Not a terribly viz-oriented news topic, but it is popular today.  Watching the announcement, I found myself very underwhelmed and wanted to share some thoughts:

  • No mention of GPS
  • No mention of 3G or Edge They just announced that “Some models” will have cellular connectivity
  • No mention of a Camera
  • Applications can run “in a box” or “2x pixel”, implying the screen is double-wide and double-tall as the iPhone screen.. Making it something like 960×640 (480×320 doubled).  But no mention of running multiple apps at once in a side-by-side or foreground/background usage.
  • Not 16×9.. The res would take 720p with space leftover, but not 1080.. Not a bit deal.. (Sorry, Brain fart there. I was thinkin 480p) As it is, it doesn’t handle any HD format.
  • Very impressed by the battery life on it.. They claim 10 hours of Video playback, and a full month of Standby.
  • iBooks is neat.. corny name, and it looks like they just cut-n-paste Delicious Library & Stanza for the interface..
  • ePub compatible.. that’s nice.. Now to see how easy/hard it is to get ePub books from other sources into it.

As I write this they are discussing iWork for the iPad (getting tired of the iNames).  I have to wonder why? Do they really think people are going to be writing documents or building spreadsheets on this thingSeriously? Maybe a document/presentation viewer, but the full suite?

No word on details like the chipset involved.  Several people theorized it might sport the new PowerVR chipset, but nothing has been announced one way or the other.   The only concrete numbers so far is the 1Ghz custom ‘A4’ processor from Apple.  The games they’ve shown are better than iPhone/iPod graphics, but not as good as PC, which is to be expected.  That could all easily be explained by the improved CPU.

What are your opinions?

UPDATE: The Apple iPad page is live.. Some things to note:

  • The resolution is 1024×768, better than I expected.  Still not HD-worthy, but better.
  • It says it will play up to 720p, but I guess it must be resampling it.