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Apple iPad Pre-Orders to Begin February 25th? Speculation about Other Features?

thejakill said:
Apple sells 3 million apple tvs and it's a failure.

Amazon sells 3 million kindles and it's a hit.
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Steve Jobs recently said of the Kindle it must not be selling well because they don't announce sales figures. Funny, I don't remember Apple announcing sales figures for Apple TV either. So they're either both a hit or both a failure. Depends on your POV, I guess.
 
Still not terribly impressed. Don't think it's 'revolutionary'. Really don't think it's 'magical'. Still tentatively agree with the comparisons to the AppleTV.

Not the end of any 'era of computers' (insert reverb here?). Moving, somewhat more towards touch-based input instead of mouse-based, possibly -- though this has been happening for years with trackpads, to an extent (though anything finger-touch-based tends to be somewhat poor when it comes to precision -- see paintbrushes/painting, pens/writing, and mice/fragging). Away from more traditional computers (meaning anything ranging from desktops to netbooks), definitely not.

I don't care how nice your touchscreen is, it will always be crap for significant text input (even something like this post) compared to a real, physical, hardware keyboard. The 'keyboard' has been around for well over a hundred years -- sure, it's been streamlined from those multi-level circular-keyed monstrosities, all the way down to 'chiclet' keyboards, but the basic layout and concept hasn't changed in a long, long time. It just works well for what it does.

And a keyboard 'dock' doesn't really cut it. Never has (see ~1995-2005 and PDAs), never will. Keyboard docks don't fit nicely on your lap, are usually too close/awkward to the screen for long-term use on a desk, and tend to make touch (or pen) input awkward as hell.
 
infowarfare said:
sends that to the Satellite basically saying "we are roughly here"
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You're pretty much spot on apart from this, Nothing from a GPS receiver gets 'sent to a satellite'. GPS receivers pick up the signals from the sats. By using triangulation and an internal 'almanac' with a highly accurate clock, the receiver uses positional triangulation to roughly locate your position.

Assisted GPS is much quicker because it is able to use ground based triangulation to quickly tell your device which satellites should be nearby (there are approx 30 sats in medium earth orbit). By giving your device a 'tip-off' it shortens the time needed for you to 'lock on' to 3 or more sats to fix your position. The GPS system is very complex but is based on very simple maths. Here's a nice little diagram that helps to visualise whats what.

ConstellationGPS.gif
 
pthurst said:
Assisted GPS is much quicker because it is able to use ground based triangulation to quickly tell your device which satellites should be nearby (there are approx 30 sats in medium earth orbit). By giving your device a 'tip-off' it shortens the time needed for you to 'lock on' to 3 or more sats to fix your position.
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Not strictly true, Assisted GPS provides ephemeris data to the built-in GPS receiver. This normally takes about 20 seconds for the receiver to get, so delaying calculation of the fix. By downloading this data quickly from the GPS network, the GPS receiver can navigate within a second or so. The data does come from ground based receivers, but it's not triangulation from those, just satellite data.
 
Dashboard, startup screen...

You know what would be cool? What would be cool is if Apple did implement the dashboard on the iPad, and then made it so that you could add widgets from the dashboard to the lock screen...

That would be cool.
 
Boghog said:
Yeah, but isn't "Assisted GPS" just cell tower triangulation anyway. I remember someone in another thread explaining that it was and that it was really inaccurate - far to inaccurate to use it for real location based services, let alone navigation.
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Nope, actually aGPS is better since it provides for a quicker "fix" of the signal, instead of a cold start as is the case with traditional GPS:

http://www.wmexperts.com/articles/gps_vs_agps_a_quick_tutorial.html

GPS for GPS, aGPS has the same features as the normal one...
 
Bye Bye Baby said:
Why is a full osx better than the iPhone os on the ipad?

I have never heard the argument clearly stated.
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Personally I think if it had full OS X on it it'd be a bit of a mess. The beauty of the iPhone OS is that it's optimised for touch. Many OS X programs would just not work very well since the mouse is far more accurate.
 
Man, that thing looks so fricken stupid. It's just my personal opinion. Whenever I see pictures of it and I'm not prepared to see it, it always makes me laugh scoffingly.

edit: I'm not saying it is or is not functional, just that I think its physical appearance is fugly. But maybe it has a good personality.
 
BRLawyer said:
GPS for GPS, aGPS has the same features as the normal one...
Click to expand...

Maybe so, but you have to compare each gps receiver against another. I've got a tomtom go 900, a sirfstar II based BT receiver and a sirfstar III based BT receiver - the sirfstar III dongle locks on a couple of seconds after power up, while the other two can take anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute.
The sirfstar III also locks onto more satellites, more accurately and is incredibly hard to lose a signal irrelevent of the terrain - It's also fairly old now, I assume there's even better options available now.
The gps chipset (never bothered to look what it is) and setup in the iphone is absolutely rubbish compared to what I've used for many years, irrelevant of what the spec/marketing sheets tell me.
 
At first i was unimpressed, but with more time to think about it, i think the ipad is going to be great. Even if I just use it 'on the can' to just browse the net.
I constantly get feed up of using the tiny iphone screen for the web and then just use my laptop instead.
I am really looking forward to the day when I have the ipad. The first thing i am going to do is clean up my iphone so it just has my music, email, and 10 of the best apps. Then have the ipad full of all the other pages and pages of ok apps that i dont have the heart to delete cos i paid 99 cents for!!
For a cleaner iphone, the Apple is getting my $499!!
Thanks Steve for making me part with my money for something I never thought I would need....
 
broken-chaos said:
...I don't care how nice your touchscreen is, it will always be crap for significant text input (even something like this post) compared to a real, physical, hardware keyboard....

And a keyboard 'dock' doesn't really cut it. Never has (see ~1995-2005 and PDAs), never will. Keyboard docks don't fit nicely on your lap, are usually too close/awkward to the screen for long-term use on a desk, and tend to make touch (or pen) input awkward as hell.
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1) People said the same thing about the iPhone's lack of a physical keyboard -- didn't seem to hurt sales or popularity. The only problem I have w/ the iPhone's keyboard is that its small so my hands cramp up. I can type very accurately on it, and what I can't type accurately the iPhone corrects for me.

2) The Keyboard Dock is not the only keyboard option. B/T Keyboards work as well.

3) The iPad isn't marketed as a laptop, it's a tablet. It compliments a laptop rather than competes with it. For example, the iPad can't run Photoshop, but my MBP can't be temporarily turned into a touch sensitive remote. My MBP weighs 5lbs. The iPad 1.5lbs., so for trips where I will only be taking notes or writing short memos it doesn't make sense to lug 5lbs around when I can take a 1.5lb tablet.

I have to say I'm amused though. It seems the close the iPad comes to actually going on sale and launching the rats are really feeling cornered and attacked like crazy. Normally, when one isn't impressed with a product they don't feel the need to say much other than "meh," and move along. For some bizzaro reason some feel threatened by the iPad and I can't figure out why. I just hope they don't end up gnawing their own tail off when the lines form.
 
voncheech said:
i for one don't want Stocks, Weather, Voice Memo, Clock, and Calculator.
there are better versions of all these apps made by 3rd party developers.
i hated being having stocks, a app i never use, stuck on my phone.
it eats up my screen space.
Click to expand...

Exactly!! Hopefully, in OS 4.0 they'll allow us to hide these apps (wishful thinking). As it stands now, I have 2 different weather apps (not including the weather app) 3 calculators and 3 different stock/news apps. Never touch the stock apps either!
 
tillathenun said:
Personally I think if it had full OS X on it it'd be a bit of a mess. The beauty of the iPhone OS is that it's optimised for touch. Many OS X programs would just not work very well since the mouse is far more accurate.
Click to expand...

Exactly! I don't know why anyone thought OS X would make it on to a tablet, can you image trying to use an OS designed for a mouse and keyboard with your fingers on a small(ish) screen?

I seem to recall that PC tablets have been doing that for a long time, and what's always the biggest criticism, that they are difficult to use because Windows was not designed to use finger input.

Before the iPad came out everyone was bandying on about how a modified version of OS X could work...well you know what a modified version of OS X is, the iPhone OS. It's the obvious choice as it was designed from the ground-up for finger input. Finger-based OS' just can't be as complicated as desktop OS' as using your fingers is neither as accurate nor as versatile as using a mouse.

Full-blown OS X on the iPad was never ever going to happen, I can't fathom why anyone thought it would?
 
pimentoLoaf said:
My phone bill is big enough. I'll take the WiFi model.
Click to expand...

You want to get a better phone contract, it's standard in the UK to have unlimited data and massive amounts of call time and texts for around £20 a month - doesn't matter how much data I use, it's still £20...
 
broken-chaos said:
Still not terribly impressed. Don't think it's 'revolutionary'. Really don't think it's 'magical'. Still tentatively agree with the comparisons to the AppleTV.

Not the end of any 'era of computers' (insert reverb here?). Moving, somewhat more towards touch-based input instead of mouse-based, possibly -- though this has been happening for years with trackpads, to an extent (though anything finger-touch-based tends to be somewhat poor when it comes to precision -- see paintbrushes/painting, pens/writing, and mice/fragging). Away from more traditional computers (meaning anything ranging from desktops to netbooks), definitely not.

I don't care how nice your touchscreen is, it will always be crap for significant text input (even something like this post) compared to a real, physical, hardware keyboard. The 'keyboard' has been around for well over a hundred years -- sure, it's been streamlined from those multi-level circular-keyed monstrosities, all the way down to 'chiclet' keyboards, but the basic layout and concept hasn't changed in a long, long time. It just works well for what it does.

And a keyboard 'dock' doesn't really cut it. Never has (see ~1995-2005 and PDAs), never will. Keyboard docks don't fit nicely on your lap, are usually too close/awkward to the screen for long-term use on a desk, and tend to make touch (or pen) input awkward as hell.
Click to expand...

Well, as any blue tooth keyboard will work with it, that's not really an issue.

People are still missing the point - this isn't a device for significant levels of text input, it's a media consumption device, you'll probably type the odd URL, or chat on messenger/facebook, and plenty of people are doing that with touch screen phones right now.
 
freeny said:
Will it be able to handle scrolling frames unlike the iPhone?
Can I change the fugly desktop image?
Click to expand...

Yes, you can change the desktop image. As for "scrolling frames," if that's what I think it is, you can scroll by dragging with two fingers inside the frame.
 
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