Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

Tech News31 Jan 2010 09:26 pm

iPad announcement

This week’s announcement of the new iPad seemed to have been lost in all the middle school humor directed at the name and its association with feminine hygiene products.  That’s really too bad because after thinking about whether this is a novelty or really a revolutionary device for a few days, I think I’m on the side of the latter.

Here are a couple of factors why:

  • People are tired of complexity
  • More and more sophisticated applications are available in the browser
  • Most people don’t need a lot more than email and what is built into the iPad

When compared to the netbook category of mini laptops, the iPad seems more performant – and that display is really gorgeous. The UI is a proven winner in the iPhone, and I can only imagine it is going to be awesome in a larger format 7.5×9.5 screen. A netbook’s only really attractive feature is their price. With a slow Atom processor and tiny screens, I think I’d grow old and blind using one. Of course all of this is a little speculative until we can get our hands on an iPad to see how that virtual keyboard works.

The most interesting move to me is that the iPad runs the iPhone OS. (By the way, it seems that A4 chip Jobs is so proud of is not from Apple after all). I mean, Apple could have built a version of MacOS for the iPad. They went with iPhone OS though, I’m speculating mainly to gain simplicity. Millions of people around the world instantly know how to use the iPad because they have an iPhone. Clearly, they give up a lot on the lack of multitasking, but they gain the hand gesture interface and simplicity.

Recall last year, Google announcing the Google OS – a combination of a lightweight Linux and the Google Chrome browser? At that time, they said to expect this to be available in netbooks in 2010.  My guess is that the iPad is no surprise to the bright folks at Google and that they are working on a compelling device.  So, will they follow Apple’s lead and base a iPad like device on their Andriod Phone OS, or the new Google OS?  I think we’ll see a Google answer to the iPad before Christmas. gPad anyone?  What a fun time to be alive!

One Response to “iPad announcement – gPad by Christmas”


  1. […] conference.  I feel relatively confident that Google is working on a tablet to compete with iPad as predicted in this blog in January. (Oh, that was my last post.  Like I said it is very busy this time of […]