New tablet splits difference between smartphones, laptops
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad today. Positioned between a smartphone and a laptop, the tablet does many of the same things as the iPhone, but on a bigger, more easily viewed screen.
Steve Jobs shows off Apple’s iPad on Wednesday.
Demonstrating the iPad at an event in San Francisco, Jobs showed how it could be used for e-mail and Web browsing, viewing photos, managing calendars and contacts, listening to music, viewing video, and more.
The iPad is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and has a 9.7-inch LCD screen. It’s run by a custom-made 1GHz CPU, and comes with 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. Jobs claimed it will get up to 10 hours of battery life.
In addition to the built-in Apple apps, the iPad will also run third-party software. Senior Vice President Scott Forstall said that the tablet will run most existing iPhone apps unmodified, right out of the box. Those apps can run at their existing size in a black box or can be doubled to run in full-screen mode.
Apple is also making a software development kit available to developers, to help create apps specifically for the new device. To demonstrate what vendors could do with those tools, Forstall introduced representatives from Gameloft, Electronic Arts, the New York Times, and MLB.com to show off iPad apps they’d already built.
Jobs also introduced a new app, called iBooks, to manage e-books on the iPad. While crediting Amazon for its pioneering efforts with the Kindle, he announced that Apple was opening its own e-book store for the iPad. He said that Penguin, Harper-Collins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and other publishers were already signed up to supply titles. Those titles will use the ePub format—an open e-book standard.
iPad to feature Apple’s iBooks e-reader app
by Philip Michaels, Macworld.com
As part of its new iPad tablet unveiled Wednesday, Apple has come out with an e-book reading app. Dubbed iBooks, the app lets you read e-books on the iPad’s 9.7-inch LCD screen.
“Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle, so we’re going to stand on its shoulders,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at Wednesday’s product launch.
iBooks lets users buy and download electronic books directly from the iPad. Users will buy books through Apple’s new iBook Store, which will be fully integrated into the app. From the iBooks demo on Wednesday, it appears book prices will be between $8 and $15.
Jobs said that five of the largest publishers—Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group—will have content on the store.
iBooks will use the EPUB standard, the most popular open book format in the world.
“We think iPad will be a terrific e-book reader for popular books and textbooks,” Jobs said.
Apple introduces iWork for iPad
Apple today at its iPad introduction announced a new version of iWork designed specifically for the iPad. The iWork for iPad application suite broadens the potential target audience for the iPad.
iWork is Apple productivity software suite, which includes Keynote (for presentations), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Pages (word processing). The new iWork for iPad suite takes advantage of the iPad’s multitouch input.
At today’s event, Apple’s Phil Schiller demonstrated each app on the iPad. All of the iWork apps launch to a library of documents that allow you to tap on the document you want to open. An on-screen keyboard appears when you need to type text.
Keynote runs only in landscape mode, since slides are designed horizontally. Pages has a new tool called Page Navigator, where you hold your finger on the right of the iPad’s screen and it brings up a loupe that lets you skim through your pages. All three iWork apps come with templates to help you create documents quickly.
The iWork for iPad apps are $10 each and will be available at the iTunes App Store.
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