Apple releases new iPad

Apple's newest product receives mixed reactions.

Apple may or may not have done it again.

Years of rumors and speculations about a tablet-like mobile device came true last Wednesday when Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, revealed Apple’s newest creation: the iPad.

Weighing 1.5 pounds, the iPad looks similar to an iPhone, but is 9.5 inches long and 7.5 inches wide.

The tablet features a glass LED, multi-touch display screen, wireless and 3G capabilities, a 10-hour extended battery life, 16, 32 or 64 GB flash-drive memory options and Apple’s custom designed A4 “system on a chip.”

Apple calls the iPad a “whole new kind of device,” placing it in a third category between the smart phone and laptop. At the Keynote event in San Francisco, Jobs explained that the “vibrant screen” makes browsing the web, watching videos and viewing electronic media some of the iPad’s key features.

“[The iPad is] far better at doing some key tasks – better than the laptop, better than the smart phone,” said Jobs, who used words such as extraordinary, incredible, amazing and remarkable to describe its capabilities.

Storing and displaying e-books is at the on the top of the iPad’s feature list. The New York Times predicts that iBooks,one of 140,000 applications available for Apple mobile devices, will be the iPad’s most significant feature. Fiction and nonfiction books, including textbooks from five major publishers will sell through a new online bookstore.

Whether or not the “truly magical and revolutionary product” will live up to Jobs’ description is unclear.

The Los Angeles Times said its exclusive media who attended Apple’s Keynote last week were disappointed and reported their accompanying Twitter status-updates.

“Nothing mind-blowing yet,” “Many disappointments so far” and “This crowd is dying of boredom,” said the Tweets on the LA Times’ Web site.

Further, just a day after the iPad’s release, Web sites such as ReadWriteWeb.com advised consumers to wait until a second generation iPad was released, when a camera, voice capabilities, annotation options, O.S. 4.0 and Verizon are included in the package.

The LA Times suggested that critics remember what Apple is known for and said, “Apple’s position as the world’s premier consumer electronics company is based not on its development of new technologies, but on its re-conceiving of existing technologies to make them infinitely more useful.”

“People just don’t know what they want,” said Apple’s IWU campus representative Nick Graham (so). He explained that most people do not fully utilize the MacBook’s capabilities. The iPad is for the average, web browsing, e-book reader.

Apple recently celebrated the sales of its 250 millionth iPod and 3 billionth application. In addition, Apple brought in $15.6 billion in revenue last quarter, making it the largest mobile devices company in the world, above Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

Their successful past stands in contrast with the media’s reaction toward the iPad.

The first generation iPads will go on sale in March starting at $499.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 8:00 AM and is filed under Frontpage.
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