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: insistence
T-Mobile has announced today that they will be offering the new 8GB 3G iPhone for 1 euro (about $1.50 USD) in Germany when purchased with a 69 euro monthly contract for 2 years.
Since Apple has dropped its insistence on revenue sharing and made the phone available non-exclusively in over 70 countries worldwide, carriers now have the option to subsidize the cost of the phone in an effort to lock the consumer into expensive data plans for long periods of time.
The original iPhone, which went on sale last June, sold six million units despite high prices and carrier exclusivity deals so at least on the outside it appears the 3G model will sell better.
T-Mobile added that the 8GB model would cost 170 euro if bought with the minimal data plan, of 29 euro a month and that the price would range between those prices for other data plans.
The 16GB model will sell for similar but with a range of 19.95-249.95 euros.
