Apple iPad: Flop Or Hot?

iPad

The Apple iPad was announced today by Steve jobs on January 28, 2010.

The other speculated names - iSlate and iTablet - were nothing more than fanciful journalist waffle.

Jobs, on his keynote presentation, mentioned that Apple had become the biggest mobile retailer in the world, and that iPhone and laptops were Apple's main products.

He asked the question, is there room in the market for something between an iPhone and a laptop?

By the end of the presentation, there were many positives for the iPad: it's powerful, relatively cheap, 0.5 inches thick, and looks very tactile for surfing the web.

There were several lingering negatives though.

During the presentation, several of the websites Steve Jobs visited had flash videos that couldn't run - an "epic fail" as the online community would call it - which means the iPad can't run flash videos, just like the iPhone.
The iPad isn't an open platform like a MacBook [we guess Apple likes locking off its technology to stop people torrenting and pirating; to make mountains of cash off the app store which has had 3,000,000,000 downloads to date].
The iPad can't run regular Mac software, so users won't be able to manipulate Logic or Photoshop with their fingers, unless optimised versions, or controller applications, are released.

The iPad is basically a big iPhone. There will be users who would prefer the iPad to be more like a small laptop. For the casual user the iPad is perfect. For the professional designer and musician the iPad represents a huge missed opportunity, but these users are not so lucrative for Apple anymore. They can only hope the iPad is the first stepping stone to a pro touch-screen device that offers hands on professional-grade editing of images, video and audio.

What does seem to be clear, is that Apple is moving away from powerful desktop computers, into a controlled casual market where they lock off the limits of technology via a streamlined user interface.

Whatever the case, at least we're one step closer to having this:

Avatar iPad