Mail, iPod, Videos, YouTube, and iTunes
The Mail app - as demoed in its Guided Tour, at least - appears to be a cut above the iPhone's bare-bones email app. Hold the iPad in landscape mode, and a list of your received mail appears to the left of the current message. Turn the iPad into portrait mode, and the message fills the display - but if you want to view your messages while in portrait mode, a pop-up message list is available.
Unlike on the iPhone, the iPad lets you view both your email list and the current message
When deleting messages, selecting them for deletion pops them onto a pile so you can review them before finally trash-canning them. Searching for mail - including messages stored on the server - can be done in the app itself, another step up from the iPhone.
As on the iPhone, tapping and holding an address in Mail brings up a set of options
The iPad's iPod app does pretty much what you'd expect it to do: play music. It also, however, adds the "Genius Mixes" capability found in the Mac's iTunes but absent from the iPhone's iPod app. [See "Update," below]
Genius Mixes create playlists based on genre, and are recreated anew each time you access them
Videos plays videos - no surprise - but it also takes advantage of the iPad's larger-than-iPhone display to show you more information about a movie than could fit on an iPhone's wee display - full movie descriptions, for example, and images for each chapter when viewing a chapter list.
One nice touch in the Videos app is chapter headings with images
The YouTube app adds little to the iPhone version, although it does make access to such functions as rating and flagging more direct. As with the Videos app, YouTube takes advantage of the iPad's larger display to present more information simultaneously than can the iPhone. Also unlike the iPhone, the YouTube app allows you to view a video in portrait mode.
You can add a video to your Favorites, or share, rate, or flag it while viewing
When you buy an iPad, Apple hopes that purchase won't be the last it sees of your credit card - and that's what the iTunes app is for. The Guided Tour demo shows little that will surprise you, just a slick interface for previewing, buying, and wirelessly downloading music, movies (rentals also available), TV shows, podcasts, music videos and audiobooks.
The iTunes app is where Apple hopes you'll spend a lot of your time - and your money
Taken together, the 11 Guided Tours demonstrate that the iPad isn't merely an over-sized iPhone. As presented - of course, in their best light by the crafty marketeers at Apple - the iPad apps take good advantage of the larger display and use it to make previously iPhone-only apps easier to use. More interestingly, Keynote, Pages, Numbers and iBooks are clearly worth at least a closer look once the long-awaited device ships this Saturday.
That is, if you can get your hands on one. ®
Update
Thanks to Reg reader David, we've learned that Genius Mixes are, indeed, available on the iPhone and iPod touch - not that accessing them is all that easy. We were unable to test this hidden feature, but here's how, according to Mac OS X Tips, Tricks, and More.
Apple uncloaks deep details of its 11 iPad apps
COMMENTS
More vitriol
What is it with these muppets who can see no reason to change or invent or improve, Every time Apple get a mention off they go; everything from battery life to only one browser (so Windoze don't you think)
Look fuckwits, Apple have done this to make money, they make money by selling products, they make more money by selling more products to more people than before. How they do that is called marketing, or in economic terms creating an incentive, their chosen route is ease of operation, not battery life or whatever you can do with your dell dongle thingy from the local PC warehouse (another great retail experience!).
So when your business, or the one you're in, has been as inventive, creative, as self assured to do something like launch a paradigm shift product - stop bitching stand back and see if it flies. If it does - great, if not no whining lets see if new wings will fix it.
No wonder the UK's up shit creek if the IT industry is full of these underachieving navel gazing wankers.
F in luddites one and all...... I'm sick of 'em.
I'll get my coat - the one with the can do attitude.
Quite
Of course, your Tablet PC is also incredibly user friendly, has dedicated apps designed for the tablet interface and isn't bulky or expensive ... Right?
Retarded?
Maybe you and the other three people in the world who bought a tablet pc should get together and start a group.
A retard
Mat, I guess I am a retard.
I only use one browser. Maybe you can explain to us retards why you need multiple ones ?
An SDCARD adapter is not exactly that unusual.. many 'tablet PCs' need them too.
Maybe someone is just a bit put out that they bought a crap tablet PC ? Personally I've had 2 - a fujitsu back in 2002/3 when they came out, and an HP last year. Both have been absolute crap - I imagine something like trying to drive a car with a joystick... wrong interface for the OS.
Even with vista/win7 tablet support is pitiful.
I used to hate macs.. I now have 3 and an iphone. It took a bit of pride swallowing, but take the iphone - pick one up.. play with it for 10 mins. surf a bit on it.. I dare u to try and not find that, despite yourself you actually find it just flows.
THAT will be what sells the iPad, now whether it has an SDCARD adapter or a VGA port hardly anyone will use sticking out the side.
You'd think...
...that buying any Apple product had been made compulsory, the way some people moan about them. If you're not interested in an iPad, don't buy one and don't even bother being puerile enough to make a stupid and ill-informed comment about it.
If Apple products are so expensive and shiny, have you ever stopped to wonder why they sell by the gerzillion? Ever really used the Mac OS that you bitch about so long and loud and not just glanced at it while you drooled over the Packard Bells at PC World? Ever looked at your hideous beige box or Android phone or whatever and wondered why it looks like creativity passed their designers by? And why do so many of you prefer to lie - and even devise wish-lists of lies - to bad-mouth Cupertino's latest product?
Every PC, and these days, every so-called "smart" phone looks to Apple because Mr Jobs and his merry men really do lead the way. You think the rest of the beige box and mobile phone world isn't watching Apple's every move to see what they, the beige phone makers, are going to pop out next? Microsoft's own OS is now such a blatant homage to the Mac OS, it's embarrassing. Every new Apple product is the rest of the world's cue to make things they hope will compete. Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, but look what they did with it, fer crissake! Acer, Asus, Dell, Packard Bell and (enter name of beige-box manufacturer here) didn't actually invent much of anything, and their only innovation is to make stuff as cheaply as possible and sell it in quantity to the simple folks who don't expect quality anyway and certainly wouldn't dream of paying for it.
Will I buy an iPad? Nope. Don't need one, can't really see a use for one. Don't have an iPod or an iPhone either, and even though I won't be getting an iPad I'm not going to write to any public forum and complain that it's crap solely because I'm not getting one. Are the people who will buy an iPad sheep for buying Apple stuff, or could it be that the people who buy naff stuff from beige-box makers in such numbers are the sheep for being so... well, ordinary?
Anyway, Apple is hugely successful, but you're not.
