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.

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