After what has seemed like years of waiting, Apple has today unveiled the iPad tablet device.  The initial impressions by those in the media seemed to be surprisingly mixed.  I suppose we should be impressed that as many favorable reviews of the iPad are coming out considering the almost insurmountable amount of buzz and speculation that this device has received in recent months.

Steve jobs repeatedly referred to the device as "magical and revolutionary" while the OS is so familiar it had the audience in San Fran feeling a bit underwhelmed.  Essentially, at first glance the iPad does look like a giant iPod Touch, complete with home button.  Apple is not a stupid company, and has retained the features that have worked so well to make both the iPhone and iPod Touch such hot sellers.  Many initial reviewers are bashing the device as essentially without purpose.  However, Apple has been carefully crafting the iPad over the course of many years and knows what works.  The iPad will sell very well, in our opinion.

For specs, the Apple  iPad is powered by a blazing fast custom Apple silicon called the A4 chipset running at 1Ghz.  It is not initially known how much ram is in this device but judging from the speed, we wouldn't be shocked to find 1GB of ram.  The iPad comes in two main types: Wifi Only and 3G capable.  Starting at $499 (Wifi) a 16GB version can be purchased as early as March.  The memory can be configured up to 64GB currently.

Early hands on with the device has many reviewers very pleased with the extreme speed of application start times as well as responsiveness of the iPad.  There are some serious missing pieces however, such as no mention of multi-tasking of multiple applications at one.  Basically, while you can surf the web on the iPad while listening to your iTunes music (as on the iPhone/iPod touch) you could not stream pandora while surfing the net, as Pandora will turn off as soon as you exit the program.  The reason for this is not because the ipad does not have the power to handle multiple applications, but the the operating system is based exactly on that of the iPhone/iPod 3.1.  These limitations inherently exist to prevent those smaller devices from performing poorly and Apple's goal is to retain performance.  However, software only issues like this will hopefully be resolved in future OS updates.

Next, the feel of the device has come into questions with a few reviewers saying that it feel very thin but does have weight to it (it is .5 inch thick and weights 1.5 lbs).  Battery life is rated by Apple to last approximately 10 hours.  Apple did not let us know how much battery it gets with bluetooth or heavy wifi usage.

In conclusion, whenever Apple introducing something radical, many people try to initially bash the company and go on to explain why certain "killer" features are missing or why thee product has no reason to exist.  Apple is smarter than all of us.  Basically, they have done their research and positioned a wonderful product that fits within the Kindle/Nook/Netbook category and will certainly allow consumers to get an Apple experience on a fantastic device.  Certain missing features can be enhanced through software updates. Apple employee's have likely been playing around with the iPad for months and months and have clearly fallen in love with the device.  This can be evidenced by the excitement Steve Jobs had during today's announcement.  It is hard for the general public to see how this device fits in their life since the product is inherently a new category of devices.  Apple wanted to create something that surfs the web better than a netbook as well as a smartphone, but it less expensive and heavy as a full blown laptop.  The product fits perfectly within the Apple product line.

Also remember this- Apple likes to introduce products which do not have all the features it could have and place them on second or third generation incarnations of the device.  They have added a volume rocker and speaker to later versions of the iPod Touch, for example.  They will likely add a camera, more memory, and better performing software to the iPad as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Ronz Gear Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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