I’m a geek! I never used to consider myself a geek but maybe I was always secretly a closet nerd dying to get out. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t speak Klingon, hang out at comic book conventions, play World of Warcraft or fantasise about Kathryn Janeway. Okay, that last bit isn’t strictly true. What I do suffer from though is a deep & powerful desire to own lots of shiny gadgets. The latest tech news has me positively salivating & my RSS feed is full of posts from Engadget, Gizmodo & CNET. The laptop I’m writing this on costs far more than it probably needs to & my iPhone is an integral part of my life (the fact that I’m currently having iTunes syncing issues is giving me no end of grief & sleepless nights). But nothing I’ve witnessed in the tech blogosphere has ever created as much noise as the rumoured Apple tablet.
This thing had been spoken about in hushed tones for years. It was going to take the design elegance that Apple is famed for, combine it with the application & UI juggernaut of the iPhone & put it in a completely new form factor. The problem being that, due to Apple’s policy of never responding to rumours the hype built up to unsustainable levels. When people were discussing the possibility of controlling it by waving your hands Minority Report style or being able to interact with software applications using nothing but facial expressions, the reality was always going to disappoint the hardcore Apple fanboys.
What was unveiled during Steve Job’s keynote was the iPad, essentially a large iPod touch but positioned somewhere between the smartphone & laptop markets. The browser on the iPad looks amazing; truly the internet in your hands. Surfing around different sites on an iPhone just won’t be the same after using this thing. The photo gallery app looked like an incredibly impressive way to show off your images & the digital photoframe frame feature makes you wonder why you would spend over £100 on an object that does only that but not half as well. Same could be said of the iBooks software. Being able to read books, newpapers & magazines on an iPad in colour & potentially with video or other media, would surely make you reconsider buying an eBook reader like the Amazon Kindle. Especially when the Apple hardware can do so much more besides. The iWorks demo really did look impressive in showing how a large multitouch interface could be used to interact with a software application, even ones designed for productivity. Unfortunately, pretty as it was, who actually uses iWorks &, out of them, who is going to use this to create a presentation?
Of course there were also downsides. The main ones for me were the lack of multitasking & no ability for video calling over the internet due to the lack of a front facing camera. The advantage of not being able to run apps in the background is obviously the longer battery life & making the system less prone to slowing down & crashing; all part of maintaining the Apple experience. It’s also been proven that there is a space internally that nicely houses a webcam module & I wouldn’t be surprised to see one fitted by the time that these things start shipping. As the software experience is basically a scaled up version of the iPhone OS, I think that before the launch date there’ll be an iPhone 4.0 announcement that will introduce lots of new UI features & content widgets that’ll stream information from your apps, such as weather or Twitter feeds. Something is definitely needed to fill all that empty space on the home screen.
Despite disappointing a lot of the tech glitterati, the iPad is almost a guaranteed success with consumers. Much as the iPhone didn’t actually do much in its first generation iteration, this is going to be a platform that Apple can build on & role out new features to keep customers coming back. It will also create a whole new goldrush for app developers. Do I need one? No. Do I want one? Absolutely. Will I get one? Depends whether Microsoft can get their act together & release the Courier.












Many people kept to a theme, others just took shoots of things that looked interesting. My original plan was to approach random strangers in the street & ask them to pose for a photo with me in it, camera held at arms length, a la the hundreds of thousands of images posted on Facebook each day. But when it came to the crunch I bottled it. I didn’t think that people would be too keen when approached by a 6 foot unshaven bloke brandishing a cheap camera with cartoons of badgers printed on it. Fortunately, 







