Oh, suck it, Amazon.
In demonstrating the iPad’s new slick iBooks e-book reading application, it was explicitly stated that the iPad uses the free, open e-book standard, ePub format.
This is a surprisingly rare but welcome move for Apple in embracing a non-proprietary media format.
ePub doesn’t mean no DRM, but it does mean you’ll be able, if only through third party Apps, to transfer your own books from other devices.
Jeff Bezos has got to be nursing a migraine right now.
[image via Gizmodo]
After showing all of the cool new App demos, Jobs took the stage and quipped:
“Isn’t it awesome? And these guys only had two, two and a half weeks to work on this thing. Imagine what they’re going to do in the next few months.”
This may be reading into things, but that may well mean the iPad won’t be out for a few months… i.e. not the March 1st release being rumored right now.
[image via Gizmodo]
The arrival of the iPad and the subsequent cheeping, chittering, cooing, peeping, chirupping and tweeting has blown a fuse on microblogging service Twitter.
Apple introduced a whole new category of mobile device today with the iPad and in so doing has opened new vistas for software development that could eclipse the iPhone App Store’s 140 thousand titles in short order.
Not suprisingly, Apple VP Scott Forstall waxed giddily about the fact that iPhone apps will run on the iPad straight away, saying, “We built the iPad to run virtually every one of these apps unmodified right out of the box. We can do that in two ways — do it with pixel for pixel accuracy in a black box, or we can pixel-double and run them in full-screen. This is really cool.”
But the presentation also showed how developers have a new palette with the iPad’s display that broadens the development horizons quite a bit.
“If the developer takes the time, they can also take full advantage of the large touchscreen display in the iPad. We did that with our own internal apps, and we expect developers will want to do that too,” Forstall noted.
The new SDK is available today and includes all the tools developers need to create custom apps for the iPad.
I’m on the hardware beat of CoM’s iPad coverage, so while the App Store devs take the stage, I wanted to just a quick aside on why I think the iPad is a terrible name for the Tablet, as spontaneously ill-considered as my opinion might be.
In an earlier post, I swore that if Apple was creatively bereft enough to call their tablet the iPad, I’d eat an extremity… but not that one. Either way, I’m reneging on my promise, since I like my digits.
But I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.
Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?'”
Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.
iSlate had its problems — I equate a slate with something monochrome, fragile, easy shatterable — but it was a lot better than iPad.
What do you guys think?
It’s been 50 minutes into the event and There’s no sign of multi-tasking. To switch between apps, all they are doing is simply closing the current and opening a new – no ProSwitcher like card management. This is definitely going to be a deal breaker for the most who are planning to trade their netbook for this device.
Also, the screen’s got some good real-estate, seems like 2x the resolution of the iPhone. However,
Of all the people in the world, you’d think Cultofmac.com readers would go bonkers for the iPad. But judging from Twitter reactions, they’re not sold — and Steve hasn’t even mentioned the price yet!
Here’s some of the feedback tweets we’re getting:
@cultofmac Just a big iPhone, nothing special just yet.
@cultofmac i’m not sold. I mean why get this if you have an iphone or mac or both????
@cultofmac: It has huge borders!!! and i hoped to see usb conectors for the #ipad
Jobs just bragged the iPad’s capacitive touchscreen was the best in the business, but they just showed that the multitouch display is also more sophisticated in the iPhone.
While demonstrating a game from Gameloft called Nova, it was demonstrated that drawing three fingers across the screen allowed you to open a door.
That seems to indicate the hardware and software of the multitouch display allows for a lot more flexibility in gesturing than the iPhone, as expected. More registered points of articulation = greated gesturing sophistication.
[image via Gizmodo]
We haven’t seen any integrated camera software yet, but right now, it doesn’t look like the iPad has any camera… just as John Gruber over at Daring Fireball guessed.
There’s no obvious camera in the front, and when Jobs held it sideways, there wasn’t a camera pinhole in back either.
Unless Apple has integrated the camera into the display, or otherwise obfuscated it, looks like this isn’t the lap-based video conferencing unit we expected.
[image via GDGT]
And now some of the specifics of my particular iPad tablet beef have come out.
The chip is from PA Semi, an ARM-based CPU, as guessed. It’s called the A4, and it “screams” at 1GHz.
The iPad is 0.5 inches thin, weighs 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch IPS, fully capcitive multitouch display.
“All the usual suspects: accelerometer, compass, speaker, mic, dock connector. And it’s got battery,” says Jobs.
And what a battery! Netbook style! 10 hours! A month of standby. Remarkable for a device so thin.
Come in flavors between 16 and 64GB of flash, SSD storage.
Only connectivity that Jobs has mentioned so far is 802.11n WiFi. Let’s see if they unveil the 3G partners shortly.
[image via GDGT]
We’re still waiting for iPad details to come from the mouth of Jobs, but here are some first observations.
Like everyone said, it looks just like an iPhone that met a rolling pin.
It’s way thin. Like MacBook Air thin, from the looks of it. This is bread slicing and jugular slicing.
The Home Button is at the bottom, which implies, like the iPhone, a dominantly vertical based orientation, although an accelerometer flips it.
There’s a WiFi signal clearly visible at the corner, so we have 802.11n support here, but I see no icon for 3G… yet.
The iPad doesn’t have a frontal camera and Steve has yet to show any Magic Mouse like capacitive case tech, although obviously, this is a vibrant, 10-inch multitouch device.
More to follow!
[image via GDGT]
[polldaddy poll=”2603443″]
There were so many possible names for Apple’s new device.
Now we know the super-slablet has been christened the iPad.
Let us know what you think of the name and what you would’ve named it in the comments.
“It’s phenomenal,” says Steve. “It’s unbelievable.”
It’s official.
At today’s Media Event, Steve Jobs just took the stage and started things off with an apology that he’d begin with a talk about existing stats.
Apple has just sold its 250 millionth iPod, according to Jobs. 234 retail stores to date, with over 250 million visitors to the stores last Holiday quarter. There are also 140,000 Apps in the App Store, with over 3 Billion Downloads to Date.
“Lastly, we started apple in 1976 — 34 years later, we just ended our holiday quarter with 15.6 billion in revenue. That means Apple is over a 50 billion dollar company — I like to forget that, because that’s not how we think of Apple, but it’s pretty amazing,” Jobs says.
And now, to a breathless sigh from the audience: “Let’s get to the main event.”
Prepare for the Tablet. Whatever it’s called.
[via Gdgt]
Steve Jobs just took the stage at Apple’s special media event.
“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary new product,” he said.
Jobs looks pretty thin but his voice is a lot stronger than October, when he last appeared in public. He looks a lot better, in fact.
A Chinese website published, then withdrew photos purporting to be the exterior of Apple’s much-awaited tablet device. The photos seem to show the rear, screen and some software involved.
According to reports, the photos from the Weiphone website “look like leaks from a component manufacturer” taken at a testing facility.
Although the App Store recently passed the 3 billion mark and iTunes has expanded vastly beyond its music-only roots, Apple said both or not generating great profit. “We are running those a bit over break even,” Apple’s finance chief, Peter Oppenheimer, told reporters Monday.
Apple said its App Store “dwarfs anybody we are competing against” – Google’s Android Market with 20,000 apps as of December still is far behind the company’s 100,000 apps as of November. Although he didn’t mention any hard numbers, Oppenheimer said iTunes experienced a “record” quarter.
The Cupertino, Calif. company appears to view two of its most well-known properties as loss-leaders. Indeed, with a company that has $30 billion in the bank, it seems more about getting new developers into the iPhone tent than scrounging around for the 30 percent cut of every sale.
Engadget has just published another picture of the tablet prototype, which clearly shows a forward-facing camera. Earlier rumors, which weren’t very plausible, said the tablet wouldn’t have a camera.
The latest spy shot (if it’s real) also clearly shows the size. That’s an iPhone in the corner, and by the looks of it, the tablet’s screen is larger than 10-inches. (The iPhone may also be a prototype: it has a black bezel, like the tablet).
The tablet’s bezel looks pretty deep. Not one of the myriad mockups floating around the internet envisioned such a beefy bezel.
While all that seems left in the tablet controversy is for CEO Steve Jobs to unveil the wunder gadget, there are many threads left untied for this present to the technology world, namely pricing. To that end, Apple has conducted “11th hour negotiations” with publishers, the goal being to hammer out new pricing for e-books. The Cupertino, Calif. company believes a $15 price tag for books could become a best-selling idea for publishers seeking a way to cash-in on the flood of e-books.
Apple is talking about pricing e-books between $12.99 and $14.99 for its upcoming tablet device. The arrangement would give Apple a 30 percent cut, leaving publishers with $10.49, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. The plan would give publishers less than the $14.50 book producers receive when sold on Amazon, but throwing their lot in with Apple could rebalance a power shift many in the industry thought tilted too far in the direction of the giant online book-seller. Although publishers received more money from Amazon, the company insisted on a $9.99 price tag for e-books, which many book firms felt could make readers hesitate paying more for a printed book.
Although unlikely to dampen the spirits surrounding Apple’s widely-expected launch of a Tablet device Wednesday, the International Trade Commission has formally launched an investigation into a rival’s allegations. Nokia, which has sued the Cupertino, Calif. company, alleging multiple patent infringements, said it was “pleased” by the news.
The ITC’s move comes after the Finnish cell phone giant in December requested the trade investigation, claiming Apple products infringed patents involving power management, antenna, user interface and camera technologies. The investigation could result in a ban on iPhones, Macs, iPods and other Apple products.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JXRy8hO8g0&feature=player_embedded
One of the things that’s easy to forget before every big Apple event is that even the vast majority of Apple employees, including people organizing the event, don’t know what Steve Jobs is going to unveil.
This Bloomberg interview with former Apple Senior Systems Engineer Edward Eigerman describes exactly what it’s like to go to an Apple event as an employee without having any more clue than the rest of us what the company has planned.
It’s definitely an interesting watch: Eigerman describes his own experience being a senior executive at Apple and literally having no knowledge of what the iPod would be like up to ninety minutes before it was announced. He says that internally, Apple employees are just as excited about product launches as the rest of us, and follow all the same rumor sites.
But there’s a more negative side to the internal secrecy: Eigerman claims that paranoia is common within Apple, since people worry they might “know too much” about products they aren’t meant to know about.
Eigerman’s an interesting mouth piece for this, since by his own admission, he was fired by Apple for accidentally giving an Apple client a piece of software a week before release. “If Apple finds out” you’re violating their intellectual property policies, intentionally or not, Eigerman says “there’s no turning back.”
[via 9to5Mac]
A lot of the frenzied last minute speculation leading up to this morning’s Apple Tablet announcement is either going to look eerily prescient or downright silly in just a few hours time, but here’s one feature we can probably expect to see later today: Apple has just gotten itself a patent for a Tablet proximity director.
The patent doesn’t describe anything revolutionary, but it seems like a feature par for the course for a company as concerned with the cohesive and seamless user experience as Apple. Essentially, the proximity detector tracks objects that are near, but don’t touch, the Tablet’s display. For example, move your fingers in a typing position near the screen and a virtual keyboard would automatically pop up.
Seems like a lock to me — Jobs isn’t the type to be satisfied with an onscreen button that calls up a virtual keyboard — but six short hours should tell.
Fox’s24 hase never been shy about having its constabulary of terrorist smashers whip out the hottest new gadgets, but it looks like the production team isn’t even willing to wait for Steve Jobs to actually announce the Tablet later today before writing the device into the show’s seventh eighth season.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOxbLU_32jI&feature=player_embedded
If the most often repeated scuttlebutt is to be believed. Apple’s Tablet, when released later today, will feature some sort of souped up flavor of the iPhone OS. That raises an interesting point: even as it is, the iPhone OS as an operating system brand name is pretty clunky, especially when you’re talking about non-iPhone hardware like the iPod Touch. If the Tablet does indeed run some flavor of the iPhone OS, maybe it needs a name change to reflect its expanded scope?
According to Mac Daily News, that’s just what Apple plans. The video they use as proof is pretty questionable, but nonetheless, MDN claims that Apple will rebrand the iPhone OS to iOS during today’s media event.
Short of a few bigwigs cloistered away in Cupertino’s panic rooms, no one really knows the exact details of what Steve Jobs plans to announce today, but even if this iOS rumor turns out to be false — and I suspect it might be — I think it’s still a pretty good bet that a name change for the iPhone OS might be in store.
This is my last chance to say something before the great and terrible Steve holds his tablet aloft (and even then, rumormongers might have beaten him to the punch), so let me give you a bit of a long-view perspective, something usually left out when we’re discussing whether we’ll see a 10-inch or 11-inch LCD panel on the device.
You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple and its insane run of success over the last nine years. Consider this: In 2001, Apple’s revenue was about $6.5 billion. In 2009, that revenue was $42.3 billion. Essentially, the company grew by more than 550 percent in eight years.
How exactly is that possible? Was it the great products? Partly. Great leadership? Sure. Killer marketing? No question. But more than all of those combined, the secret to Apple’s success was that it defined and followed the right strategy and the right era. Steve Jobs is king of the world right now because he hit on the idea for the digital hub.