The Apple iSlate changes everything - maybe even its name
January 26th, 2010 by Tim Greenhalgh
In a few hours’ time (10.am PST – 6pm GMT) Steve Jobs will unveil the new Apple iSlate (iPad, iPlank, iWant1) at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts Theatre in San Francisco and change everything, again - except the global network his new baby will join.
Guess what, he’s not alone. Hewlett-Packard CTO Phil McKinney took Steve’s cue and boosted his company’s Slate – announced first at the CES show- again on video this week. Phil has been raving about the potential for these devices for the past year and might feel more than a little miffed by the Apple landgrab. HP is due to market their slate later this year. It’s the consolidated concept made real - the all-in-one device (based on Windows 7, naturally).
For now, though, Apple has the stage. No company creates desire better than Apple – and nobody does it better than Steve Jobs. We don’t know the details (desire), the Apple website is very slow and anyway is ignoring the future of computing - so we put dreams and nods and winks together. Here’s mine: 10-inch multitouch screen, aluminium or rough surface body, webcam, MacOS 10.7, wi-fi/3G access, Apple-crafted ARM-based chip, App Store enabled, games and widgets…
Its one weak spot – no keyboard. Touchscreen boards suck – ergonomic hell and we will want to communicate. It’s the iPhone’s major failing and I don’t know how Apple is going to address this flaw.
What it will do is to outshine all the beautiful design and tech specs. Apple’s timing is, again, spot-on as the traditional media push back against the embedded culture of “free” and look for a means to make paying for content a pleasure. With the iSlate, newspapers and magazines have just been given a new lease of life.
It will be cool again to pay for trad media content because Apple will make it desirable and flexible. No need for an annual subscription, Apple will provide the payment platform that gives you options. Micropayments suddenly make economic sense to publishers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Who else wins? Education – facing unacceptable cuts in funding from nursery to post-grad. In the US, Apple has a sizable share of the education dollar and institutions have already bought into the eBook as a means of reducing library costs. The iSlate will extend that market selling point globally and will tough it out against HP and the other PC Slate builders.
Book publishers will benefit not only from academic sales and reduced costs of production/distribution. Tie-ins with the big supermarkets should enable them and the Slate makers to make a killing at the expense of the traditional booksellers and the first generation e-reader manufacturers. Amazon must be working on a game plan for Kindle 2 (a Slate?) or talking hard with HP and Apple.
I bet we’ll have to wait in Europe for our version of the iSlate – maybe until the Summer, although that won’t stop the publishing giants from knocking hard on Apple’s door. Or us, for that matter.
Tags: Apple tablet, HP slate, iSlate, Phil McKinney, steve jobs