Summer of Apple?

Christmas-Like excitement abounds with the the imitate release of Apples IPad. Scheduled to hit stores April 3rd.

Never has there been so much written and talked about, about a product that only announced, and not yet released.

The Apple IPad will either be a huge success and a huge flop. My feeling is that once its out and people can touch it and use it, and word get around how amazing it is to use, it will find more believers. Over the last month I have read numorus articles touting its future uses in a varity of business applications, both corporate and small business. The major ap devlopers are rushing to get new versions of their aps out in time for the release on April 3rd. So far, all of this is being done with the SDK that Apple put out when the announced the IPad. So they are devoloping for a product they haven't even touched yet.. Once its out and the aps can be tried on a real product the real fun begins.





The idea of a tablet pc has been tried before several times. Each time it died a slow painful death, and generally faded off the market into tech history. Theres has been some limited success with tablet pc, in specialized situations, it has not done well with the general public.

The recent success of the Apple Iphone, Ipod Touch, and more recently the Google Android series of Phones has shown that there is a market for tablet devices, if done well. The major lesson being you can't just stick a regular PC desktop OS into a tablet and add touch, and handwriting recognization and call it done. It won't work, its not intuitively and easily, its clunky and a pain to use in a hurry to take notes, or other uses where one would want quick access to information, or to add information quickly. This is where the Iphone and its little brother the Ipod Touch come in, They are easy to use, and get information from, and in many cases easy to get it into.



Apple has taken on a new venue with the IPad, that of the ebook reader. For many years the ebook market has been limited to Amazons Kindle product line, and more recently Barnes & Nobles offering the Noook ebook reader. Both of which use a plain text format limiting it to pretty much just text and no pictures. While it works well, its not breaking any new ground. Then Apple comes along with the IPad, and introduces the IBook store and wakes up the publishing industry and upseting the price structure that Amazon had set up for the ebooks they sold. Thats not even discussing the whole color and mutilmedia formats that the Ipad is able to play.The idea of publishers and writers being able to produce not only a writen book, but a multi media experince to complement it is huge. magazines being able to play videos of subjects of the articles, or related to the articles natively in the player, and adding links to supporting content and other ways to enhance the ebook experience are astounding. Again Apple has possibility changed a entire market, as it did with music, and video and Itunes. At this point its only guessing, but given Apple past track record for redines markets, and in some cases creating markets, its a pretty safe bet.

As I asked in the last article ; "Is the Apple IPad a game changer?" Very soon we will begin to know the answer.. This will be the summer of Apple. Possibly Apple's biggest summer in recent years.