iPad, the new beautiful thing from Apple

After months of rumors and lots of guessing, at last Steve Jobs unveiled the latest hype coming from the Cupertino company, the, (drums, please), iPad.

So what is the iPad? It’s the Apple tablet that has been rumored for over a year now, and that it’s, among other uses, coming to compete with the Amazon Kindle to read digital books.

Development for an Apple tablet begun as far as 1993 with the Newton MessagePad, which was discontinued in 1998. New attempts begun in 2000, but Steve Jobs cancelled the project twice, because of short battery life and inadequate memory problems.

After the too well known sick leave, the Apple guy focused on finishing the product and strike deals with major book publishers to offer an important library from day one of the iPad.

But before being announced, people started to take interest in the same way the iPhone speculations and interest had begun, way before the official announcement. Among the rumored names for the new device were iTablet, iSlate, iBook and iPad, which ended up being the real name.

The iPad offers many of the same applications of the iPhone including internet browsing, photo and movies viewing, music listening and ebook reading, all with nice Spotlight search and Multi Touch functionality.

In the ebook department, the iPad will use a new application that will be available at the App Store for free called iBooks, something I hope, will be an iTunes for books. The books themselves will be priced somewhere between $8 and $15. The interface of iBooks looks cool, as your ebooks will be shown on bookshelf where you can just tap and select the one you want to read, flip through the pages at whatever speed you want, or look into a table of contents. In addition you will be able to change font size to suit your needs, and even change the font type between Times New Roman, Verdana, Baskerville, Cochin and Palatino, so you can’t complain about lack of options for your reading pleasure.

iBooks will use the standard ePUB open source format to read and display digital books.

Jobs has nailed five major book publishing companies Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group.

But that’s not it. Although not spoken about, imagine the further possibilities of this device. Magazines and newspapers will have a new way to reach people in a more convenient way, and, digital comics will no doubt help comic fans maintain a huge library in an orderly fashion. And all the physical space, not to mention trees you’ll save.

One of the most attractive things about the iPad is not what’s inside, but the price. The cheapest model featuring 16GB drive and Wi-Fi will cost $499 and the Wi-Fi+3G device with the same hard drive capacity will start at $629.

The iPad will be available by the end of March in the Wi-Fi model, and the Wi-Fi+3G at the end of April in the US and selected countries.

The Amazon Kindle looked like an interesting option to read digital books and ditch physical printed books, much like digital music is doing with CDs, but once you knew Apple was going to have its own gadget to do just that, you knew the Kindle’s popularity, with it’s lack of features and high pricing it’s about to decline.

Aside from the name, I’m totally inlove with this new device and looking forward to put my hands on it.