by Edward C. Baig USA Today Apr. 4, 2010 12:00 AM
Months of speculation, feverish lust, an uberhyped prize that could disrupt the status quo of computing. You wouldn't be the first person to compare the run-up to this weekend's arrival of the iPad to the prelaunch mania that surrounded the iPhone.
Apple's freshly conceived slate-style computer promises to influence the media, mobile entertainment and publishing industries the way its close cousin the iPhone has affected wireless.
The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon's Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.
For more than a decade, nobody, not even a deep-pocketed company like Microsoft, has successfully cracked the tablet market. Apple, based on my tests over several days, is likely to be the first. Back in 2001, Gates predicted tablets would be the most popular form of PCs
sold in America within five years. That obviously didn't come to pass.
Apple's roots with the tablet form of computing date at least to its ill-fated Newton, an early 1990s personal digital assistant pushed by then-CEO John Sculley and later killed by Steve Jobs.
These days, several large computing companies have shown off or announced some sort of slate-type computer, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. Netbook pioneer Asus told Forbes that it, too, plans to roll out tablets. But Apple's new tablet will do the most to spawn renewed interest in the category and could tap into markets as varied as medicine and education. This week, Pennsylvania's Seton Hill University announced plans to give every full-time student this fall an iPad. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster expects 2.7 million iPads to be sold in 2010 and 8 million next year. Endpoint Technologies analyst Roger Kay ups the sum to about 4 million units the first year.
An often-asked question after Jobs unveiled the tablet at the end of January was: What is iPad's purpose for being? I answered that question by surfing the Web, watching the movies "Up" and "Michael Jackson's This Is It," reading the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's "True Compass," playing Scrabble and an accelerometer-driven game called RealRacing HD, and boning up on the periodic table of elements.
The iPad is larger than a smartphone but smaller than a typical laptop. Depending on your perspective, the space between is either fertile ground for an electronic device or a no-man's land. Even Apple seems unsure to what degree the iPad may hurt sales of its MacBook or MacBook Pro notebooks.
The iPad is not so much about what you can do - browse, do e-mail, play games, read e-books and more - but how you can do it. That's where Apple is rewriting the rulebook for mainstream computing. There is no mouse or physical keyboard. Everything is based on touch. All programs arrive directly through Apple's App Store.
Apple's tablet is fun, simple, stunning to look at and blazingly fast. Inside is a new Apple chip, the A4. The machine is the antithesis of the cheap underpowered netbook computers that Jobs easily dismisses.
"Netbooks aren't better at anything," Jobs scoffed during his January presentation introducing the iPad. "They're slow, they have low-quality displays and they run clunky old PC software."
What does a successful iPad launch mean for traditional netbooks? They'll have to adapt or disappear.
