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So the long-anticipated Apple iPad is finally here. It’s a device that’s supposed to take on netbooks at their own game and win, prevent working on the train or plane from being an ergonomic nightmare, and make Apple fanatics feel special again for owning one now the world has an iPhone. But it’s also a useful tool for designers, illustrators, and digital artists looking to get creative on the move.

Before we kick off, here’s a quick rundown of the what Apple has dished up. The Apple iPad is a slate PC that looks like a big iPhone. It has a home button and an aluminium bezel like a MacBook. The 9.7-inch touchscreen is made of glass. It’s only half an inch thick, and weighs about 1.5 pounds (about half a smallish laptop).

It contains a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, which is both processor and graphics. The Apple iPad will come with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of flash solid state storage. There’s 802.11n Wi-Fi for use at home and in cafes, Bluetooth 2.1 for keyboards and other peripherals (there’s also a hardware keyboard dock), and optional 3G for connectivity on the move. You can run iPhone apps on it, as well as iPad-specific tools such as a custom version of the iWork office suite—and download e-books like the iPhone’s capabilities for music and videos.

It costs between $499 and $829, though the 3G-capable models are being sold without being tied to lengthy contracts. (Prices and contract details outside the U.S. are not yet available.)

But what does it mean for artists?

1. It’s a digital sketchpad.

Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile opened up the iPhone for artists to doodle in spare moments while waiting for trains, tubes, or mates in bars or elsewhere.

The iPhone has limited touch sensitivity but its main problem for this task is the small, low-resolution screen. The iPad is much larger and offers a resolution of 1024-by-768 pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch. It’s no mobile Wacom Cintiq though, as it’s unlikely to have a professional-level of touch sensitivity (I’m speculating a bit here, though if it had, Apple would surely shout about it).

While Autodesk hasn’t announced an iPad specific version of Sketchbook Mobile, the iPhone version will run on it. As part of the launch, Steve Jobs demonstrated the popular Brushes app on the device.

2. It’s a portable portfolio.

Again, you can use your iPod to show off your portfolio, using something like Quark’s new I Love Design app. Again, screen size and resolution are issues, so the iPad will allow you to show off your work in all its glory. Interactive designers should beware though, as with the iPhone operating system, there’s no support for Flash sites.

3. A new lease of life for design.

The nature of reading a newspaper, magazine, or book on a train means that you’ll appreciate the pleasurable layouts of print more than the strict segmented grids of Websites. Hopefully, this means that publishers will invest in design (and designers) for iPad versions of newspapers and magazines. Creating digital versions of magazines won’t be as easy as taking your print layout and exporting an iPad version along with your press-ready PDFs—even at the iPad’s 1024-by-768 resolution, an A4 magazine page with 8-point body copy won’t be readable. Whether this means more jobs for designers or cruddy replicated layouts depends on whether the interactive magazine model takes off and provides enough revenue to support good design (as well as the whims of individual publishing houses).

For interactive designers, there’s hope that the iPad will enable more creative use of interactivity. We’ve seen some incredible demos of what you can do with interactive newspapers and magazines—the best of which is Bonnier’s Mag+ —but these are so much more expensive to create than print magazines in terms of time and manpower. This will limit opportunities here to the biggest newspaper and magazine publishers only.

As with the iPhone, where the iPad will create more work for interactive designers is in creating branded projects for clients. And with Flash CS5 slated to offer a simple Output for iPhone/iPad export system, creating apps could be simpler, quicker, and more suitable for small projects than you’d expect.

4 “I’m on the train.”

Looking like a giant iPod, the iPad is ideal for recreating Dom Joly’s classic “I’m on the train” sketch. Yeah, it’s a joke that’ll get tired quickly—all the more reason to get one quickly and get in first.

via Macworld.

Quite some time ago now a joke about the PC press suggested that if Steve Jobs walked across San Francisco Bay using nothing but his bare feet, their headlines would read: “Apple “Genius” can’t swim!”.

This hasn’t changed: an overwhelming majority of PC press iPad reviews mix faint and deeply reluctant praise with enthusiastic emphasis on anything even remotely construable as a negative. There’s a review of iPad reviews done by some Computerworld blogger that illustrates this perfectly — because the bits picked from other reviews for retail to the Computerworld audience include some of the silliest attempts to denigrate the iPad you’ll ever see. Would you believe, for example, that having a faster CPU than the iPhone is bad thing?

Even though the performance of the iPad and the [iPhone] 3GS over the same AT&T 3G network were almost identical, the iPad felt slow, mainly because of how much faster the iPad’s CPU can render pages. …

The consultancy side of the PC hype machine acts the same way: there isn’t a major player out there that hasn’t recommended against business adoption of the iPad on grounds every bit as honest and logically compelling as their earlier rejection of the iPhone, the iMac — and just about every other Apple product ever released.

So, with that in mind I thought I’d help out a bit by listing the eight most important things the PC press won’t go out of its way to tell you about the iPad:

No Intel CPU (it’s a PPC derived, ARM core, system on a chip);

No motherboard “architecture” — from the review of reviews quoted above:

The 3G iPad is not nearly as barren as the Wi-Fi-only iPad, but it’s still not jam-packed.

Not jam-packed? oh the horror! the horror!

Like the iPhone, it runs Unix (making Unix now the best selling consumer OS)

The iPad/iPhone apps industry is the single fastest growing smart jobs generator in America today.

In absolute terms it’s still tiny, of course — but the take-up rate is amazing.

Security issues generally relate to user accounts and shared network infrastructure, not the iDevices themselves — did I mention that they run Unix and don’t use Intel CPUs?

The iPad is already driving some secondary innovation — Purses designed to accommodate the things, early adopters in real estate marketing finding major competitive advantage, a real possibility that new media reporting will hit the mainstream, and people at Boeing thinking of using them in airplane seat backs to offer better services at lower cost and lower weight.

the iPad generally meets or exceeds customer expectations — a mortal sin in the Wintel world where service revenues depend on exploiting the gap between hype driven customer expectation and the reality of what the products can actually deliver.

Since at least 1984 the PC press has ridiculed every major advance in communications and computation until its own advertisers could produce copies and then enthusiastically hyped those copies as world beating innovations. What we’re seeing with the iPad is just more of the same: the objective experts who hated the first iPhones now love the me toos, and the same people who now hate the iPad will be telling you, in a year or two, how incredibly wonderful, ground breaking, and just plain business mission critical the wintel industry’s insanely innovative clones are.

And that, of course, is the single most important thing the PC press hides about the iPad: that hating it is commercially important to them.

So, bottom line? I don’t think people who write headlines like iPhone 4: Perfect for everyone, except humans attack it because it advances personal computing, offers new business opportunities, or embeds new design ideas; I think these people instinctively reject Apple products simply because those products generally meet expectation –while their living depends on selling products that don’t.

via The top eight things the PC press hides about the iPad | ZDNet.

(Via WSPA)

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