What I'm really interested to know is will the iPad allow me to write a book, save in unencrypted ePub format, and upload it to my own device, to be read by iBooks?
Yes. Drag your ePub file into iTunes, sync with the iPad, done. Or publish your book via smashwords (free), get it into the iBooks store this way and install it right from the iPad;-)
There already is an iPhone/iPod app for this. It's called SoundAMP, and is $10. So for $210 you can get an iPod touch and SoundAMP, and have way more features than a normal hearing aid (unless the new ones can play music, surf the web, etc). It even has a playback feature in case you missed what someone said (presumably in the case where you can't ask them to repeat it, such as TV, or an announcement or something).
I've often thought you could do it this way. Add some good ear-conforming earphones with mics on the outside and have the software run on the iPhone. OK, that thing won't fit into your ear, but then it should be not only much cheaper, it can also do much more than straight hearing aids. Sell the special earphones and the software for $200 and all the half-deaf geeks out there will love you. If you're clever, add some sophisticated test and tuning mode to the software, so people can just buy the thing and adjust the software to their kind of hearing loss.
In German the equivalent to the English "hot" (in taste) is "scharf" which means literally "sharp" as in "a sharp blade". This is different from the word for high temperature (which is "heiss", meaning again "hot" in English).
I have always found "sharp" to be a fairly usable description of that somewhat painful taste and one that is less likely to be confused with actual temperature than "hot".
Seriously, their technology must be something all display manufacturers are after. So why have they to offer something like that which will be only of interest for geeks?
As far as I know there is nothing amiss with this displays. They are great, cheap, easy to produce and offer nothing but advantages. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to sell this technology to everyone building netbooks or notebooks or desktop displays. But there's not a *single* device you can buy with this display. What's going on here?
I would say "prototype" usually means some working hard- and software, a real device. Not in mass production or finally nailed down, but something that really exists and can be touched and basically works.
So, are there pictures of that device? I have seen nothing than renderings and UI mockups yet and people talking of a "prototype" when there is just a "concept" drive me crazy.
And I also don't get it when people talk about "multi-touch" and seem to mean "you can touch and swipe and gesture everywhere and everywhere every touch and swipe and gesture does something different. Isn't it great?". No! It isn't!
Why do you think it's too big to hold for long periods of time? Is that simply speculation, or do you have some evidence to back that up?
If you care to measure and weight some books you'll find that the iPad is about as heavy as an average book of a similar size. It's not really light but it's also not really heavy. You probably won't hold it with outstretched arms for hours, but you won't do this with a book (or even with empty hands) for very long either.
The iPhone offered new things in a phone, things the average consumer didn't realize were possible. The iPad offers... what? I just don't see it. The only significant difference between the iPad and an iTouch is the screen size.
I think you'd be amazed how many people are wishing just for an iPhone with a larger screen... because that's the only thing they see as a real limitation in their iPhone. Well, and that's there no way to attach a keyboard when they have to write some more text.
Like it or hate it, but there are lots and lots of people out there who don't actually want to deal with computers and software and files. They want an appliance that does some simple things in an easy, friendly way, nothing more.
I believe *we* are the ones who have been brainwashed (or brainwashed ourselves) to love "computers". For a while computers were new and full of limitless capabilities. Now they are the most boring things under the sun, complicated tools full of crap, forcing you to solve over and over the same problems that are being solved at the same time all over the world again and again. There's nothing less geeky than computers today. 99% of the time you're wasting with computers does not teach you anything worthwhile or helps you to solve new and interesting problems. Just servicing cheap and crappy machinery and software, that's all.
So only Apple fanbois bought the iPhone (which is more expensive than the iPad)? Surely not. There are more iPhones out there now than Macs.
I tell you what: Only geeks are interested in what their devices can do. Normal people are interested in what *they* can do with their devices. Price plays a role, yes, but it's not the only thing. People already have computers and smartphones. They will only buy something really new if they can do more with it with less effort.
The iPad has a home screen with icons for apps and you can tap such an icon to use an app and press the home button to go back to the home screen. That's it. This is a good user interface. It's a bad geek interface, but most people aren't geeks.
Well, and my mother: I've prepared her a PC with Ubuntu long ago. She uses it twice a month or so and every time she has forgotten how to do this and that. Why? Because she does not care. She's not interested in it. It's complicated and she does not experiment and she does not have fun learning it. She certainly has no interest in multitasking and would be just too glad to have every app use the full screen, allowing her to actually concentrate on what she is doing right now. And she's not silly, believe me. She's been running her own business for 40 years, has cared for a large family and a house and now, at 76, she's still caring for the financial side of a local organisation, just for fun. Sometimes I think she's more clever than me. Every time I sit down with her at the computer I have to agree: Yes, this thing is so dumb and complex. You have to learn thousands of things before you even can start to get some use out of it and none of these things have anything to do with what you want to do.
Netbooks were once recognized as finally making the transition from the PC to the appliance. A cheap, HD-less, Linux-powered device with a straight UI, good enough just for the basic things everyone needs but simple enough to be used by everyone everywhere, with a rather small SSD and good networking capabilities. We called it "netbook" for a reason.
Then MS came, looked and shivered. And offered really cheap Windows licenses, cheaper than integrating and inventing some Linux UI. One year later netbooks were just cheap notebooks with 10"-displays, running off Windows and big HDs. Problem solved.
Now Apple rears its always pretty head. A small and rather cheap device, with a good UI and no tinkering needed, just enough to get by for all your web and content and game needs.
Then MS speaks up again: Netbooks are the future! Yeah. Netbooks. Not tablets, which may run Android on platforms Windows lacks any support for. Not tablets from Apple, running circles around whatever MS has to offer. Netbooks, running Windows 7. The IBM PC, smaller, faster, cheaper and with a painted lid. And with Windows on it. Of course.
Im being picky here, but the screen is an awkward shape for eBooks. 1024x600 as 10.1" is a rather elongated rectangle, and isn't anywhere near the same ratios as 8.5"x11" paper (22:17 which pdfs emulate).
As much as I like the Pixel Qi displays I have to admire Apple to be bold and go back to the good old 1024x768. I was totally surprised by that but they're right.
There's another problem with 1024x600: When you turn the thing around the height/width ratio changes so much that you either have to totally re-adjust your UI or have to accept some awkward compromise that somewhat works with both orientations and somewhat sucks in both.
OK, Android apps have to deal with so many different screen solutions that this probably is the smallest of your problems. But I very much doubt that this will help Android with UI excellence.
For me the point is not that this sort of device can be used as a handheld device (and ONLY that), but it should work well as a handheld device IN ADDITION to being a proper computer, albeit with lower performance than a big desktop machine.
That way you have ONE device that you can take with you anywhere, which is always useful AT LEAST as a handheld device.
To be honest, the keyboard-dock for the iPad was the point where my modest disappointment with the iPad (I hadn't expected anything else than a larger iPhone anyway) turned into shy interest. This thing, along with iWork, looks *so* much like an old-fashioned typewriter executed with modern means. It's probably just a dream but I had some flash of finally using a computer just as a tool I have to and want to waste only very limited thoughts on. I very much doubt that we're there yet, but the dream is still alive.
I think a lightweight tablet has a lot of potential if it is cheap enough. The $500+ Apple tablet I think costs WAY too much for any but the fanboys who will buy anything Job's touches. If they could get this tablet down to the $200-$300 range I think they could have a winner. I would love to have a little tablet that lets me browse the web, read e-books, store/play music, maybe watch movies, and do other passive media consumption tasks.
As always the question is how much money your time is worth (and if you want to have it metered). If the iPad with its OS and apps require/allow much less tinkering than that tablet with Android and Android apps, $500 may be cheaper than $300.
I have seen only very few Android apps that are really great and the fact that there is so much hardware and different screen resolutions to be supported by those apps makes me think that for "just use the thing" an iPad isn't that a bad idea.
I'm not an Apple fanboi but Apple *is* good at making the technology vanish and to make it look like magic instead. Android doesn't even try, it still looks and feels like an OS. I do not want to deal with an OS for consuming media, I want it to be magic.
Saving $200 at my current rate means I have 4 hours over the lifetime of such a tablet to waste with tinkering around before the return turns negative.
I may very well end up with an iPad for the lazy/magic part and an Adam tablet for something I can hack... Or with just hacking real computers, which I have more than enough of. I'm still not really sure if this isn't the point to take some time-out from always screwing around with my devices and get one to just turn into a mindless user now and then. And I'm *very* tempted by the iPad, my geek mind just wants to explore how it feels to just use something that my mother could also use. There may be new fields of insight to be found here.
One thing I'm wondering about: A "normal" touchscreen needs no cursor (or mouse arrow or whatever you may call it) since you see where you tap.
A rear-touchpad needs to work much more like a normal touchpad on a notebook: You move around some sprite on the screen and click/tap if it's in the right place.
How does this work on this tablet and how is it supported by the OS and the apps? I think one important thing with tablets is integration: In the best case you don't have to care at all about such things. You click the thing on, use it and click it off again. This certainly is something Apple is doing perfectly right.
Anyway, I love to tinker around with my devices and to make them mine, but now and then something that just works and even fights back hard against all attempts to tinker with it may be somewhat relaxing.
Well, the rear-touchpad is a nice idea. We will see.
Even an LED-backlit 10" screen is likely to use at least 7 watts of power in active use... and there's not a whole lot of space in the iPad for a big battery.
Now, this is nonsense. The iPad has a 25Wh battery, so a 7 W display alone would suck it dry within less than 4 hours... My 13" Macbook consumes about 10 W when browsing the net over WiFi on half brightness and that's not only the display, it's the whole machine.
The iPad is at the other end of the spectrum, it handles color and refreshes in miliseconds instead of seconds but it's also heavy and thick (what do you expect with a big glass covered IPS LCD screen and ~5x the battery capacity of any of it's competitors to power it).
The iPad is about as heavy as an average book of the same size. Not really light, but also not really heavy for a book.
Yeah, but look at any demo video of this thing and you can't fail to see how incredibly slow and clunky the user interface is. You tap somewhere and get no feedback at all. A few seconds later the screen flashes and something happens (or not). This must be the most disconnecting and confusing way to use a device ever. I couldn't use such a thing for more than five minutes before throwing it at the wall. Even looking at the video is maddening.
E-ink is just fast enough now for slowly reading through linear books (like novels) and really totally sucks for any more complex user interface or for anything that requires to quickly move around, skim pages or in any way interact with the screen.
I just can't believe that they even think of producing and selling this. This thing will be EATEN by the iPad, e-ink or not.
Every dimension was converted prior to doing anything else. There are 25.4 millimetres to the inch, or 2.54 microns per ten thousandth of an inch. Never, ever had a problem converting.
That's because, ironically, the inch now is DEFINED as being 25.4 millimetres, so a clean and exact conversion is no problem since the inch is already based on metric units. Saying "one inch" is just another way of saying "25.4 millimetres". Other units are less clean and exact.
I've read more than 200 books on my iPod touch (with Stanza) now and while I think that a larger screen is better and e-ink is better in certain conditions (enough light, slow and linear reading through a novel or so), I'm totally happy with it. The iPod totally vanishes behind the book I'm reading and what more to say about an ebook-reader?
I'm quite sure that the iPad will be a hit. It's not perfect, but it is a well rounded product offering much more than just an ebook reader.
E-ink is not as important as some people think. It does exactly one thing well (displaying static text with no backlight) and totally fails at all others. It's incredibly slow, it has no colors, it has low contrast and you can't have a decent user-interface with a touchscreen (because it is much to slow to offer good visual feedback, scrolling, or any other kind of animations). And the low energy consumption of the screen alone makes a difference only if the hardware beneath it is also very minimal. Put an e-ink screen on something like the iPad and it will run 15 hours instead of 10 on a charge. Bad deal.
I think the prices of e-ink readers will have to come down a lot or they will just vanish from the market. They are very limited devices after all.
I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time here or if I should patent the idea;-)
Make a shop in which authors can sell books like developers can sell apps in the Apple appstore. Have them set a price for the book. Then (and now comes the interesting part) have a way for the readers/buyers to VOTE WITH THEIR MONEY for a book by giving the author (and him alone) another amount of money if they liked the book. Rank authors and books by the number of people giving additional money and by how much they gave. Allow those (and only those) to write comments and reviews on it.
What would this produce? Now, probably a steaming pile of shit consisting of lots of cheap books with some diamonds hidden in it. But who cares for the shit if you can find the diamonds easily? In fact I think that such a combination of a direct shop with crowd-sourcing by money would work even with apps, music and other things. People like to promote things they like and have usually no problem to give a tip to someone who deserves it. Combine these and make sure that the money lands where it belongs and you may have solved a hard problem.
Of course you would also need an additional market for people actually helping authors to write books very much like publishers do. But as this is just a service there's no reason why an open market shouldn't work here.
I think you will find that the majority of computer users doesn't use them for "computing" anymore anyway.
And the iPad isn't a "computer". I don't think it will do anything to computers. But I also don't think the majority of people wants to use "computers" at all. The iPad and other tablets like it *will* start to push computers out of the homes and classrooms soon. This will not be the end of the "computer" but it will finally go back to where it belongs, into offices and labs and the industry and basements.
Which is entirely irrelevant. I'm an "IT Professional and programmer" and I carry a Thinkpad.
"Think pad"? Are you a bloody girl? Hahaha!!!
(This is solely in reference to all the "Mac's iPad" postings all over the net when the name "iPad" was suggested for the Apple tablet. Sorry for that, I just couldn't resist.)
Now, really. People don't care about Apple, but they try to get that out really loud and would like to discuss it. Hmm.
The thing about Apple is that they do something that is almost unheard of in recent computer time: They think. Whatever you like or hate about Apple and Steve Jobs, but they always had a way of re-thinking things everyone takes for granted that is just appealing to people. Call it "vision", call it "a mission", but they just put the PC industry to shame. Because all this industry does is nothing than "do whatever all others do and try to do it cheaper". There is no fun in that.
It's not so much that there's something special about Apple but there's something very much unspecial about the IT industry. Computers have become boring. Really. It's 2010 and we STILL USE PCs! Even the most recent netbook and "Tablet-PC" is still a faster, smaller, cheaper IBM PC. Still a "general purpose computing device". People are sick of that. They want a tiny, shiny piece of the future and not just a 20th century office machine with a painted lid.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm really interested to know is will the iPad allow me to write a book, save in unencrypted ePub format, and upload it to my own device, to be read by iBooks?
Yes. Drag your ePub file into iTunes, sync with the iPad, done. Or publish your book via smashwords (free), get it into the iBooks store this way and install it right from the iPad ;-)
ifixit.com looked into it: It has 256MB, yes.
Well, if what you're doing is reading Slashdot and posting one-liners, it should work fine for that.
There already is an iPhone/iPod app for this. It's called SoundAMP, and is $10. So for $210 you can get an iPod touch and SoundAMP, and have way more features than a normal hearing aid (unless the new ones can play music, surf the web, etc). It even has a playback feature in case you missed what someone said (presumably in the case where you can't ask them to repeat it, such as TV, or an announcement or something).
I've often thought you could do it this way. Add some good ear-conforming earphones with mics on the outside and have the software run on the iPhone. OK, that thing won't fit into your ear, but then it should be not only much cheaper, it can also do much more than straight hearing aids. Sell the special earphones and the software for $200 and all the half-deaf geeks out there will love you. If you're clever, add some sophisticated test and tuning mode to the software, so people can just buy the thing and adjust the software to their kind of hearing loss.
In German the equivalent to the English "hot" (in taste) is "scharf" which means literally "sharp" as in "a sharp blade". This is different from the word for high temperature (which is "heiss", meaning again "hot" in English).
I have always found "sharp" to be a fairly usable description of that somewhat painful taste and one that is less likely to be confused with actual temperature than "hot".
Seriously, their technology must be something all display manufacturers are after. So why have they to offer something like that which will be only of interest for geeks?
As far as I know there is nothing amiss with this displays. They are great, cheap, easy to produce and offer nothing but advantages. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to sell this technology to everyone building netbooks or notebooks or desktop displays. But there's not a *single* device you can buy with this display. What's going on here?
I would say "prototype" usually means some working hard- and software, a real device. Not in mass production or finally nailed down, but something that really exists and can be touched and basically works.
So, are there pictures of that device? I have seen nothing than renderings and UI mockups yet and people talking of a "prototype" when there is just a "concept" drive me crazy.
And I also don't get it when people talk about "multi-touch" and seem to mean "you can touch and swipe and gesture everywhere and everywhere every touch and swipe and gesture does something different. Isn't it great?". No! It isn't!
If you care to measure and weight some books you'll find that the iPad is about as heavy as an average book of a similar size. It's not really light but it's also not really heavy. You probably won't hold it with outstretched arms for hours, but you won't do this with a book (or even with empty hands) for very long either.
I think you'd be amazed how many people are wishing just for an iPhone with a larger screen... because that's the only thing they see as a real limitation in their iPhone. Well, and that's there no way to attach a keyboard when they have to write some more text.
Like it or hate it, but there are lots and lots of people out there who don't actually want to deal with computers and software and files. They want an appliance that does some simple things in an easy, friendly way, nothing more.
I believe *we* are the ones who have been brainwashed (or brainwashed ourselves) to love "computers". For a while computers were new and full of limitless capabilities. Now they are the most boring things under the sun, complicated tools full of crap, forcing you to solve over and over the same problems that are being solved at the same time all over the world again and again. There's nothing less geeky than computers today. 99% of the time you're wasting with computers does not teach you anything worthwhile or helps you to solve new and interesting problems. Just servicing cheap and crappy machinery and software, that's all.
Well, there are exceptions, but not many.
So only Apple fanbois bought the iPhone (which is more expensive than the iPad)? Surely not. There are more iPhones out there now than Macs.
I tell you what: Only geeks are interested in what their devices can do. Normal people are interested in what *they* can do with their devices. Price plays a role, yes, but it's not the only thing. People already have computers and smartphones. They will only buy something really new if they can do more with it with less effort.
The iPad has a home screen with icons for apps and you can tap such an icon to use an app and press the home button to go back to the home screen. That's it. This is a good user interface. It's a bad geek interface, but most people aren't geeks.
Well, and my mother: I've prepared her a PC with Ubuntu long ago. She uses it twice a month or so and every time she has forgotten how to do this and that. Why? Because she does not care. She's not interested in it. It's complicated and she does not experiment and she does not have fun learning it. She certainly has no interest in multitasking and would be just too glad to have every app use the full screen, allowing her to actually concentrate on what she is doing right now. And she's not silly, believe me. She's been running her own business for 40 years, has cared for a large family and a house and now, at 76, she's still caring for the financial side of a local organisation, just for fun. Sometimes I think she's more clever than me. Every time I sit down with her at the computer I have to agree: Yes, this thing is so dumb and complex. You have to learn thousands of things before you even can start to get some use out of it and none of these things have anything to do with what you want to do.
Netbooks were once recognized as finally making the transition from the PC to the appliance. A cheap, HD-less, Linux-powered device with a straight UI, good enough just for the basic things everyone needs but simple enough to be used by everyone everywhere, with a rather small SSD and good networking capabilities. We called it "netbook" for a reason.
Then MS came, looked and shivered. And offered really cheap Windows licenses, cheaper than integrating and inventing some Linux UI. One year later netbooks were just cheap notebooks with 10"-displays, running off Windows and big HDs. Problem solved.
Now Apple rears its always pretty head. A small and rather cheap device, with a good UI and no tinkering needed, just enough to get by for all your web and content and game needs.
Then MS speaks up again: Netbooks are the future! Yeah. Netbooks. Not tablets, which may run Android on platforms Windows lacks any support for. Not tablets from Apple, running circles around whatever MS has to offer. Netbooks, running Windows 7. The IBM PC, smaller, faster, cheaper and with a painted lid. And with Windows on it. Of course.
Im being picky here, but the screen is an awkward shape for eBooks. 1024x600 as 10.1" is a rather elongated rectangle, and isn't anywhere near the same ratios as 8.5"x11" paper (22:17 which pdfs emulate).
As much as I like the Pixel Qi displays I have to admire Apple to be bold and go back to the good old 1024x768. I was totally surprised by that but they're right.
There's another problem with 1024x600: When you turn the thing around the height/width ratio changes so much that you either have to totally re-adjust your UI or have to accept some awkward compromise that somewhat works with both orientations and somewhat sucks in both.
OK, Android apps have to deal with so many different screen solutions that this probably is the smallest of your problems. But I very much doubt that this will help Android with UI excellence.
For me the point is not that this sort of device can be used as a handheld device (and ONLY that), but it should work well as a handheld device IN ADDITION to being a proper computer, albeit with lower performance than a big desktop machine.
That way you have ONE device that you can take with you anywhere, which is always useful AT LEAST as a handheld device.
To be honest, the keyboard-dock for the iPad was the point where my modest disappointment with the iPad (I hadn't expected anything else than a larger iPhone anyway) turned into shy interest. This thing, along with iWork, looks *so* much like an old-fashioned typewriter executed with modern means. It's probably just a dream but I had some flash of finally using a computer just as a tool I have to and want to waste only very limited thoughts on. I very much doubt that we're there yet, but the dream is still alive.
I think a lightweight tablet has a lot of potential if it is cheap enough. The $500+ Apple tablet I think costs WAY too much for any but the fanboys who will buy anything Job's touches. If they could get this tablet down to the $200-$300 range I think they could have a winner. I would love to have a little tablet that lets me browse the web, read e-books, store/play music, maybe watch movies, and do other passive media consumption tasks.
As always the question is how much money your time is worth (and if you want to have it metered). If the iPad with its OS and apps require/allow much less tinkering than that tablet with Android and Android apps, $500 may be cheaper than $300.
I have seen only very few Android apps that are really great and the fact that there is so much hardware and different screen resolutions to be supported by those apps makes me think that for "just use the thing" an iPad isn't that a bad idea.
I'm not an Apple fanboi but Apple *is* good at making the technology vanish and to make it look like magic instead. Android doesn't even try, it still looks and feels like an OS. I do not want to deal with an OS for consuming media, I want it to be magic.
Saving $200 at my current rate means I have 4 hours over the lifetime of such a tablet to waste with tinkering around before the return turns negative.
I may very well end up with an iPad for the lazy/magic part and an Adam tablet for something I can hack... Or with just hacking real computers, which I have more than enough of. I'm still not really sure if this isn't the point to take some time-out from always screwing around with my devices and get one to just turn into a mindless user now and then. And I'm *very* tempted by the iPad, my geek mind just wants to explore how it feels to just use something that my mother could also use. There may be new fields of insight to be found here.
Most touchscreens are capacitive these days, so I don't think it will register anything else beside fingers.
All eleven of them.
It's somewhat curious that the multitouch touchpads on MacBooks indeed support exactly eleven touch points...
One thing I'm wondering about: A "normal" touchscreen needs no cursor (or mouse arrow or whatever you may call it) since you see where you tap.
A rear-touchpad needs to work much more like a normal touchpad on a notebook: You move around some sprite on the screen and click/tap if it's in the right place.
How does this work on this tablet and how is it supported by the OS and the apps? I think one important thing with tablets is integration: In the best case you don't have to care at all about such things. You click the thing on, use it and click it off again. This certainly is something Apple is doing perfectly right.
Anyway, I love to tinker around with my devices and to make them mine, but now and then something that just works and even fights back hard against all attempts to tinker with it may be somewhat relaxing.
Well, the rear-touchpad is a nice idea. We will see.
Now, this is nonsense. The iPad has a 25Wh battery, so a 7 W display alone would suck it dry within less than 4 hours... My 13" Macbook consumes about 10 W when browsing the net over WiFi on half brightness and that's not only the display, it's the whole machine.
The iPad is about as heavy as an average book of the same size. Not really light, but also not really heavy for a book.
Yeah, but look at any demo video of this thing and you can't fail to see how incredibly slow and clunky the user interface is. You tap somewhere and get no feedback at all. A few seconds later the screen flashes and something happens (or not). This must be the most disconnecting and confusing way to use a device ever. I couldn't use such a thing for more than five minutes before throwing it at the wall. Even looking at the video is maddening.
E-ink is just fast enough now for slowly reading through linear books (like novels) and really totally sucks for any more complex user interface or for anything that requires to quickly move around, skim pages or in any way interact with the screen.
I just can't believe that they even think of producing and selling this. This thing will be EATEN by the iPad, e-ink or not.
That's because, ironically, the inch now is DEFINED as being 25.4 millimetres, so a clean and exact conversion is no problem since the inch is already based on metric units. Saying "one inch" is just another way of saying "25.4 millimetres". Other units are less clean and exact.
I've read more than 200 books on my iPod touch (with Stanza) now and while I think that a larger screen is better and e-ink is better in certain conditions (enough light, slow and linear reading through a novel or so), I'm totally happy with it. The iPod totally vanishes behind the book I'm reading and what more to say about an ebook-reader?
I'm quite sure that the iPad will be a hit. It's not perfect, but it is a well rounded product offering much more than just an ebook reader.
E-ink is not as important as some people think. It does exactly one thing well (displaying static text with no backlight) and totally fails at all others. It's incredibly slow, it has no colors, it has low contrast and you can't have a decent user-interface with a touchscreen (because it is much to slow to offer good visual feedback, scrolling, or any other kind of animations). And the low energy consumption of the screen alone makes a difference only if the hardware beneath it is also very minimal. Put an e-ink screen on something like the iPad and it will run 15 hours instead of 10 on a charge. Bad deal.
I think the prices of e-ink readers will have to come down a lot or they will just vanish from the market. They are very limited devices after all.
I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time here or if I should patent the idea ;-)
Make a shop in which authors can sell books like developers can sell apps in the Apple appstore. Have them set a price for the book. Then (and now comes the interesting part) have a way for the readers/buyers to VOTE WITH THEIR MONEY for a book by giving the author (and him alone) another amount of money if they liked the book. Rank authors and books by the number of people giving additional money and by how much they gave. Allow those (and only those) to write comments and reviews on it.
What would this produce? Now, probably a steaming pile of shit consisting of lots of cheap books with some diamonds hidden in it. But who cares for the shit if you can find the diamonds easily? In fact I think that such a combination of a direct shop with crowd-sourcing by money would work even with apps, music and other things. People like to promote things they like and have usually no problem to give a tip to someone who deserves it. Combine these and make sure that the money lands where it belongs and you may have solved a hard problem.
Of course you would also need an additional market for people actually helping authors to write books very much like publishers do. But as this is just a service there's no reason why an open market shouldn't work here.
I think you will find that the majority of computer users doesn't use them for "computing" anymore anyway.
And the iPad isn't a "computer". I don't think it will do anything to computers. But I also don't think the majority of people wants to use "computers" at all. The iPad and other tablets like it *will* start to push computers out of the homes and classrooms soon. This will not be the end of the "computer" but it will finally go back to where it belongs, into offices and labs and the industry and basements.
Which is entirely irrelevant. I'm an "IT Professional and programmer" and I carry a Thinkpad.
"Think pad"? Are you a bloody girl? Hahaha!!!
(This is solely in reference to all the "Mac's iPad" postings all over the net when the name "iPad" was suggested for the Apple tablet. Sorry for that, I just couldn't resist.)
Now, really. People don't care about Apple, but they try to get that out really loud and would like to discuss it. Hmm.
The thing about Apple is that they do something that is almost unheard of in recent computer time: They think. Whatever you like or hate about Apple and Steve Jobs, but they always had a way of re-thinking things everyone takes for granted that is just appealing to people. Call it "vision", call it "a mission", but they just put the PC industry to shame. Because all this industry does is nothing than "do whatever all others do and try to do it cheaper". There is no fun in that.
It's not so much that there's something special about Apple but there's something very much unspecial about the IT industry. Computers have become boring. Really. It's 2010 and we STILL USE PCs! Even the most recent netbook and "Tablet-PC" is still a faster, smaller, cheaper IBM PC. Still a "general purpose computing device". People are sick of that. They want a tiny, shiny piece of the future and not just a 20th century office machine with a painted lid.
And I can't blame them.