Apple’s iPad – Who’s Buying it?

Yesterday Apple announced their highly anticipated tablet computer dubbed the iPad. Everyone knew it was coming and it seems Apple is the only company that could make a product like this successful. The iPad is really just a larger iPod touch or iPhone in all aspects. It comes out in 60 days and the big question is who is really going to buy this? Read on as we go over the new iPad and discuss its features and applications.

The iPad Rundown
Well like I said it is basically a bigger version of an iPod touch. The dimensions of the device itself are 9.56” x 7.47” x 0.5”. So it is very thin and weighing in at only 1.5lbs it is very light. Under the hood you have a 1Ghz Apple A4 custom designed processor and have a choice of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models.

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It is an all touch screen device; Apple will be selling a keyboard separately. The screen itself looked very beautiful – it looks much like the iPhone screen, just bigger. The 9.7-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen display is LED backlit, multi-touch, and uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology, which is new to us. Apple says this technology allows you to have a 178° viewing angle. So the max resolution on the iPad is 1024 x 768.

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The iPad does have 802.11n WiFi built in and they will have 3G models available 30 days after WiFi versions ship. These models will be $130 more than the WiFi-only models. As far as data packages go with the 3G Apple has announced AT&T deals. The first deal is $14.99 and gives you 250MB of data and they have an unlimited plan for $29.99. No word yet if that is the “5GB unlimited” or actually true unlimited data.

The iPad runs the iPhone OS, which means all of your iPhone apps will be compatible and work right off the bat. So unlike the original iPhone you will have a HUGE library of applications to choose from when the iPad comes out. From the demo’s we saw yesterday the iPad scales these apps extremely well as they are designed for the smaller iPhone screen.

With the iPhone OS running on very powerful device like the iPad it is very responsive and things load extremely fast. Also the touch-response is very quick and seamless. Another thing that is very interesting is that many people already have an iPhone, so learning to use a device like this would be seamless.

Of course with a device running the iPhone OS you will have the iTunes store. So you will be able to easily download MP3’s, Movies, TV Shows, Apps, etc. Apple announced iBooks a new App built for the iPad, which is a book reader. With that you will have books in the iTunes store as well. The iBook App seems pretty cool you have a bookshelf with your purchased books on it. You double tap to open a book up and start reading. It seems very fluid and a huge jump over what Amazon is doing with the Kindle.

Pricing starts at $499 for the 16GB version that only has WiFi, the rest of the prices are listed below.

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