Apple iPad – A Quick and Useful Overview

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The iPad, Apple’s newest addition to its product line, hit North American stores in April and will hit the rest of the world in May. If you haven’t heard about it, you’ve probably been living under a rock as the spanking new gadget was announced in January – and speculated about for months before that.

Basically, the Apple iPad is a tablet computer that features video and music playback, internet browsing, and gaming. The unit measures at 24.3 cm x 19.0 cm x 1.3 cm (9.56 inches x 7.47 inches x 0.5 inches) and is equipped with a lithium-ion polymer battery. This tablet computer runs on a 1GHz Apple A4 system-on-chip processor and runs a modified iPhone operating system.

Like its cousin, the iPhone, the Apple iPad has an accelerometer that automatically switches between landscape and portrait views, and an LCD that is both fingerprint-resistant and scratch-resistant glass. The iPad also has a sensor that adjusts the screen’s brightness depending on the ambient light. The 25-cm touchscreen supports up to 132ppi on a 1024 x 768 resolution.

The Apple iPad comes in two connectivity options, Wi-Fi only and a Wi-Fi and 3G version. The Wi-Fi and 3G version was released on April 30 while the Wi-Fi only version hit the shelves on April 3.

Applications-wise, the iPad can download the applications you want or need from the Apple App Store. In addition to the 140,000 applications readily available from the Store, twelve applications were made specifically for the iPad. The said applications have Multi-Touch capabilities and works on both landscape and portrait views.

The applications available for the iPad include a reworked version of iWork specifically made for the tablet computer. This new version of iWork allows users to make documents, presentations and spreadsheets with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, respectively. With the iBooks application, users can browse for e-books from independent and major publishers on the Apple iBookstore. Users can buy and read the books they like on the iPad.

App Store, iTunes, and iBookstore users will be able to sync their iPads to their Macs via a USB connection. Like other Apple gadgets like the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the iPad will sync downloads into iTunes.

Some reviews of the gizmo expressed disappointment over the iPad’s lack of a camera and multi-tasking capabilities. While some reviewers were fixated on what the iPad doesn’t have, the others praised it for what it does have.