Apple’s iPad has finally landed
After much speculation in this week’s press, Apple’s chief executive Steve Jobs finally took to the stage in San Francisco on Wednesday evening to unveil the iPad.
The iPad is Apple’s latest gadget – dubbed by many as an over-sized iPhone. It certainly looks similar, with a flat screen and a single button at the bottom, although it boasts a much larger 9.7 inch colour screen.
For Jeremy Swinfen-Green, digital director at Mike Colling & Co, it is just a big iPhone, which is “not going to revolutionise the newspaper industry”. He was hoping to see ‘e-ink’ technology, which for him “could have transformed the user experience of print”.
However, the benefit of the iPad being similar to an iPhone, is that the 75 million existing iPhone and iTouch users will already know how to use it, as Jobs pointed out in his presentation.
And despite Swinfen-Green’s criticism, the iPad, of course, offers much much more. Apple have gone all out to bring something new to the market – the iPad is more than an iPhone and an iTouch, it can do almost everything a laptop can do and it pushes the boundaries of any e-reader on the market.
Although, for Rhys McLachlan, managing partner of Implementation & Futures at MediaCom, “it has tried to do too many things… and as a result, it does loads of things but doesn’t do anything brilliantly”.
The device offers internet, emailing, gaming, presentation software, videos, ebooks and a lot more, as well as the same functionality and apps as an iPhone.
The iPad is 0.5 inches thick, weighs 1.5lb and can store 16 to 64 gigabytes of data (and has 10 hours battery life, according to Apple).
It sounds impressive enough, and is pretty much what was predicted (not least by Newsline), minus a bit of over-excited hype. The first versions of the device, without mobile connectivity, will go on sale around the world at the end of March.
Users can get their hands on one from around $499 in the US, although consumers wanting 3G will have to wait at least another month. UK prices have not been set yet.
But what is perhaps more interesting for the media industry than the iPad’s functionality, is that Apple has already signed deals with five major publishers – HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette – to sell ebooks on the device.
Users will be able to “discover and purchase and download” ebooks directly on to the device from the iTunes App store, which already has 140,000 applications for sale. And to appease publishers, Apple is offering content producers a 70% share of any revenues from sales through the new “iBook” (as well as allowing book publishers to set higher prices than Amazon has – a sure way to get them on board).
As a result, newspapers and magazines will surely follow suit. MediaCom already has it “on very good authority” that Apple has signed a content deal with Condé Nast US, which has already seen its GQ single-edition magazine app sell 20,000 times.
“This is where it becomes interesting for us,” McLachlan said. “If publishers start digitising content and take advantage of this technology, ad formats will be substantially different. This technology enables people to engage in a different way, and that will fundamentally change the ad industry.”
“As an industry, we will underestimate the impact of this,” he continued. “It’s not the definitive product but it certainly points to the differences that can be made.”
So, it looks like Apple may well do it again. It conquered the music market with iPods, then the mobile market with iPhones, and on top of that it has iTunes, which offers TV, films and music downloads.
The iPad is positioning itself to lead the ebook market (which will soon include both newspapers and magazines), but with the additional laptop-style features it has to offer and its iPhone-style user interface, it’s hard to imagine the device won’t take off. If it comes close to the sales predicted – tens of millions in the year ahead, according to Deloitte – it will not only be a success for Apple but will also be a sign of things to come!