Apple’s iPad Announcements

One of the slides Steve Jobs showed has this on it:

iPad: Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price. Starting at $499.

I think that’s absolutely true. I’ve been lusting for the iPad for years.

I’ve tried to be funny about it, and patient, but this is exactly what I want. I mostly want it to read ebooks; I’m delighted that most iPhone applications will work well, and I’ve been assured by the developers of some of my favorite applications for reading stuff on the iPhone that they are going to support the larger screen asap. You can find Apple’s official iPad site here.

For those of you in a cave, here are the basics:

• 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch
• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chipWireless and Cellular
• Wi-Fi model
• Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology
• Digital compass

The Wifi Model comes out around the end of March, world wide; the G3 + WiFi about a month after that. In terms of pricing, the basic Wifi model with 16GB is $499.00. The 32 GB model is $599, and the 64 GB iPad is $699.00. When the 3G + WiFi models emerge, they’ll each be $130.00 more. There are two prepaid data plans from AT and T; 250MB/month for $14.99, or unlimited for $29.99.

Apple’s own accessories include a dockable keyboard, and a case.

As for me, I’d line up right now to buy one. I note that I’m not a “Apple released it; I gotta buy it” sort. The only Apple products I ever bought on initial release or earlier were my first generation 5 gig iPod (which still works, thank you very much) and my iPhone, which yes, I lined up to get. I’d buy the iPad now, were the cash available. I note, by the way, I wasn’t all that far off from what they released in this parody post from last year. I’d still like 180GB storage, and FireWire, but I’m awfully happy with what they’ve done. The two things that genuinely surprised me are the iBooks application and ebook store, and the iWork for iPhone. That’s sweet. I’m awfully excited, and off to learn more about ePub as an ebook file format; what I remember of it is that it’s not very good at internal links, images, or media handling. I’m still waiting for a media rich ebook that can do what Voyager did back in 1994 with MacBeth. I think this might be the best device I’ve seen for high quality media rich hypertext ebooks.