A handful of tech journalists and bloggers have been given iPads to try out and the first reviews have appeared. They are overwhelmingly positive.
Most reviewers praised the iPad’s speed. That’s understandable considering it has a much faster CPU than any generation of the iPhone or iPod Touch, while most of the apps available for it now were actually designed with those devices in mind.
The user interface also got its share of kudos. The Houston Chronicle’s Bob LeVitus calls the on screen keyboard “eminently usable,” adding that in landscape mode he can almost touch type on it.
Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times called the iPad “a computer that’s designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations.”
But that leaves us to think about what other considerations might be important. Perhaps the biggest is what consumers will expect from a device priced about the same as a budget laptop.
As all the reviewers make clear, the iPad is no substitute for a laptop.
Everyone was quite pleased with its multimedia playback and e-book reader capabilities. But they were equally unanimous about its unsuitability for things like working with word processing or creating spreadsheets.
And then there’s the content. If you’re looking for e-books there will be plenty available, including not just commercial titles from big publishers, but also a number of public domain books from Project Gutenberg.
One potentially huge problem on the e-book front is the insistence by major publishers on controlling the price so as not to compete with their physical products. We’ve seen this strategy before with record labels.
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Result for: hard time
P2P video
service Joost has decided to shift away from P2P and head towards Flash. The company will give up their efforts developing the P2P client that has so far defined Joost.
Joost, which was considered one of the most innovative start-ups in early 2007 when the beta was released, has gone through some hard times lately. Ultimately the P2P client, with its obvious benefits, had more flaws than expected. Without the ability to link to specific videos or embed them on to your own website it became obsolete.
In last September Joost launched the Flash site, which gave users the option to select between Flash and P2P. Now there’s no choice to be made. The only platform that will apparently have an own Joost client is iPhone.
Moving to Flash not only means fierce competions with tons of other online video sites, but a much larger bandwidth bill for Joost. P2P streaming was a clever idea, unfortunately it didn’t succeed - at least not in this case.
With no major proprietary content, unlike Hulu with NBC/FOX and TV.com with CBS, Joost will have even harder times ahead. And you don’t need to be an industry analyst to predict that if they don’t come up with something exclusive the story of Joost could be over.
Result for: hard time
Just days after the rumor hit the Internet, Nintendo has denied that there are any plans for a launch of a new redesigned DS Lite at this year’s upcoming E3 event.
The rumor and speculation began when Enterbrain president Hirokazu Hamamura made comments that suggested Nintendo was ready to headline E3 with a new hardware revision to its very popular DS handheld.
“We cannot comment on the specifics of what will be announced at E3, but at the very least there won’t be anything like what Mr. Hamamura suggested, so [we] would like to clearly deny this,” said Nintendo Japan’s head of PR.
“We’re having a hard time understanding what kind of evidence [Mr. Hamamura] had for saying this.”
Hamamura suggested, citing past moves by Nintendo, that a new hardware revision is in the works because the company does such revisions every two years. The Nintendo DS Lite was launched two years ago, in 2006.
