Thursday 28 January 2010

The iPad ...

Well the world's been all a-twitter about Mr Job's latest creation. Like ninety nine percent of the world I havn't seen one yet but judging from all the blogs and news reports it seems to be essentially a big iPod touch with an optional keyboard/charger. As I've blogged elsewhere the keyboard means that you can use it as a general purpose computer but it doesn't mean that the iPad is a general purpose computer - instead it's a content display device, as witnessed by the deals with Penguin, Harper Collins et all, and it's ability to play movies etc.

As such it's more of a threat to the Kindle's and other e-book readers of the world rather than netbooks like my beloved Ookygoo (Asus 701 Eee SD), prnicipally because the Ookygoo has a full range of applications, is light, portable, and has good wifi access. Basically you can do your email, surf the web, read blogs, write notes locally, use skype, access Google Docs, all with a package weighing slightly less than a kilogram. The iPad isn't really set up for that.

On the other hand it makes my e-book reader look jaded - or possibly not - it just depends how superb the screen is for reading on in practice ...



1 comment:

dgm said...

one interesting aside is that the ipad uses epub as a file format, which might result in a slew of nice epub generators/converters ....