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By Krishan K
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a
time, there was a very rich, very clever
man. He got up on a big stage and
held up a new kind of computer. It was
flat, and it didn't have a keyboard. This very
rich, very clever man then tried to convince a
bunch of reporters that in five years this flat,
keyboardless computer would be the most
popular kind of computer in the country.
Some of them even believed him.
The year was 2000. The man's name was Bill
Gates.
That year at Comdex, which at the time was
the biggest technology trade show on the
calendar, Microsoft unveiled something it
called a Tablet PC. Just for good measure,
the company unveiled it again at Comdex
in 2001. But it never particularly caught
on, because who wants a computer that's
basically an underpowered netbook without
a keyboard? The Tablet PC was much like
a piece of paper, except it was heavier and
more expensive and it broke when you
dropped it.
Now Apple is offering us another tablet PC:
the iPad. We didn't want one then. Why
would we want one now?
The tough thing about writing about Apple
products is that they come with a lot of hype
wrapped around them. The other tough thing
about writing about Apple products is that
sometimes the hype is true. So let's scrape
the Vaseline off the lens and figure out what
exactly we're looking at.
Apple took a computer, chopped off
the keyboard and squashed it flat. It's
reasonably powerful for its size. Nobody has
independently benchmarked the new housemade
1-gigahertz A4 processor that powers
it, but it never once stuttered in the demos,
so let's just say it's somewhere between an
iPhone and a netbook - toward the netbook
end - and more than sufficient unto the day.
The iPad is thin: half an inch (1.25 cm) at its
thickest. It's light: 1.5 lb. (680 g), half of what
a MacBook Air weighs. |