Awesome Techs

Apple has just officially announced the Apple iPad, their tablet device that aims to bring the best of the iPhone and laptops to a slim, attractive device.

The result is a very thin, roughly 10-inch (diagonal) device. The hardware is about what you’d expect, considering that we already know how the iPhone works. It supports touch input, multi-touch, swiping gestures, orientation detection, and all the rest of the features that the iPhone made popular with users.

The tablet’s multitouch screen measures in at 9.7 inches, as per the rumors, meaning that it’s got a significantly smaller footprint than the smallest MacBook, but a much larger screen than the iPhone. That’s 9.7 inches diagonal, from screen corner to screen corner. The bezel is a little fat, but this thing is basically a clean slab of display. The screen’s aspect ratio is closer to 4:3 than 16:9, meaning that it’s not a widescreen like the iPhone or a MacBook, and more of a bi-directional tablet. Or, er, Pad. It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds. It’s powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and has 16GB to 64GB of flash storage. From the looks of it, Apple finally got some use out of that PA Semi purchase, and built their own mobile processor. It’s also loaded with 802.11 n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 30-pin connector, a speaker, a microphone, an accelerometer and a compass.

The operating system on the tablet is based on iPhone OS, which is in turn loosely based on OS X. In other words, it’s got the same guts as the iPhone, as well as a somewhat similar interface. The browser is essential an upscaled version of Safari Mobile, with a familiar, finger-friendly title bar and not much else. It rotates by command of the accelerometer. Mail again takes its visual cues from the iPhone, but with a lot more decoration: you can preview your mailbox from any message with a pull-down menu, and preview any message from within the mailbox, with a pop-up window.

via : [Gizmodo]