The Summer Of Apple..?

Christmas-Like excitement abounds with the the imitate release of Apples IPad. Scheduled to hit stores April 3rd.
Never has there been so much written and talked about, about a product that only announced, and not yet released.
The Apple IPad will either be a huge success and a huge flop. My feeling is that once its out and people can touch it and use it, and word get around how amazing it is to use, it will find more believers. Over the last month I have read numerous articles touting its future uses in a variety of business applications, both corporate and small business. The major ap developers are rushing to get new versions of their aps out in time for the release on April 3rd. So far, all of this is being done with the SDK that Apple put out when the announced the IPad. So they are developing for a product they haven't even touched yet.. Once its out and the aps can be tried on a real product the real fun begins.


The idea of a tablet pc has been tried before several times. Each time it died a slow painful death, and generally faded off the market into tech history. Theres has been some limited success with tablet pc, in specialized situations, it has not done well with the general public.
The recent success of the Apple Iphone, Ipod Touch, and more recently the Google Android series of Phones has shown that there is a market for tablet devices, if done well. The major lesson being you can't just stick a regular PC desktop OS into a tablet and add touch, and handwriting recognition and call it done. It won't work, its not intuitively and easily, its clunky and a pain to use in a hurry to take notes, or other uses where one would want quick access to information, or to add information quickly. This is where the Iphone and its little brother the Ipod Touch come in, They are easy to use, and get information from, and in many cases easy to get it into.

Apple has taken on a new venue with the IPad, that of the ebook reader. For many years the ebook market has been limited to Amazons Kindle product line, and more recently Barnes & Nobles offering the Noook ebook reader. Both of which use a plain text format limiting it to pretty much just text and no pictures. While it works well, its not breaking any new ground. Then Apple comes along with the IPad, and introduces the IBook store and wakes up the publishing industry and upsetting the price structure that Amazon had set up for the ebooks they sold. That's not even discussing the whole color and multimedia formats that the Ipad is able to bring into play.The idea of publishers and writers being able to produce not only a written book, but a multi media experience to complement it is huge. magazines being able to play videos of subjects of the articles, or related to the articles Nativity in the player, and adding links to supporting content and other ways to enhance the ebook experience are astounding. Again Apple has possibility changed a entire market, as it did with music, and video and Itunes. At this point its only guessing, but given Apple past track record for redefining markets, and in some cases creating markets, its a pretty safe bet.
As I asked in the last article ; "Is the Apple IPad a game changer?" Very soon we will begin to know the answer.. This will be the summer of Apple. Possibly Apple's biggest summer in recent years.

Apple's IPad: The Shape of Things To Come?

Wednesday was a big day in the tech world, particularly, if you’re into Apple. After months of speculation, guessing posturing, and predicting by pundits and everyone else the Questions were finely answered.

Its called the Apple IPad. What it is essentially is a scaled up version of the hugely popular Apple Ipod Touch media player. Which means it syncs with your apple I-Tunes and can play music, videos and run all of the applications that you can run on a I-touch or I Phone now. This gives it a huge leg up on most new products. Using it is the same as using the I touch.

While Apple did not invent the MP3 player, and the Smart Phone, they did set the standard by which all others are judged in those lines. The same goes for Portable Media Players. While Apple didn't invent the Portable Media player they just may have set the stranded.. again..

Obliviously, its way too early to tell for sure. as they have just announced it today, and they won't ship for 60 days . But the bigger questions will take a while to answer. They have been critiquing something that very few of them have really seen, much less actually held yet. So essentially what they are doing is guessing. Until it ships and get out to the public and they use it no one will completely know what the impact it will have.

With the ability to get models with 3G and a no contract option for buying 3G from AT&T it becomes a platfrom for use in situations where one probably wouldn't do Internet and letting you do things you couldn't do on your IPhone because the screen is too small.

But the bigger question is will the public buy into it? Will they use it like they do the IPhone, and Ipod models, particularly the I touch ?

The IPad has already been called the Kindle Killer. The ablilty to buy and download e-books and audio books and play them on here as well as music and video, and aps defiantly even the playing field. Will aps makers buy into it? How soon will aps written specify for the IPad, and how many aps will be ported up to the IPad, so they can work natively on the larger 9 inch screen, and other features of the IPad?

Theses are many of the questions that will be answered over the course of this spring and summer.

I followed the news of the Apple announcement not on the TV so much as it was covered and commented on on the big new stations, But on my laptop, watching live streaming coverage by a number of websites, and web news venues, cheifly My favorite, Leo Leporte and his gang at TWIT.TV. Leo was actually in the convention center and saw the Steve Jobs presentation and afterwards was able to go and see and play with the demo units they had set up for the press. They then did live discussions with many of the people who were there for quite a while before Leo headed home. All of this was streamed and shown live . I don't remember the exact number they had watching at one time but it was huge, 2-3 times more then they had figured on. This not the first time they have done live remote streaming of events. In fact they were at CES in Los Vegas earlier this month, for 4 days straight and streamed and did live overage, and did several of the regular TWIT network shows live from the CES floor. What he had done on a relatively small budget is bring as good in some cases better coverage of events like CES and The Apple doings today to an audience who care what is happening, and given them the news they wanted when they wanted it.

So this was a news day in several ways, while Leo was covering Apple, He was interviewed by a reporter from I believe it was Fox , which was streamed to us right along with everything else.

So now all of the pundits can stop guessing and betting on whats it got,, they can now guess about the future of the Apple IPad.

Ken Lawson