The Apple ipad was launched on Saturday April 3rd to a herald of hype from Apple fans, the Tech world, critics and the web. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple calls the ipad as truly “Magical” and “Revolutionary”. Presently the ipad is only available in the US, but within two months, it is expected to be launched in Europe and elsewhere.  When it gets to Europe, I expect to order one and then give a hands-on review on mobilitynigeria. But before then, it is still safe to say that from intensive study and follow-up of the ipad news and saga on the web and on CNN that the long awaited ipad had generally mixed to favorable reviews.

What exactly is the ipad? Is it a net-book? Or a net-book replacement? Or could you call it a tablet PC. Or is it just an entertainment device with a fantastic and eye candy user interface? What niche will it occupy if it becomes mainstream or if it ever becomes mainstream? Do we need another device separate from our laptop and mobile phone? This analytical review shall attempt to look at these pertinent questions. And push us closer to the inexorable question; Do we really need an ipad?

This is not really a hands on Review but an analytical look at the ipad and opinion of the author on the ipad before he gets one for himself, possibly in the summer,

Apple Ipad
The ipad is Apple’s multimedia tablet device. It is just like a tablet PC or a small MAC but with simplified user interface and a 9.7 inch diagonal with a resolution of 1024 – by – 768 pixels. From reviews I have read on the net and videos on youtube, it appears to have an intuitive, fluid and impressive user interface. Not un-similar with the iphone. In fact, the ipad shares the same Operating System (OS) with the iphone and ipad touch. The OS is 3.2. compared with the iphone which is presently 3.13.  The Physical Specs is; Height: 9.56 inches by Width: by 7.47 inches by Depth:0.5 inch (13.4 mm). Weight: 0.68 kg.

The Space between a Laptop and a phone
When Apple first announced the ipad in an event at Cupertino, California that I previewed live from a streaming video from Macworld.com, I felt myself engulfed in his enthusiasm and started there and then to develop a love for this device. Steve Jobs, Apple’s Founder positioned the device in the space between a Laptop and a phone. This singular act greatly impressed me because there were times in my life where my laptop may appear too big and then my phone will look way too small for the occasion. At such times, the ipad could fill the gap. I believe that the ipad cannot replace my phone anytime soon but the question remains whether it can replace my laptop from time to time, depending on the occasion.

Features of the Ipad
1.    Tablet form factor with a large screen measuring 9.7 inches.
2.    Built-in speaker and Microphone
3.    Apple’s designed 1 Gigahertz A4 system on Chip Processor.
4.    On Board Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, with Bluetooth 2.1
5.    Vibrant colour display on the screen with a resolution of 1024 – by – 768 pixels.
6.    SSD memory of 16, 32 or 64 Gigabyte
7.    10 Hours battery life when watching Video, (Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music)  Or One week on Standby.
8.    iBook – An E-reader for reading Ebooks.
9.    Iwork for working with Documents. Iwork consists of iPage, inumbers and Keynote. Those persons familiar with a Mac Computer or Macbook will appreciate this!
10.    An already established app store with more than 5000 ipad specific application or more than 150,000 iphone OS compatible apps
11.    Support for 3G sim card (in some models).
12.    Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
13.    Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously
14.    Game Centre. To play games with friends or strangers and lets you view your worldwide rank on a certain game as well as an achievement board.
Criticism
1.    No USB port (Although you can use an accessory from the Apple store. This will cost more money.)
2.    No Front facing Camera
3.    No QWERTY keyboard (But for God’s sake, this is a tablet!). You can as well use it with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard or a key board Dock. (This will however set you back 130 dollars!)
4.    NO Multi-tasking (At least this is only temporary, until summer, when it would start multi-tasking with an OS 4.0 update).

To be concluded – Editor

You live in Nigeria, one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets. Or any of the other numerous African and Asian countries that make the top of the list in terms of mobile growth for that matter.

You can duck into almost any mobile retailer’s store and walk out with a Symbian device in less than twenty minutes. And it takes that long only because you are spoilt for choice. There are so many such smartphones on display (and from different manufacturers) that you had to think through which one you would walk out with.

So, you have heard about all those spanking new mobile operating systems and how they are revolutionalizing people’s lives. Unfortunately, you hunt through store after store in search of an Android smartphone, and come up with nothing.

You ask a particular store attendant for the Palm Pre. “Pre-what“, he asks? Never heard of it. Don’t even waste your energy mentioning that it runs Web OS. Probably never heard of that either.

However, while its hard to find an iPhone, you do run into a handful of stores with a couple of units for sale.

Luckilly, hunting for a Windowsphone is not as tedious as hunting for an iPhone. Oh, it is not a walk in the park, but at least one or two major retailers list a handful of Windows Phones, especially from HTC.

Or perhaps you do not even care about mobile OSes and have no idea what differences exist under the hood of different phones. So you walk into a store and see this shiny phone that gets you drooling. “What can that phone do?”, you ask the attendant.

She responds, “It has a camera, surfs the web, you can check email, has bluetooth and you can connect it to your computer“. “Cool“, you say and pick a unit. You have just purchased a Symbian-powered smartphone. Yes; you don’t know and you couldn’t really care. But Symbian has made a sale just because its devices were available.

This is the situation on ground in many of the world’s fast growing mobile markets. Nokia and other Symbian licencees have a firm hold of those markets. They have a distribution network on ground. This factor alone means that for quite a while, Symbian will outsell other mobile OSes.

It does not matter how much of a rave OSX, Android and Web OS are in North America and Europe. If they are not widely available on the shelves in countries where mobiles are selling like hot cakes, the growth of those OSes will remain limited. This is one of the flaws of Palm’s strategy with the Pre. They ignored where the action is.

Of course, Android looks like it has the greatest potential to play catch-up. It is licensed by an ever-growing number of manufacturers who already have their feet planted in these fast-growing markets. Hopefully, we will begin to see Android devices by Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson in mobile retail stores here in Nigeria.

For now, the few Android-powered devices and iPhones in the market came in mostly via unofficial channels.

When other smartphone platforms invade stores in the hottest mobile markets, then, and only then will the mobile OS race be truly on. For now, the hold of Symbian is yet to be really challenged where it matters.

PS: By the way, anyone knows of any mobile store in Nigeria that currently stocks Android devices?

Android fan site, Phandroid, reports that Android and other newer operating sustems are stealing Symbian and WinMo market share

Below are percentage share movement in the smartphone market from Q3 2008 to Q3 2009:

Android – 0% to 3.9%
BlackBerry OS – 16% to 20.8%
iPhone – 12.9% to 17.1%
Symbian – 49.7% to 44.6%
WebOS – 0% to 1.1%
Windows Mobile – 11% to 7.9%

Read the full item: Android Stealing Symbian & WinMo Market Share

Symbian. Windows Mobile. Palm. Blackberry. OSX. Android. Maemo.

These are all mobile operating systems (OS). Some have been around longer than others. The new kids on the block are OSX and Android, and they are having their day. While Palm is an old platform, the complete revamp that has been executed on the OS has transformed its hitherto dated interface into something hip and up-to-date, just as obtains on the newer kids.

Symbian, the world’s most widely used mobile OS, has also undergone a revamp with the S60 5th Edition, but with not quite an elegant result as Palm. I have been “Symbian Inside” for the most of my mobile life, having used S80 (Nokia 9500), UIQ (P990, P1i) and S60 (E61, E61i, E90, E75) devices for years.

I have not hidden my position that Symbian as it currently is needs a serious facelift of its user interface to get up-to-date with current fads in the industry. I have even held that position strongly. But there seem to be those who think that Symbian is actually going to die off. I seriously doubt that. At least not anytime soon.

If what Nokia has pulled off on the N900 tablet-phone is anything to go by, those who have prophesied Symbian’s death because of what seemed Nokia’s inability to implement a fancy user interface can start recanting. Nokia has shown that they are capable.

We must note that the current fancy user interfaces are touchscreen based. Unfortunately, unless there is a massive change in the general direction of mobile users, the statistics till date shows that the majority of users prefer regular type phones with a physical keypad. In this field, Nokia still holds the fort.

I submit that Symbian is likely to remain the dominant mobile OS for a long time. Current trends suggest that Android will take the 2nd place quickly.

One of the advantages that Symbian has is what will help Android achieve this feat. Both Symbian and Android are licenced by numerous manufacturers, some of which are adding layers of services, functionality and usabilty to the underlying operatiing systems.

Already, we have multiple Android devices from HTC, Motorola, and Samsung respectively on the ground. More are on the way from Acer, Sony Ericsson, LG and others.

The other operating systems are generally mono-products – the iPhone which runs OSX is manufactured by only Apple; Blackberries are manufactured by only RIM, and Palm devices by only Palm.

The only other widely licensed mobile OS is Windows Mobile. The recently launched Windows Mobile 6.5 is a good upgrade, but leaves much to be desired. Hopefully, version 7 will bring this venerable OS up-to-speed and then we can see how things go from there.

One thing that is unarguable, however, is that exciting times are ahead in the mobile OS field. Whatever operating system you root for, the months and years ahead promise much.

Mike Rowehl runs ThisIsMobility.com, a blog that focuses on “Ripping mobility from the clutches of telecom”. He is also a developer with 9 years of experience, and in a very interesting article tells how Nokia/Symbian and other manufacturers and stakeholders held the mobile development scen down till Apple stepped up to the plate.

Excerpt:

I’ve been working, for years and years. And years and years and years and years, trying to get out to all those handsets, trying to build applications or websites that were able to hit a critical mass of users on all those handsets out there. Or at least enough users to run a profitable business. Lots of us have been trying to.

And generally we’ve been working at it alone. There’s been little help from handset manufacturers, little help from operating system providers, and really no help at all from carriers (though they’ll be very quick to tell you otherwise). Whenever us developers would complain about it or attempt to change the way things worked there was always some excuse about why things aren’t better. We would ask for more capable browsers and the response was that battery life and network constraints make it impossible to create a browser of near desktop capability on a mobile device. We would ask for development tools that would make it easier to get started developing and make it easier to debug and we were told that mobile development is just too complex to try to make it simple. We would ask for a simple payment system that didn’t result in massive checkout dropoff and everyone would just laugh.

The entire system was deadlocked cause no one with the power to was really interested in shaking it up. We kept getting fed excuse after excuse justifying the general lack of forward progress on all fronts. But then something comes along that makes it easy, often profitable, and frequently even fun to develop for mobile again. Apple has exposed the fact that the lack of progress in mobile wasn’t something inherent in the system. That someone with the right motivation can really shake things up and get the train moving again.

Full article: Please Don’t Mistake My Apathy For A Lack of Understanding

Comments please!

Okay, it hasn’t happened yet, but if the feature list of the new iPhone OS 3.0 is anything to go by, things don’t look too good for Nokia/Symbian.

The newly announced iPhone firmware (version 3.0) has a list of – wait for it – 100 new features. Many of those features are things that smartphone power users had lamented were absent on the iPhone and thus kept them away from the allure of the apple (pun intended).

Now, with things like system-wide cut-and-paste, SMS forwarding, MMS, Stereo A2DP Bluetooth streaming, System-wide landscape keyboard, WiFi auto-login for hotspots, live video and audio streaming, tethering, and voice recording, now available on the iPhone OS, the picture has suddenly changed.

The iPhone has gone from an expensive toy to a very functional, expensive tool – and Nokia/Symbian needs to watch it. Why?

Here’s Why

That stunning, user-friendly interface on the iPhone still has no competitor. Forget s60 5th edition Touch. Forget TouchWiz, and all the other slap-on layers individual manufacturers have come up with.

iPhone 3.0 screams a balance in uber-cool and functionality.

I have used Symbian devices most of my smartphone history, but consider for example that Nokia/Symbian is yet to implement cut-and-paste in the built-in web browser (which is insane; the elder statesman Nokia 9500 had this simple feature), and now the iPhone has beaten s60 to it – plus that user interface, and I won’t be surprised to see many erstwhile Symbian users take a bite of the apple. No kidding.

Will I be picking an iPhone? I don’t know. I am a physical QWERTY keyboard person. No; those on-screen QWERTY keyboards just don’t offer the same ease of use as their hardware counterparts.

If Apple releases a QWERTY version of the iPhone running v3.0 tomorrow, I have no doubts that I will pick one up. Till then…

Heads-up from: GSMarena.com