I’m a big Apple fan. You’ll nary find one bigger. So let’s talk about the tablet for a minute ignoring the veil of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Books coming to iTunes. This is pretty awesome, mostly because Apple would be foolish to limit them to only working on the tablet. So if all goes well, we’ll have books on our iPhones that we can also use on a tablet should we decide to buy one. Super.
Kindle isn’t exactly a roaring fire. This one works in Apple’s favor in the US, but overseas where there are hundreds of and hundreds of ereader devices available, the tablet will face some very stiff competition.
Apple is built on margin. Brand new technologies (and existing ones with limited use) are expensive or don’t work very well simply because they’re so early in development.
A solar charger? While I don’t doubt that there’s some revolutionary and cool stuff in the tablet, this certainly isn’t it. An expensive and inefficient method for charging? More likely you’ll have a wireless charging station like the Palm Pre and the Touchstone.
Apple likes making pretty stuff. Macbook Air. Terribly pretty, but not terribly useful. Apple is more than willing to cut features to make a good looking device.
Apple TV was supposed to open up some more avenues for TV and movie sales for iTunes but it hasn’t been nearly as good a seller as Apple had originally hoped. Because its limited functionality meant that if people were serious about putting an Apple product in the living room to hook up to a TV, a little research revealed that it made much more sense to just get a low end Mac Mini.
Wait this is the RDF we’re talking about. Research goes right out the window. Hm. Moving on.
Apple loves battery life. That the WSJ posted some of Jason Calacanis’ tweets about new features is laughable. An HDTV tuner and PVR? Do you have any idea how much processing power a PVR takes? You’d get 15 minutes of use out of it.
For reference, a single 1 hour episode from my Eye TV on my home theater Mac is over 5GB big before being compressed. It’s not compressed on the fly because that takes a ton of processing power. Ton of processing power = 0 battery life. Good thing my living room Mac is always plugged in.
Also, Apple sells TV shows on the iTunes store. Something tells me they’re not going to sell a device that lets you watch and record your own shows instead of buying them from iTunes.
One more thing… On the topic of Calacanis, why would they even give him a tablet? His audience is mostly people who spend a ton of time on the internet. Last I checked the internet was already in a fervor over the tablet. Apple doesn’t need a blogger celebrity to promote their devices.
But you know who does have one? Walt Mossberg. And something tells me he’ll be posting something at approximately 145pm this afternoon.
Look, I’m looking forward to this afternoon’s event as much as anybody. But let’s take things in stride, shall we?
Could this be the beginning of the college market taking digital content seriously?
I suppose it’s time I took this topic a bit more seriously. When the touch screen Apple tablet truly arrives (as the technology and mainstream media would have us believe is soon), it’ll do a lot of things. You can read all about those on other blogs and news sites.
I still mourn the death of the 12” form factor for Powerbooks. I love the 13” Macbook Pro (and hate the Macbook Air), but they’re just not as compact as my 12” Powerbook is. I say ‘is’ and not ‘was’ because I still have mine and use it regularly despite having a Macbook Air at my disposal. That’s how much I love it.
For me, it will take one feature and one feature only to make a tablet truly compelling as a device.
Mini-DisplayPort out to power an HD display…
If this thing is supposed to be a media powerhouse, it should have no problem displaying movies, Cover Flow album covers and your picture galleries on a huge TV screen.
… + Keynote ‘10
But the real reason I want video out is for business purposes. If the thing can run a version of Keynote (‘10, presumably), then I should be able to put my presentations on it, hook it up to an HD projector and forgo bringing my laptop to a meeting altogether.
There are existing technologies that let you do this wirelessly from other mobile handsets, and while that would be great (assuming there’s no bandwidth issues) I’d carry around a cord to make it work in a heartbeat.
The Macbook Air is often too weak to deal with the complicated slides I give it and the result is stuttering at high resolutions. If the tablet, with it’s optimized version of Keynote could handle it, I’m sold.
What’s interesting about this is that it only happened after almost every major manufacturer announced plans for ereader devices at CES. Or does this have to do more with the emergent tablet marketplace that Apple is going to introduce in one week’s time?
If anything is going to answer the question of “What else can ebooks possibly do” this will probably going to be it.
With at least one publisher working on digital magazine content, you would think that the focus would be on making this content available to as many platforms as possible. Development environments like Adobe Air allow cross platform applications, which suits the content providers nicely, but will Apple play ball with such an open format? That’s the reason everybody is holding their breath for the Januar 27 Apple event; their tablet is arguably the most anticipated device in this as of yet unproven form factor and if they don’t support something cross platform, that could have huge ramifications for publishers.
I blogged about this video very briefly yesterday, but I’m more at liberty to go into detail today. CourseSmart was one of the first services to offer digital textbooks directly to students. The goal was to make more textbooks accessible to more students while lowering costs. The lowering costs thing can be debated as CS was founded by a coalition of textbook publishers. Either way, it’s had a pretty fair amount of success, boasting over 8,500 titles available and offering huge savings per book.
I for one am going to keep a very close ear on what they have to announce during the coming week.
Microsoft’s Courier demo was a really great view of what the future of tablet computing could be, but I disagree with what Peter Smith says about competing with the lower cost Entourage eDGe.
The eDGe is a niche product: it’s aimed at students currently in schools. While it can be used by a standalone user, it really shines when paired with some in-class software.
The Courier is aimed squarely at the same market Apple would be going after with their tablet. If the price on the Courier is low enough to leave a wide margin with Apple’s offering (which isn’t that hard to do, knowing Apple) then we will have a very interesting battle on our hands in the coming months.
Always reassuring.
Flexible displays have been around for a while, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time they’ve putting one in a device intended for mass market consumption. They’ve definitely got the design down, it’s downright pretty!
