Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the much-anticipated Apple iPad. The internet has been buzzing with speculation over the past few weeks at the prospect of this announcement. Many were calling it the iTablet, some thought it would be the iSlate. The Wall Street Journal humorously noted that the “last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”
But this morning it became official.
What is the new Applie iPad?
The iPad is a content consumption device that will likely pave the way to a new category of devices, something that fits in between the smart phone and the laptop.
Apple lists the full specs of the iPad on its site. In many ways it is like a giant iPod Touch, including WiFi and 3G internet access.
Here are five of my favorite iPad features:
- multi-touch interface
- sharp looking LED display
- 10 hrs battery life, a month of standby life
- maps that also include Google street view
- the iBookstore (ePub format)
There are some things that the iPad still can’t do, such as:
- play Flash
- multi-task, e.g. you can’t listen to Pandora while writing an email
One of the most talked about features of the iPad is the iBookstore. Apple already has several publisher deals in place, and many more will likely follow. So the question that follows is, will the iPad be a Kindle killer? What will it do to Sony’s eBook?
And with the iPad infringe on the netbook market?
The entry price for the iPad was a pleasant surprise and lower than expected, at $499. It looks like Apple has learned form its experience with the iPhone where it entered the market slightly higher than it should have.
iPhone and iPod Touch owners will still be able to play all of the apps (currently just over 140,000) that are available for those devices, on the iPad. And app developers will be able to design separate apps which utilize the full capabilities of the iPad’s superior graphics and touch screen.
What’s next for the iPad?
Well, first there’s the wait. According to today’s announcement, it will be available 60 days from now in the US.
Once available, it will be more than interesting to see how the market handles the iPad. And if it succeeds, this tablet device will likely be the first generation of many more to come.
If you’re interested in the future of Search and have got an hour and a half to spare, I highly recommend sitting down with your favorite beverage and watching this video.
In this video, Google presents their most significant product releases of the year, including real time search.
Marissa Mayer starts off by presenting four main areas of innovation at Google:
1. Modalities
How people search, e.g. mobile devices, voice search, search by taking a picture 2. Media
The types of media appearing in search results, e.g. maps, books, video, news 3. Language
Translation services which open up the world’s content to people of all languages 4. Personalization
Search results with higher relevance based on your location, social networks, etc.
Later in the talk, Google Fellow Amit Singhal talks about the huge relevancy challenges faced when delivering search results, especially now with real time search. He shared Google’s 4 pillars of search delivery:
Comprehensiveness,
Relevancy,
User Experience, and
Speed,
with relevancy becoming more and more difficult. The audience poses several important questions near the end of the presentation, including the question of whether Google uses the same algorithm to rank its general index as its real time results.
Real Time Search is being rolled out gradually for all users over the next few weeks. Whether these results appear or not will depend on the keyword used. There is a way to see real time search results right away, through Google Trends.
I was in a Sony store last night. Walking through the mall, I was lured in by the glossy TV screens and the idea of potentially making the move from DVD to Blu-Ray. I’ve never owned an Blu-Ray player and, to be honest, have been somewhat skeptical whether Blu-Ray will quickly replace the ubiquitous DVD format.
The sales rep. that chatted me up was, unsurprisingly, enthusiastic about the quality that Blu-Ray delivers. This same salesperson also told us that we should expect to pay $60 for an HDMI cable. Ouch.
Nevertheless, I didn’t walk home with a Blu-Ray player. But I did start doing some reading. Are retailers pushing Blu-Ray players on their customers to support the new format? Can an up-converting DVD player suffice for now? And the even bigger question: what’s next after Blu-Ray?
My intuition tells me that the USB Flash Drive format may be a viable alternative. We already have Flash Drives which can hold ample data. To put it in perspective, a standard DVD holds 4.7 GB of data, a Blu-Ray disk holds 25GB (or 50GD if dual-layer). USB Flash Drives have come down in price and gone up in capacity. If you really need the space, you can even get them as large as 256GB, more than five times the storage capacity of a double layer Blu-Ray disk. Optical disk readers, e.g. Blu-Ray, DVD and CD players, are inherently fragile and sensitive to heat, condensation, and dust. USB Flash is more robust, and certainly more portable.
So the question remains, what’s next after Blu-Ray? Will it be a new optical disk technology, such as Holographic Versatile Disk (HVD). Or will it be a type of card or portable thumb drive? And don’t forget, there’s also the possibility that we may soon just be downloading all of our data heavy content from the cloud, e.g. like renting movies via iTunes.
Google Wave has been the talk of the town over the past few days. Techies everywhere have been clamoring to the 100,000 invites which were sent out last week. It has been a trending topic on Twitter and the first reviews are coming in. As luck would have it, I`m not one of the fortunate 100,000 who received an invite, and can`t give my own opinion on it yet. But if you`re looking for a quick, simple explanation of how Wave may change the world as we know it, check out this video from EpipheoStudios.com.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a full blog post, while looking down at my last couple of posts which have simply embedded videos. And when this latest idea came to me, I felt guilty for once again taking the “easy” route of just republishing information. But this one is too good to pass up.
At Enquiro, we have something called TED Tuesdays. We take our bagged lunches and sit down in our boardroom while watching the latest and greatest from …TED. This past week we watched David Pogue’s rant and rave on mobile phone technology. Pogue, a technology columnist for the New York Times, gives us a presentation that resonates with anyone who has ever owned a cell phone, and he delivers it his way, with humor and musical style.
Andrew Spoeth is Enquiro's director of marketing, with interests in B2B marketing, social media, the psychology of leadership, and just about everything else you can point a finger at.
