I was 'waiting' for this because
- Although Kindle and Sony Reader are great ebook readers they produced a set of issues for me in India. One, they were priced > 300$ and well, just for reader feature and a little bit of 'other freebies' I did not want to pay so much. Two, the data formats such as PDF, Images, Graphs etc are all supported but not without the small prints. While I live in India, where Amazon still has no provider for its services, its quite a hassle to convert all data formats using Kindle because every non-native content is sent to Kindle's server for 'conversion' and then brought back.
India has 23% of its population on the mobile but Amazon has not tied up with any ISP provider as far as I know. Does any reader support Indian languages?
- An e-Reader was one more device I had to carry. There's the laptop, the power cord, the head phones for Skype, the mobile phone already in my travel bag and now one more device that I must bother about. A dream device would have had all features into one with intuitive UI and an optimum form factor that makes it easy to 'handle'.
When the rumors were around for the iPad most people guessed that it would be a tablet. However what surprised me is the features offered for the price. It's a Big iPhone plus e-Reader. (Disclaimer: I still don't know if I can read all types of documents on it). I expect iPad to extend its tentacles everywhere because of its extensibility, the SDK the same as that of iPhone and hence the power that third party developers have will only add to customer usage and pleasure of use.
I was an iPod basher about a few years ago because eberything about it was curtailing and propreitary. However iPod has become a 'good boy' now with its 'Home Sharing' of files with which family members can share the songs or podcasts. New iTunes also converts non-native formats such as realplayer formats by implicitly importing the formats. Podcasts have extended themselves to iTunes U where you can download university lessons on any topic thats available. If Only IPod or iPad can transfer songs without a separate adapter or a dedicated laptop! Thats the last mile that Apple has to go. Extensible, yet exclusive is the key.
Well done Apple. No beta, no trial versions and a big bang release of a new device! I'm waiting to check out the different versions.
