IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Apple Unveils iPad

Posted January 27, 2010 by James Brightman

After days of speculation about Apple's new tablet device, today Steve Jobs officially unveiled the new platform in San Francisco. It's called the iPad and it looks, unsurprisingly, like a massive iPhone or iPod Touch. Similar to the iPhone, the iPad features a touchscreen and works in both landscape and portrait mode. It's just a half-inch thin, weighs 1.5 pounds, and offers a 9.7-inch IPS display.

The iPad will be powered by Apple’s own custom silicon, using a 1 GHz A4 chip, 16 GB of memory, and 32 or 64 Gigabytes of storage. It also will offer Wi-Fi, 802.11n, and the latest Bluetooth; 3G wireless will be offered on some models, but not all. Impressively, the iPad can provide up to 10 hours of use on a full battery charge, and the device can remain in standby mode for weeks.

Jobs demonstrated the movies Star Trek and Up, as well as reading material from publications like the New York Times. “It’s awesome to watch TV shows and movies,” Jobs said. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen.”  He added, “You can browse the Web with it. It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”

If you're wondering about compatibility with the current App Store, the iPad will run “virtually every one” of the apps for the iPhone “virtually unmodified,” according to senior vice president Scott Forstall. The iPad will apparently run the iPhone apps in a black box in the middle of the screen - the user will also have an option to double the pixels to fill the screen.  Forstall also finally raised the topic of games on iPad, which is what we really care about. He claims that games are “incredibly smooth,” and he said that the iPhone SDK will be modified to support development of the iPad - that new SDK will be released today. “We think its going to be a whole other gold rush for developers as they build apps for the iPad,” Forstall boasted. Following Forstall, Gameloft developer Mark Hickey came out on stage to show off Nova, which is a new shoot-em-up for iPad. Electronic Arts also showed off an iPad version of Need for Speed Shift.

While gaming will no doubt look great on the iPad, Apple's big push with the tablet seems to be in the e-book arena. Apple is looking to directly challenge Amazon's Kindle product. An iBooks store is being integrated with a new iBooks app, which will enable users to discover and purchase e-books. Five of the largest publishers — Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette — are already on board. Jobs gave Amazon much credit for Kindle, but said "we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit farther.” 

Now for the real dirt... pricing. Apple will be pricing the iPad between $499 and $829. That's quite a pretty penny, especially in this economy with a 10% jobless rate. Consumers will have the option of paying for 3G service. AT&T will be providing the network, just as they do for the iPhone. There will be two 3G plans: one will offer up to 250 MB of data a month for $14.99 per month, and a second plan will provide unlimited data for $29.99 a month. iPad owners will also get free access to AT&T hotspots. Thankfully, there's no contract needed with AT&T so you can cancel anytime. 

The first iPads will ship in 60 days, but the 3G models will take another month. The $499 model gives consumers 16 GB of storage, with WiFi built-in. Then for $599, the storage steps up to 32 GB, and $699 brings it up to 64 GB. A 3G model will cost an extra $130. So that means for $829 you can get a 64 GB model with 3G.  “When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had specific technical goals and user interface goals, but an aggressive price goal, because we want to put this in the hands of a lot of people,” said Jobs.

Jobs realizes that Apple is now faced with the challenge of making consumers want this new device. Needless to say, he's hugely optimistic, since anything with an Apple logo on it seems to sell like hotcakes. “Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of products? The bar is pretty high. It has to be far better at doing some key things. We think we have the goods,” he said.

Update: The official Apple website for the iPad is now live. Check it out.

[Thanks to NYTimes.com for its live blogging of the iPad event]

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.