The Apple iPad - Anand's Analysis
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2010 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Resolution and Video Decoding
The iPad uses a 9.7” IPS panel with a 1024 x 768 resolution. The panel technology is great, the resolution is a bit disappointing.
Video decoding is presumably fully hardware accelerated, but there are limitations here. Apple says you can only decode H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 48kHz. The only containers supported are .m4v, .mp4 and .mov.
This is horribly unfortunate and it means that anyone with existing content not in a friendly format will have to convert it before it’ll play on the iPad. While Apple likes to assume the world revolves around it, the truth is it just doesn’t. This is great for folks who already watch movies on their iPhones and not so great for those who don’t. Luckily with a good enough desktop, transcoding movies to your iPad shouldn’t be too painful.
There’s no camera on the device so I’m assuming there’s no video encoding support either. You can get rid of any image processing as well. In order to hit that $499 price point with such an attractive device Apple most likely had to cut corners wherever possible.
Final Words
Apple never entered the netbook market because it believed the devices weren’t very good. I’d tend to agree. You can get better performance and similar size out of a CULV notebook if you’re looking for an actual notebook. The netbook makes sense if you are using it as a 2nd, 3rd or 4th machine - but then who’s to say that you need to stick with the same form factor as a notebook?
This is where the tablet/smartbook device comes in.
Intel’s Atom processor is more than fast enough for the tasks you’d do on a netbook. The issue is that the OS and its applications running on netbooks are optimized for a class of processor that’s many times faster than Atom.
The iPad isn’t revolutionary, it simply takes an OS tailored to the power of the machine and pairs it with hardware that doesn’t look or feel like a netbook. Assuming that browsing the web, sending emails, using apps and watching videos is as fast on the iPad as it is on an Atom based netbook, Apple will have effectively capped the price of netbooks at $499. And to be honest, there’s no reason netbooks should ever approach that price to begin with.
A device that slots in between a smartphone and a notebook shouldn't look too much like either device. It needs to borrow from the strengths of both and bundle them in an attractive package. As a consumption device, the iPad looks promising. The big unknowns for me are: multitasking support, the performance of the A4 and ultimately whether or not you can actually be productive on the iPad. Based on all of that, we'll be able to figure out how much this thing is really worth.
Like the original iPhone (perhaps even moreso), the iPad is an extremely polarizing device. Even among AT staff it's a hit or miss depending on the person, regardless of their Mac buying history. For what it's worth, Mike Andrawes and I are both excited about its potential. Perhaps it's what we've been waiting for these past ten years.
We’ll find out in 60 days.
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Mike1111 - Friday, January 29, 2010 - link
Why wouldn't you? It's not like Windows where a higher ppi means smaller text.My problem with exactly 1080p would have been the aspect ratio. 16:9 is not really optimal for a tablet, 3:2 like the iPhone makes imho the most sense (with 16:9 a landscape software keyboard would take up too much screen real estate). 1920x1280 (multiple of iPhone resolution) would have been my personal favorite.
But since it's highly unlikely that Apple will change the resolution or aspect ratio anytime soon (imho not for at least 2 years), we'll have to live with 1024x768 and 4:3 for a while. Maybe if the iPad is a mega huge success Apple will develop an iPad Pro ($800-$1200 instead of $500-$830) for the high-end :)
AstroGuardian - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
What about DRM and it's disgusting consequences? Anand?A5 - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
If you still want to fight the DRM fight, I'd recommend a time machine to 5 years ago. DRM isn't going anywhere and this device isn't going to do anything worse than devices that are already out there.Sandwiched - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
You mentioned that the resolution is disappointing, but if the 1024x768 display is a full 9.7" diagonal, then it works out to 131.959 PPI. Considering that a common print quality is 300 DPI, and most computer monitors are in the 72-100 PPI range, I'd say that 132 PPI is pretty decent for a 9.7" screen.Now, if you'd had issue with the bezel size, I could understand that. Perhaps that will be the iPad 2 - same dimensions, smaller bezel, larger screen. :)
Mike1111 - Friday, January 29, 2010 - link
You sit a lot farther away from a computer monitor than you would from the iPad (more like book or magazine reading distance). And even 300 dpi is pretty low for a high quality magazine.The final goal for a ereader tablet should be to look like national geographics, and not just a little better than your computer monitor.
Around 200 ppi would have been okay for the iPad, 250 ppi or more would have been better (Motorola Droid has 265 ppi).
But yes, the bezel could have been smaller. I find that the bezel of the iPhone (top and bottom) is big enough for most thumbs. Plus content almost never starts immediately at the sides. And modern capacitive sensors and software should be able to differentiate between a hand holding the device and a thumb or finger interacting with the screen. I mean you could even place some capacitive sensors (really low density) in the bezel to detect where the user is holding the device to make it easier.
cjb110 - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
The usage model presented seems very very similar to the usage model of ChromeOS. The recent interview in Ars had the dev discussing leaving it on the couch, picking it up, browsing to a site and turning it off again.Now I think most people are assuming Chrome OS is a screen+keyboard netbook/laptop...but if iPad is slightly succesfully, I doubt it would take Google very long to get nice touchable UI in there.
Byte - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
Ouch, looks like apple finally hit a flop on this one.wwwcd - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
Too expensive for free buy!vrodic - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
Anand, why do you assume that A4 is ARM based? Apple has extensive development experience in PowerPC architecture, and PA Semi created PowerPC based designs. It also means that there are no ARM license costs. PowerPC is quite a power efficient architecture.Most of the OS is written in portable C code, and recompiling it to a PowerPC architecture is not a significant effort. Also, existing iPhone 3rd party apps could be recompiled with the new SDK to run on iPad, and only if they use some custom ARM assembler code the "port" would require significant effort.
Mike1111 - Thursday, January 28, 2010 - link
As far as I understand it iPhone apps run without any modifications on the iPad.