The iPad?
Because I am a big dork, I spent the hour and a half glued to my computer screen reading the liveblogs of Apple's iPad announcement. Woo, it's a big iPod touch, not that I have one of those. (My iPod is, um, in black and white.) It looks pretty, but I'm not sure I need anything in that size. It isn't as powerful as an actual computer (so it shouldn't be a computer replacement), it's not pocket-size, so it wouldn't be a very good iPod replacement, and there's no way it will replace my Kindle.
(I know it's supposed to be a Kindle killer, ooh, backlight, ooh, page turning gestures, ooh, looks like a real book. The thing I will say is that everyone but Amazon appears to be ePub, but I'm sure Amazon will go ePub only if that's where the market's heading. I really think the e-Ink is much easier to read on than backlit anything -- and dude, it's not like books are backlit! -- I like the battery life on the Kindle much, much better, and from an accessibility perspective I can read with the Kindle using only one hand, which is absolutely awesome, let me tell you, and it makes reading a lot easier to be able to do this. The iPad seems really optimized for having a two-handed reading experience. You know, like books. I just like hitting "next page" with my left hand on the Kindle. Why, yes, I do wish we printed books with pages the other way, but the Kindle is way easier than even that would be.)
So I'm not really sure what it's competing with, except the netbook market, and so far I've resisted that, except if my Mac up and dies I might replace with a netbook, which is good enough for basic web and word-processing, and it sounds like Apple wants you to have an existing computer to hook the iPad up to. Yeah. So I guess I'm not the target market.
Also the name iPad (a) makes me think of sanitary napkins and (b) is going to be really difficult to distinguish from "iPod" in languages that have one low vowel where we have [æ] and [a]. They've just given their products the same name. Ha-ha.
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(I know it's supposed to be a Kindle killer, ooh, backlight, ooh, page turning gestures, ooh, looks like a real book. The thing I will say is that everyone but Amazon appears to be ePub, but I'm sure Amazon will go ePub only if that's where the market's heading. I really think the e-Ink is much easier to read on than backlit anything -- and dude, it's not like books are backlit! -- I like the battery life on the Kindle much, much better, and from an accessibility perspective I can read with the Kindle using only one hand, which is absolutely awesome, let me tell you, and it makes reading a lot easier to be able to do this. The iPad seems really optimized for having a two-handed reading experience. You know, like books. I just like hitting "next page" with my left hand on the Kindle. Why, yes, I do wish we printed books with pages the other way, but the Kindle is way easier than even that would be.)
So I'm not really sure what it's competing with, except the netbook market, and so far I've resisted that, except if my Mac up and dies I might replace with a netbook, which is good enough for basic web and word-processing, and it sounds like Apple wants you to have an existing computer to hook the iPad up to. Yeah. So I guess I'm not the target market.
Also the name iPad (a) makes me think of sanitary napkins and (b) is going to be really difficult to distinguish from "iPod" in languages that have one low vowel where we have [æ] and [a]. They've just given their products the same name. Ha-ha.
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
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