Five Reasons The Apple Tablet Will Rock
Jul 27th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: Featured Story, General, Internet TV, iPods & Portable Media Players, Streaming Video, Video 
The Apple Tablet is still complete vaporware – but it’s looking more and more likely that Apple is developing a large-scale version of the iPod touch.
While some think the idea of an Apple Tablet is a train wreck, Apple hasn’t released many train wrecks recently.
With that in mind, here are five reasons that the Apple Tablet will rock:
- It will be a great ereader – the Kindle was the first ebook reader to really get people’s attention. But the Kindle’s primary focus is to be a platform for Amazon to sell you proprietary, DRM’d ebooks. That’s looking backwards. Apple will come up with something forward-looking, and make its tablet computer a great platform for reading books, but also for reading anything else that you like. And watching anything you like. And playing anything you like. And doing anything you like. All that, and it will be in color, extra sexy and actually let you touch hyperlinks to open them up.
- It will be open to app developers – Apple’s learned from its insanely popular iPhone app store that people want a dead-simple way to load apps. Apple’s also learned the value of establishing a successful new mobile app platform. That means the App Store is coming to the Tablet. People can quibble about Apple’s screening process, but nobody has done a better app store than Apple. App developers will have no problem working with larger screens, and they’ll love the extra real estate. The platform will have 10,000 apps in a year.
- It will be awesome for video – the iPhone is a great media platform, but a larger screen will crank things up a notch. The Apple Tablet will also have an advantage over any other notebook platform; it will sync with iTunes, making loading and buying media a no-brainer for anyone who’s ever used an iPod.
- It will be a great game platform – The success of games on the Wii and the iPhone show that raw gaming power isn’t as important as making gaming easy and fun. Games that were fiddly on a tiny iPhone screen will be way more fun with a big touchscreen. A larger screen opens the platform up to games with two simultaneous players touching the screen, too.
- It will be a great platform for new media – any Apple Tablet will make it easy to use YouTube and video podcasts. But the Apple Tablet will be great for reading blogs, pdfs and all sorts of Internet media – making it great platform for new media developers, and giving users access to an unprecedented variety of free media. And because of the larger screen, blogging and creating new media will be much more practical.
Add to that bigger versions of Maps and Mail and you’ve got a winner, if Apple gets the price right. And if they don’t, they’ll sell it at a premium to the rich for a year and then cut the price and watch it sell like hotcakes.
The Apple Tablet may be vaporware – but it’s got “hit” written all over it.
What do you think? Is the Apple Tablet speculation out of hand, or are you getting excited about the idea of a new platform from Apple?
Personally, I am going to wait for a netbook with Windows 7 and DirectX 11…..at half the price and twice the capability.
Mark – sort of like Windows Mobile phones are so much cheaper and more powerful and, gee whiz, just all around more awesome than the iPhone?
Why wait for Apple when you can get the system today from Archos?
I love this, three comments are NOT about anything relevant.
Mark, do it. Get a Windows 7 platform. Then we can compare price and availability. Don’t want to do it, then WAIT for the stuff to even EXIST and let others do a feature by feature review.
arjun, don’t be catty. Maybe he likes Windows Mobile? I could make comments about market share, but I’ll let sales figures speak for themselves.
Voicer,I want names and evidence.
Archos, one of the original developers of MP3 players (mine was bought before the iPod came out, still works great, original batteries, never a problem after 8 years). If you want a media player with net access, Archos 5 or 7, or you can take a look at the Archos 9 netbook, getting ready for release:
http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/index.html?country=dj&lang=en
Apple rules over quality for any device, be it the ipod, iphone or computers, whoever doesn’t agree wakeup. Windows users are only using them because they were forced to learn on them and use the by corporate America.
I bought the first ever personal media player capable of playing audio & video called the Archos Jukebox Multimedia. While it did work smoothly for about 9 months, the price tag was pretty hefty (~$500 US) for something that only worked properly for 9 months. The major issue was the support of the device. Getting ANYONE at Archos to actually respond to an email much less provide any useful help was one of the most defeating experiences I’ve ever had with a company. These new toys they have look super cool but I wouldn’t dream of giving these idiots another dime of my loot. Guess what Archos, 2002 was a long time ago but I haven’t forgot, and neither have any of my friends any time they’ve mentioned your name or any of your products.
Interesting to hear about your experience with the Archos. Those always tempted me, but I was put off by the fact that they seem to be a niche player.
I had similar experiences with the Zune. I bought a Zune 30 early on, and it’s been a dog since day one.
It sounds like Apple has been studying the shortcomings of things like the Archos players and the Kindle and other media players and has something different.