Sun, May 30, 2010 page14

• Technology

  • By Jack Schofield / THE OBSERVER
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  It is the most over-hyped device since the iPhone, but there’s just one question: Is the iPad worth buying? If you already own an iPhone or an iPod Touch and wish it had a much bigger screen, the answer is probably yes — if you can afford US$300 for even the most basic model. If you already own a notebook PC and would like something smaller, the answer could well be no; you’d be better off with a netbook at less than half the price.

  Such rationality may not stop you from succumbing, however. The iPad is a wonderfully shiny new toy from a company that understands seduction. And it’s cunningly designed to fit in between your smartphone and your laptop without replacing either.

  The iPad is the latest and most popular example of what Intel calls mobile Internet devices or Mids. There is a battle between devices that are mobile phones but larger and devices that are notebook PCs (mostly Microsoft Windows) but smaller. It is not just about “chip” technology — Arm chips that power most smartphones versus Intel chips that drive most computers; what really makes phone-type Mids attractive to technology companies and developers is what might be termed “propensity to pay.”

  It pains the creative industries that computer users generally won’t pay anything for a four-minute song, but will happily pay US$1 or more for a ringtone version of it. PC users won’t pay to send and receive thousands of e-mails a year, but will pay to send one SMS text. The iPad is clearly on the “will pay” side of the great divide, which makes its users much more attractive than any number of netbook buyers on the “won’t pay” side.

  At the moment, most iPad apps have been written for the iPhone and adapted. But there is clearly lots of potential for newspapers, magazines, books, games and other apps designed for the iPad’s brilliant-looking screen.

  Another thing to bear in mind is that the iPad is missing a lot of functionality: It has no camera for videochats; no SD card slot for loading photos from your camera; and no USB. Like the first iPod and iPhone, it’s just a starter for a string of enhanced versions that will tempt you to buy a new model every couple of years, or when the sealed-in batteries no longer work. And you’ll be delighted to buy every one.

  IPads are already on sale in Japan and Australia, though Apple has decline to say when they will be sold in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. Those made of stronger stuff can wait for similar tablets based on the Google Android software already used in many smartphones. Scaled-up Android tablets won’t have the iPad’s sheer class, but it’s a free, open-source Linux-based system that will enable hundreds of companies to compete. Additional reporting by AFP

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  For your information

  Components of the iPad

  The casing The iPad feels reassuringly solid, thanks to its brushed aluminum unibody case. While many small electronic devices are now made of plastic, the iPad’s contoured base “is machined from a single billet of aluminum,” according to the iFixit Web site. This makes it relatively heavy — 680g for the basic model — but gives it a feeling of quality. The actual size of the iPad is 242.8mm by 189.7mm, which is slightly smaller than the Kindle DX. The batteries The iPad has two long, thin, lithium-ion polymer batteries that lie side by side at the bottom of the case with the dock connector cable between. This should provide a total of 24.8 watt-hours, which should keep an iPad going for about 10 hours, depending on use. However, just extracting a battery involves a 21-step process and special tools, according to one expert guide, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever change them yourself. The screen The first thing that catches your eye with the iPad is the vivid 9.7-inch LCD color screen. It uses the same capacitive touchscreen technology as the iPhone and iPod Touch, which is both sensitive and surprisingly accurate, though it’s admittedly a bit on the shiny side. It uses IPS (in-plane switching), which is more common on TVs than laptops and provides a wide range of viewing angles. Ebook readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and Plastic Logic’s Que, have monochrome e-ink screens that are easier to read in daylight, but the iPad’s screen is better for Web browsing, games, movies and other applications. The resolution is 1024x768 pixels, which is less than high-definition, and not widescreen. In fact, it’s the 4:3 shape that was popular on notebook PCs a decade or so ago, which means movies usually appear with broad black bands top and bottom. The storage Although the iPad is sometimes touted as having a solid state drive (SSD), which is the sort of drive you get in some laptop PCs and even netbooks that can benefit from their speed and reliability, it doesn’t. The iPad, like the iPod Touch it resembles, has Flash memory chips soldered to the board. Flash chips, which have nothing to do with Adobe Flash software, are commonly used in MP3 players, USB memory sticks and similar devices. These memory chips provide iPads with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage without adding the bulk, weight or cost of a real disk drive, or of an SSD designed to fit in its place. This is a pity because having an SSD would make it feasible to swap out Apple’s drive for a larger one, or in the case of a dead iPad, to rescue the user’s valuable data and access it from a different computer. The processor Apple could have based its new tablet on the Arm chip, used in the iPhone and iPod, or on an Intel Atom, which is a low-power/low-cost chip compatible with the processors used in its Macintosh computers, as well as in most Windows PCs. It chose the Arm route, creating a system than can’t run full Mac OS X or Windows applications but runs the same operating system and apps as its older but much smaller stablemates. But, as it often does, Apple went further. Instead of buying an off-the-shelf Arm (which includes system-on-a-chip designs such as Nvidia’s Tegra and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, widely used in smartphones such as the Google Nexus One), Apple developed its own 1GHz A4 system on a chip. Presumably, this development was aided by Apple’s purchase of PA Semiconductor, a small Californian chip design company, for US$278 million in 2008. X-rays reveal that the A4 processor package includes an Arm similar to the Samsung-sourced chip in the iPhone, plus two Samsung memory chips that provide 256MB of memory. The A4 provides snappy performance in the iPad, though there are more powerful dual-core Arm designs that could be used in later and much better multitasking versions of the iPad; the current graphics chip could also be upgraded. Apple and Arm have a long history and Arm might not even have been founded if Apple hadn’t wanted to use its chip in the Newton Messagepad, a touchscreen organizer or PDA, launched in 1993. The Arm, originally the Acorn Risc Machine, was first used in the Acorn Archimedes desktop computer. It was renamed Advanced Risc Machine and spun off into Arm Ltd, which was owned by Acorn, Apple and chip company VLSI. Arm-based chip designs are now used in more than one billion phones every year.
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