Tablet thoughts
The Apple Tablet - excuse me, the iPad - release event is now over, so I'll take a break from the tech blogs, where everybody's shouting about how much it sucks, and register my opinion.
It's pretty, but we've come to expect that from Apple, right? It's thin, it's light-ish (1.5 lbs), it's reportedly amazingly fast, and it does pretty much everything I need a portable device to do. There's no Flash, but that's a known Apple quirk, and while I'll need to find an alternate way to get my Homestar Runner fix (YouTube, probably), I can probably live without it. Lack of multitasking is a bigger surprise, and a bigger disappointment - does Apple really think we'll never need to switch between web browsing and word processing without losing our places in either? This could conceivably be fixed in an OS upgrade, though, and I'm pretty firmly convinced (albeit with no hard evidence) that Apple will roll out an OS upgrade for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad this summer that provides multitasking. It runs all the iPhone/iPod Touch apps out of the box (well, except the ones that require missing hardware, like a camera or GPS), and the SDK was released today, so I expect a suite of device-specific apps to be available when the device ships in March.
Shockingly, I think Apple nailed the price point on this: $499/599/699 for 16/32/64 GB WiFi-only models (with a $130 premium for 3G on each level). That's well within my budget, even at the 64 GB level. The enTourage eDGe I've been considering is comparably priced ($530 to get it in black, and then I'd need to get a 16GB SD card for additional storage, so figure $570-600 total); it's also substantially heavier, and there are vastly more available apps in the Apple ecosystem than for Android. So it looks like I'll be buying an iPad. I'll let you know how that goes. (More info at Apple's iPad site.)
It's pretty, but we've come to expect that from Apple, right? It's thin, it's light-ish (1.5 lbs), it's reportedly amazingly fast, and it does pretty much everything I need a portable device to do. There's no Flash, but that's a known Apple quirk, and while I'll need to find an alternate way to get my Homestar Runner fix (YouTube, probably), I can probably live without it. Lack of multitasking is a bigger surprise, and a bigger disappointment - does Apple really think we'll never need to switch between web browsing and word processing without losing our places in either? This could conceivably be fixed in an OS upgrade, though, and I'm pretty firmly convinced (albeit with no hard evidence) that Apple will roll out an OS upgrade for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad this summer that provides multitasking. It runs all the iPhone/iPod Touch apps out of the box (well, except the ones that require missing hardware, like a camera or GPS), and the SDK was released today, so I expect a suite of device-specific apps to be available when the device ships in March.
Shockingly, I think Apple nailed the price point on this: $499/599/699 for 16/32/64 GB WiFi-only models (with a $130 premium for 3G on each level). That's well within my budget, even at the 64 GB level. The enTourage eDGe I've been considering is comparably priced ($530 to get it in black, and then I'd need to get a 16GB SD card for additional storage, so figure $570-600 total); it's also substantially heavier, and there are vastly more available apps in the Apple ecosystem than for Android. So it looks like I'll be buying an iPad. I'll let you know how that goes. (More info at Apple's iPad site.)