it seems to expect you to write characters in a specific direction - not words, but characters. It's the Brain Training DS problem - if you don't write a "4" from the correct starting point, it has no idea what you're doing.
 
avaya said:
Supplement what? Why would you need this? Seriously? What is the market? Can't imagine it being very big at all.
The market is anyone who is convinced that this would be a cool gadget to have. I don't know if this device has what it takes to carve out its own niche in the market, but I don't understand why people seem to think that every niche has been carved. With each passing year, more and more devices -- given a surface glance -- seem redundant. We want practically every gadget we get these days to do what a computer alone used to be needed for.

I don't think this thing is necessarily a lock for being a runaway success, but given the proliferation of smart, connected devices over the past decade, it seems silly to go "What do I NEED this thing for when I've already got 8 other, vaguely similar devices?" What did you need that eighth device for? Because it looked cool and you wanted it. It's up to Apple's marketing team to once again convince people that they need yet another device in this market, which is far from an impossible task.
 
mrkgoo said:
Arrgghh, too many iPad threads, getting confused.

To reiterate, I'm a little disappointed the iPad is 'just' an iPhone tablet/e-reader, with nothing miraculous built in, but I'm not surprised.

I will still want this device to show off photos.

No doubt this will sync with iPhoto as the iPhone does, but what will it do with resolution? As far as I know the iPhone photo sync causes small 640x480 images (sometimes smaller) to be made. These will be inadequate for the iPad. Hopefully it goes through and remakes them or has its own cache.

The way it runs iPhone apps is also disappointing, but like the original iPhone, it's early times. Can't wait to see what people come up with for a bigger screen.

Where are you going to be showing photos though? In your house? On the go? If its in your house, wouldn't putting them up on a TV or something be better? If it's on the go, you're going to store them and waste the limited space that the device has to keep them handy? It doesn't seem exactly practical to show off photos.

I'm sure I'm different than most, but me, I store my photos on a central server at home and can access the photos from any device that is on the network. On top of that, I have them pointed to on a password protected webserver, so I can access them from outside of my network on just about any device with a web browser.

I'm sure someone will find a need, but I'm having trouble understanding the situation that this would warrent the purchase to do so. Not trying to say what you're doing is wrong or anything, I'm just wondering if you've considered the alternatives and trying to understand the scenario that makes sense to me for this.
 
MThanded said:
You come and read a crap ton of research papers and you will understand.
? I assume these are in pdf format? If so then fuck no, I'd be much happier with my 24" monitor that can fit two pages side by side. Or even better print it off and read it, I'd prefer that over anything because long reading on an LCD just doesn't work for me I can't concentrate for that long looking at a screen. Wouldn't something like a Kindle be superior seeing as it uses eInk or whatever, not an LCD screen like this?
 
MThanded said:
Reading research papers on the go and being able to zoom and move around on the page. Doing this without a laptop is sort of impossible right now.

This is cool, I like this idea.


Tobor said:
Again, I can only speak for myself, but an iPhone with a larger screen is really what I want. I want it to read books/comics, browse the web, and run app store games and apps optimized for the larger screen. That's worth $500 to me. If it was a $1000, I'd be on board with you. /shrugs

I get that too.

However does this have the same mass appeal as an iPhone or iPod? I doubt it, the devices are not powerful enough yet to do it. If this could do office as well, then....then the game is ON.

Maybe I'm derailing the thread with this, so I'll stop.

Will go check this out in person at Regent's Street, might change my mind. When is 4.0 coming btw?
 
I was hopping for a touch screen mac book and I got the mutant off spring of a Ipod Touch and Air book.

Maybe next time...
 
I should be doing hw said:
Wtf, put it in the bank you fool.

I guess I will now, after buying an e-reader. I sold off a bunch of crap and was going to categorize this as an educational expense. Now that I know you can't do any real work on it and it will likely be entirely inadequate to read long books/papers, there is no way I can justify the device.

My wife walked out of the room mid-video when I showed her the promo vid. She laughed when she first saw it (i'ts just a big iPhone, lol), didn't think any of the uses made sense for her, and certainly didn't make her regret her $700 Sony Vaio I bought her for Xmas, which I was worried about. At least I don't have to worry about buyers remorse on the laptop.
 
I should be doing hw said:
? I assume these are in pdf format? If so then fuck no, I'd be much happier with my 24" monitor that can fit two pages side by side. Or even better print it off and read it, I'd prefer that over anything because long reading on an LCD just doesn't work for me I can't concentrate for that long looking at a screen. Wouldn't something like a Kindle be superior seeing as it uses eInk or whatever, not an LCD screen like this?
you can't zoom. I am an engineer and there will be state-charts or diagrams i would like to look at so zooming would be nice.

Also the amount of research papers I read is sort of ridiculous and not a good idea to print them. I actually have to read 6 a week for class and then on top of that the ones for my research. Some of these papers are 20 pages long.
 
avaya said:
This is cool, I like this idea.




I get that too.

However does this have the same mass appeal as an iPhone or iPod? I doubt it, the devices are not powerful enough yet to do it. If this could do office as well, then....then the game is ON.

Maybe I'm derailing the thread with this, so I'll stop.

Will go check this out in person at Regent's Street, might change my mind. When is 4.0 coming btw?

Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell. I think $500 for something like this will be compelling for people, especially once they've held it.

4.0 should be this summer with the new iPhone, that might change of this discussion as well.
 
MThanded said:
you can't zoom. I am an engineer and there will be state-charts or diagrams i would like to look at so zooming would be nice.
Fair enough, if it works for you then by all means buy one, especially if it makes you job easier. I definitely could not say the same for pretty much everyone else here who would probably have no real practical use for it other than pleasuring their iGeekdom.
 
maharg said:
Don't love it, don't need it, and probably won't buy it.

The price is just impossible for me to justify. I'm eager for something like Star Trek pads to come out, and this seems like it fits that bill, but they aren't something I see as 'precious'. It's not as functional as a netbook, not as functional as an iphone, not as functional as a macbook, and doesn't really merge the functionality of those three types of devices in any meaningfully special way (ie. the sum is not greater than the parts). Basically, it's like a Nintendo DS that's just $300-500 too much.

In other words, Apple just pulled a Sony.
 
Charred Greyface said:
MThanded, have you seen confirmed PDF support from iBooks app? Or an annotations feature? I hope Apple got those right...
No confirmation on annotations but i am sure that will come eventually. At this point I really would like to read pdfs on a portable device and be able to zoom and view things in color if they are in color(journal articles)

Since apple plans to get a lot of content providers on board I would have to assume its an intended feature.
 
I can understand seeing this and saying "No thanks, not for me". That's a fair response.

I can't understand someone failing to see that there are some who feel something like this does fill a requirement, I have a beefy triple-monitor PC, a decent desktop replacement laptop and an iPod Touch.

I hardly use my laptop unless I need a good amount of processing power when I'm on the move, I never use it at home, far too much hassle as it's weighty, the battery life sucks and I have a PC to switch on if needed.

I do however use my iPod Touch one hell of a lot, and have been screaming for one with a 7"+ screen for ages, because I use it so much, because it's quick to fire up, has a handy form factor and I can use it without messing about with my laptop. - I also have difficulty using the Touch when I want to because like myself the rest of the family have found the same with it and use it alot, it's a mobile email client, TV guide and all sorts to everyone so is probably the most popular device in the house.

So a Touch with a 9.7" screen? Hell yes please, It's not going to replace any of the tech in my house, But I can sure see it complimenting it nicely.

You can't? - Then fair enough, but don't call me stupid, I get all itchy-fingered when people do that :P
 
Jak140 said:
After having just seen this:
http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet

I can't really see the point of getting an iPad. I mean I can see how a lot of people would prefer the iPad because they want a simple web browser, but the Microsoft tablet seems a lot more revolutionary.

This. I was expecting an Apple take on a truly new device, and after hearing Steve Jobs saying the iPad was the "most important thing he has ever done," and how it was "magical and revolutionary," I don't think my expectations were that off base.
 
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