"It was hyped and ripped before it even had a name, and after it was announced, it was both praised and panned. Apple's iPad has been the subject of debates about the future of technology and media, and massive speculation about whether people will really want to buy and use it."
- Macworld
Since the first computer was made in the fifties, the technology has developed extremely. Computers which usually took the place of a living-room then, are now being made in creditcard formats. The amount and variety of technology currently available today, is remarkable. Certainly the iPod, iPhone, and now "The iPad" have changed the way people communicate and work in order to be successful in schools, offices and homes.
When you search Google for "iPad", it returns 149,000,000 results, amazing!! and why not, for such a revolutionary product, it should have resulted even more. Having being announced on January 27, 2010, it was released on April 3, 2010 and April 30, 2010 for Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G respectively, it has made a great impact with a remarkable number of pieces sold. In 2001, The iPod sold 129,000 units in its first 3 months, Amazon Kindle sold 1,100 units in its first 24 hours, Google Nexus One with 20,000 units in its first week, iPod Touch with about 16,000 sales on its first day, XBox 360 sold 36,222 in its first 24 hours, Nintendo Wii with app. 74,000 sales in 24 hours, Motorola Droid sold 100,000 on its first weekend, while due to online pre-orders, Apple shifted 240,000 iPads in one day. Apple says it sold 1 million iPads by May 3, 2010, and 2 million by May 31, 2010, Flawless !
The Apple iPad comes with a multitouch display of 9.7 inches at a resolution of 1024x768 pixels with LED backlighting, a fingerprint and scratch resistant coating makes it even prominent among other tablet computers. It weighs 680g(Wi-Fi) and 730g(Wi-Fi + 3G). It has a 1 GHz Apple A4 Processor, with a fixed capacity of 16, 32 or 64 GB storage. The most important of all, it has a 2.1+EDR Bluetooth and a Wi-Fi, for best internet availability. The operating system used in iPad is the same as iPod Touch that is iPhone OS 3.2 which is upgradable upto OS 4.0. It has a 10 hours video playback time or 140 hours of Audio playback and 1 month standby time. What more, one could expect.
The applications that comes with the iPad, include Safari, Mail, Photos, Video, YouTube, iPod, iTunes, App Store, Maps, Notes, iBooks, Calendar, Contacts, and Spotlight Search. Several are improved versions of applications, developed for the iPhone.
Like any other electronic device, there are some drawbacks in the iPad as well. You are talking about the "Next generation personal computer" without a camera? Thats a nightmare. Some other failures include, the unaccessibility of multi-tasking; browsing without listening music, sounds pathetic. The unavailability of USB ports is often a big failure. The iPad is meant to be an easy-to-use appliance, not an all-purpose computer. A USB port would mean installing drivers for printers, scanners and anything else you might hook up. More importantly, the omission of Adobe Flash is not the thing, we were expecting from such a great invention. The limitations of storage is also a negative aspect.
There are some aspects of this device which we love, and others which we clearly don't. The iPad is a computing revolution. Although it has some drawbacks, It evolves the personal computer in a significant way. The best way to sum up is to say that its the first device to substantially deliver on the promise made by its manufacturers. We can say that iPad is the end of a long journey as well as the start of a new one. We can't wait to see where the technology takes us next.
Apple ipod