Apple Tablet Event Liveblog | Gizmodo Australia
So far, we’ve got our our usual pre-game countdown, with observations of the line, celebrity look-a-like sightings, angry rants about how cold it’s going to be in San Francisco, and photos of what people are wearing. us? A tasteful Target and Walmart ensemble, naturally.
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10.30am: Jason Chen: he can “fly to San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole way on one charge.” That’s 10 hours of VIDEO. and one month of standby charge. “And it’s got battery. What is the battery life of this remarkable new device?” 10 hours of battery life. and the environmental checklist, pretty much the same as the laptops Apple’s currently building.
10.29am:
10.29am: Jason Chen: it has 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. 30-pin connector, speaker, microphone, accelerometer and compass.
10.29am:
10.29am: Jason Chen: “As you know, Apple builds the same multitouch sensors in the world.” and it has multitouch on this. It’s powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and has 16GB to 64GB of flash storage. “And it screams.”
10.28am:
10.28am: Jason Chen: Now, the hardware. “It’s half an inch thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds (1.68kg).” it has a 9.7-inch IPS display, which has “great angle of view”.
10.28am:
10.28am: Jason Chen: “And that’s an overview of what the iPad can do.”
10.27am: Jason Chen: Now he’s showing the movie Up!, which is also in widescreen (not quite as wide as Star Trek). There’s also a lot of bezel around the device for some reason. I’d say 20 per cent of the device is bezel, if you’re measuring in one direction?
10.26am: Jason Chen: As for movies, Jobs is bringing up Star Trek, selecting a chapter and watching it in widescreen landscape mode. the movie only takes up about half the screen’s display area because it’s widescreen, and the tablet is not. P.S. lens flares.
10.26am:
10.25am: Jason Chen: Jobs may have just said “that’s fucking YouTube” while demoing YouTube, but I didn’t quite get that middle word and heard what I wanted to hear. So, unconfirmed.
10.25am:
10.25am: Jason Chen: Brian says don’t go to the Sushi Boat place that Jobs just mentioned, because you will get food poisoning.
10.24am: Jason Chen: but what else? There’s a maps app, which is Google Maps (he doesn’t mention Google by name though!) Not yet, anyway. He’s loading up his current location, that means this has GPS or some kind of location sensing. but, there’s no icon on the top next to the Wi-Fi icon that shows a 3G connection.
10.24am:
10.23am: Jason Chen: Jobs jumped over to calendar, which looks really like the one on the desktop, except for a couple more views like Day and List, which looks more like an organiser book (a physical one).
10.23am:
10.23am: Jason Chen: There are movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, iTunes U and a topless Alicia Keys.
10.22am:
10.22am: Jason Chen: Now, iTunes. he can pull up songs similar to the new Album Cover view in iTunes, and he taps different album covers to bring up a list of songs in that album. Tapping a song there plays the song. It’s more similar to iTunes on the desktop than iPod on the iPhone. and the iTunes store? He’s showing JOHN MAYER’s Battle Studies.
10.21am:
10.21am: Jason Chen: Jobs is showing a photo slideshow with backing music and decent-looking transitions. He’s sitting cross-legged on his little loveseat. he holds the iPad with one hand and manipulates it with the other.
10.20am:
10.20am: Jason Chen: he can also zoom out to map mode for photos, and see all the photos he took in a particular location in the world. There are pins representing different cities, with popups for each photo set.
10.20am:
10.19am: Jason Chen: It’s a cross platform device, because he can sync photos with Mac and Windows, but if he’s on a Mac, you can get photo data like events from iPhoto. He’s showing a holiday photo of someone’s kids. and some girl named Liz.
10.18am: Jason Chen: Now, photos. He’s swiping around and tapping photos, very similar to the way the iPhone works – but with a bigger screen, naturally.
10.18am:
10.18am: Jason Chen: and to compose a message, click on compose and “up pops this gorgeous keyboard here”. Steve Jobs is typing actually NOT with his thumbs, but with fingers, like on a real keyboard. He’s placing it on his lap and typing away semi-naturally. but not without errors.
10.18am:
10.18am: Jason Chen: Now, demonstrating how to open a PDF. Tap on it and the PDF opens in a new window, just like on the iPhone.
10.17am:
10.17am: Jason Chen: Next up, email. He’s looking at a message, and he can bring up a pulldown menu of the inbox on the left by clicking the inbox button. he can swap to landscape view and view things in widescreen, with the inbox on the left and the message on the right.
10.16am: Jason Chen: and next, National Geographic‘s website. This could a flash plugin, I’m not sure. and Steve Jobs hasn’t said anything about it yet. He’s zooming in and swiping around just like you would on an iPhone.
10.16am:
10.16am: Jason Chen: Now, Time magazine. Next, Fandango, because Steve Jobs wants to buy some tickets for a movie. “Grab the tablet that’s in the kitchen, go to the iPad and buy your tickets.”
10.15am:
10.14am: Jason Chen: first up, he’s showing up Safari, going to Apple.com. Now he’s visiting the New York Times website. the page renders just like a browser’s, and there are the navigational buttons on the top. Jobs clicked a story and there is a missing plugin error (is this flash? does this mean that the iPad won’t have flash?)
10.14am:
10.13am: Jason Chen: you can also watch YouTube (even in high def), and you can watch TV shows and movies. It’s not widescreen though, and looks closer to 4:3 than 16:9. and here’s a demo. you slide to unlock, just like an iPhone. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop.”
10.13am:
10.13am: Jason Chen: the music player is also very similar to the iPhone’s, but also very similar to actual iTunes. It’s a hybrid.
10.12am: Jason Chen: you can flick through photos and emails just like on the iPhone, basically. There’s a built-in calendar (like a datebook married to the desktop OS X calendar).
10.12am:
10.12am:
10.12am: Jason Chen: and here’s the keyboard: “it’s a dream to type on”, and it looks like a giant iPhone keyboard. “It’s almost life size.”
10.11am:
10.11am: Jason Chen: you can turn iPad, and an accelerometer will adjust by itself. “You can see the whole web page. “
10.11am:
10.11am: Jason Chen: “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”
10.11am:
10.11am: Jason Chen: A quick overview: “it’s very thin”, and you can change the background of the device. Here’s what it looks like, and Steve Jobs has one. the icons are like the iPhone’s, complete with a tray at the bottom (like the Mac OS X dock).
10.10am:
10.10am: Jason Chen: “And we call it, the iPad.” It’s official.
10.10am: Jason Chen: but what about Netbooks? “Netbooks aren’t better at ANYTHING! They’re just like cheap laptops.”
10.09am: Jason Chen: This device needs to be BETTER than a laptop or a smartphone at these types of devices. “Or it has no reason for being.”
10.09am: Jason Chen: things like browsing the web. Email. Photos. Videos. Music. Games. Ebooks.
10.09am: Jason Chen: “In order to create a third category of devices, these devices will have to be far better at doing some key tasks. What kind of tasks?”
10.08am: Jason Chen: “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? something that’s between a laptop and smartphone?”
10.08am:
10.08am: Jason Chen: and three years ago, they invented the iPhone.
10.08am:
10.07am: Jason Chen: before he’s going to talk about the tablet, he’s going to go back to 1991, when they shipped the first PowerBooks. it was the first laptop with a TFT screen, putting the keyboard up to create palm rests, and a pointing device.
10.07am: Jason Chen: Steve’s showing a quote from the WSJ on the tablet.
10.07am:
10.07am:
10.06am: Jason Chen: and now, the main event.
10.06am: Jason Chen: By revenue, Apple is the largest “mobile devices business” in the world now. Larger than Sony, with digital cameras camcorders, bigger than Samsung’s and bigger than Nokia. again, by revenue.
10.05am:
10.05am: Jason Chen: they get their revenue from three product lines, iPods, iPhones and Macs. (A fourth coming today?!)
10.05am: Jason Chen: So now Apple is an over $US50 billion company. “It is pretty amazing.”
10.05am:
10.05am: Jason Chen: Lastly (a photo of Woz and Jobs is on stage), Steve says 34 years after they started in 1976, they have $US15.6 billion of revenue.
10.04am:
10.04am: Jason Chen: Next update: App Store. There are over 140,000 applications in the App Store. “A few weeks ago we announced a user downloaded the three-billionth app from the App Store.”
10.03am: Jason Chen: Their fourth store in NYC is on Broadway in Lincoln Centre, with a huge glass front and a bunch of tables inside.
10.03am:
10.03am: Jason Chen: the second update (he’s going pretty fast here). Apple has 284 retail stores. They’ve had 50 million visitors to their stores.
10.02am: Jason Chen: but first he is going to talk about some other updates. A few weeks ago, they sold their 250-millionth iPod.
10.02am:
10.02am: Jason Chen: “We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical product today.”
10.01am: Jason Chen: Steve Jobs is on stage, and he looks about the same as we last saw him (kinda skinny, but not unhealthily skinny).
10.01am: Jason Chen: There are three bottles of water on stage, because Steve Jobs never drinks from the same water bottle twice. (This is not true.)
10am: Jason Chen: the lights are dimming and the show should start soon.
10am: Jason Chen: I would love to liveblog a Dylan presentation. I could make up any text I wanted and nobody would doubt it, since nobody could decipher his mumblings anyway.
9.58am: Jason Chen: Apple’s playing a live recording of a Dylan concert. Unless Dylan is backstage, complete with an audience, that is. you never know!
9.56am: Jason Chen: People are taking their seats, and the announcer is asking us to silence our mobile phones and paging devices.
9.55am: Jason Chen: I’m willing to bet half the people here will be liveblogging the next Apple event on a tablet, possibly with a keyboard attachment peripheral.
9.54am: Jason Chen: There are so many video cameras here from so many TV stations that I’m afraid to pick my nose, lest I end up on some station’s B-Roll that they’ll air sometime tonight. Ahh, screw it, here I go anyway.
9.54am:
9.53am: Jason Chen: I swear the guy who was on Rescue Me (the fat lieutenant guy) is here, in the front, talking to someone. SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS.
9.53am:
9.51am: Jason Chen: We’re still about 10 minutes away from the event starting. I wonder if the guys backstage are vomiting from nervousness. I would be.
9.50am:
9.49am: Jason Chen: oh and don’t forget to post your comments and predictions in our post here. Besides the Tablet, any guesses on what’s going to be announced? My last minute ones: iLife, MacBook Pro i5/i7 upgrades and an upgrade to MobileMe that allows you to live stream your day to anybody who is interested.
9.46am: Jason Chen: I was willing to bet a lot of money that Apple was going to play Phoenix before the show started, but it doesn’t seem like they will be.
9.45am:
9.45am: Jason Chen: We’re inside. I’m liveblogging from the bathroom.
9.40am: Joel Johnson: (In that metaphor we are Bing Crosby’s sweater.)
9.39am: Joel Johnson: We’ve lost contact with our away team as they begin the death shuffle to seats. these guys have been training for today for weeks. You’d think I’m joking because that sounds so pathetic but I’m totally not. This is our Bowie-meets-Bing-Crosby moment.
9.32am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that makes us all understand why we inexplicably crave a tablet.
9.31am: Jason Chen: People are lining up to go inside, and I am drafting behind someone who is guaranteed to get in fast.
9.31am: Joel Johnson: OH WHAT IS THAT fruit table! Brian was all “They always serve food; there’s no need for sausage patties.”
Well, clearly there is. God, the editorial sense in this place!
9.30am: Joel Johnson: mark: I heard that Jason Calacanis has an Apple tablet that is powered entirely by an encapsulated ego dynamo that orbits the black hole in his brain where most people have a sense of humour.
9.29am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet free from the yellow, flickering screens of the latest iMacs.
9.26am:
9.26am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a 10-inch tablet that can double as a colourful vanity plate.
9.24am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that functions exclusively in select Starbucks locations.
9.24am: Jason Chen: Joel, while it’s true most gingers have souls, it’s undetermined if Matt Buchanan does. My money is on him stealing the soul of an intern when we weren’t looking.
9.22am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that’s really just six iPod touches glued together, bezels and all.
9.18am:
9.18am: Joel Johnson: and if you stare at that JPG and whisper, “Bloody ginger, bloody ginger” five times the spectre of Matt Buchanan will appear.
9.16am: Joel Johnson: Jason: that usually means that I’m trying to get into your pants. Seduction-by-thesaurus is way undervalue, lowball, do an injustice to, be wrong about, sell short, play down, understate.
Whoa, it’s Fry and Ive! take that, House!
9.15am: Jason Chen: Also pictured next to Ive, Stevie Fry, who is unfortunately not drinking.
9.14am:
9.14am:
9.13am: Jason Chen: Joel, I don’t understand half of the words in your last update.
9.10am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that is 99 per cent compostable, save for a highly radioactive nuclear core with half life of two million years.
9.10am: Jason Chen: we just saw Jon Ive, and he is drinking brandy like a classy son of a bitch.
9.10am: Joel Johnson: Pics! I hear that dressing up in quasi-steampunk worsted fabrics is what the cool kids in the Bay Area are wearing these days. and to think we gave up tight-rolled jeans for beards in the last ’80s revival.
9.07am: Jason Chen: Whoa, one man looks like he just got back from a Himalayan expedition. It’s working for him.
9.06am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that runs seven hours on lithium ion battery, or 7.5 hours on one gram of unobtainium.
9.04am: Jason Chen: If I could grow a ’70s moustache like some of these guys, I would be seven times as manly. Plus, I would never go hungry.
9.04am: Joel Johnson: OMG Jason. My beard is so bad right now because I’m growing it out for this article on shaving I’m doing for mark. but what’s worse is that now it has been so long since my skin has seen sunlight that when I finally do shave my face will be so buttery it’ll look like I just went down on Paula Deen.
9.02am: Joel Johnson: I was about to make fun of Earth2Tech for this post where they talk about how “green” the Apple Tablet will be without ever having seen one, but then I realised:
1) I write for Gizmodo, which has paid for several of Denton’s wigs this month by Apple speculation alone
2) Atoms are the new bits!
So don’t worry about anything. I’m pretty sure Apple harvested the raw materials from wandering asteroids.
9am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet with a display that shakes clean like an Etch a Sketch, but ruins 70 per cent of the emails you type handheld.
9am: Jason Chen: I regret shaving my beard off last night.
8.56am: Joel Johnson: I have a dirty secret: I’ve never actually ever been to an Apple event.
Here’s a worse one: I got this email bounce of the invite that Apple sent to Gizmodo, and for like 24 hours I thought they were inviting me specifically. I crowed about it ever so subtly to the rest of the Gizmodo crew, until I realised that I didn’t actually know how to read email headers properly.
Hence, me home in my bathrobe.
(P.S. MSF can still use funds that you can’t spend on a tablet today, anyway. I’ll stop now.)
8.55am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that renders Call of Duty at full resolution but requires a MobileMe subscription to play online.
8.51am: Joel Johnson: Wow, Haiti really cleaned itself up for this one. (That is Haiti, right?)
8.50am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a tablet that Bootcamps into a Microsoft Courier.
8.49am:
8.48am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces the 10-inch tablet we’ve all imagined but the only supported language is Wingdings.
8.48am: Jason Chen: oh you said patty. that too.
8.45am: Jason Chen: Joel, I believe I would be more interested in a sausage shaped tablet party.
8.43am: Joel Johnson: Jason, mark. I don’t want to get all I-told-you-so, but wouldn’t you really be loving a van-cooked tablet-shaped sausage patty right now?
8.42am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a 180lb (80kg) tablet that’s 1.8m tall and only displays a life-sized animated gif of Steve Jobs waving to me at all times.
8.40am: Jason Chen: Hey look, it’s Matt Buchanan, who some random stranger called the Gizmodo albino one time. that wasn’t nice, random stranger. you take that back.
8.36am: Jason Chen: Beard to baldness ratio is about 1:3, unless you’re talking about the other kind of beard, in which case there are no women here.
8.33am: mark Wilson: I hope Apple announces a 9lb (4kg) tablet with hand crank power only.
8.30am: Jason Chen: A few standard outfits here. You’ve got your jeans, shirt and a blazer, your “running down to Dennys” windbreaker and sweatpants, your “I’m on network TV” suit, and your randomly sprinkled hipster uniforms.
8.28am: Jason Chen: Some guy just came up and asked me if I was Jason Chen. after I confirmed, he said he was a big fan. I thanked him. Was I just punk’d?
8.27am: Joel Johnson: Jason, what about the beard|baldness ratio?
8.26am: Joel Johnson: OK, Herrman got pictures of the back up: Is This the Outside of the Apple Tablet? looks legit to me!
8.24am: Attendee baldness ratio remains unchanged. No more, no less. but there is no sun, so the glare isn’t too bad.
8.23am: We’re here, along with the usual cast of unemployables.
8.23am: Ooh, we just got in some pictures of what looks like the unibody aluminium back of the tablet. Posting here in a sec.
8.19am: Joel Johnson: really bad puns ahoy:
@Lea_Hernandez RT @gdwessel Nice. RT: @EddieRobson: Wouldn’t it be great if Apple made a comics reader called the iSner?
It’s funny because of this guy named will Eisner who was sort of an important comics guy who… fine.
But I would love love love to see some comics stuff announced today for this thing. actually, I should call one of my sources now just for a last second check up.
8.16am: Joel Johnson: So a lot of people have been kind of chuckling up to me, being totally nice if misguided, and asking, “So are you totally sick of this tablet stuff yet?” and I mean, I appreciate it, but I have to say that in this case no I am not. I am legitimately excited to see what Apple pulls out today.
Although I will cop to being slightly mentally prepped for learning that they’ve cracked some magical new haptic/physical feedback QWERTY typing solution. If it’s just a really nice touchscreen device I’ll survive, but I will shed a tear privately.
8.11am: Joel Johnson: Richard Lawson over at Gawker is musing about the scavenger hunt they ran:
Like blockbuster movies! That’s sort of sweet in an irredeemably nerdy way, isn’t it? There is something about the grandeur and anticipation of one of these keynote magic shows. Yes it’s all nasty and capitalistic and cold and inhuman, but a little bit of excitement never hurt anyone, especially in these penurious times, when a Cosmo centerfold has assumed the regency and rules us all from his throne made of the bones of the new York Yankees.
The Apple Tablet and the Joy of Anticipation
8.08am: Joel Johnson: Jason, you wish it’d only be $US600 more entertaining. I’m betting on this thing costing upwards of a grand. Or as I call it “ten large, but not the extra large, right just hundreds.”
8.06am: Joel Johnson: It’s strange to be receiving last minute leaks on what the tablet looks like. At this point it’s almost impossible to get excited about something we’ll see for certain in a couple of hours.
8.05am: I wish I were typing this on a tablet right now. it would be more entertaining by $US600.
8.03am: Joel Johnson: the last time I was in new York, Nick Denton took Blam and I out to lunch. we sat in some sort of Mexican dungeon while Denton stared down at the thick wooden table and said of the tablet, “It’s the gadget I’ve been waiting for all my life.”
Then today he sent out some lines from Shakespeare. All I’m saying is can someone in the new York office check on him? I’m worried about him.
8.01am: Uh oh a tunnel.
7.59am: Joel Johnson: Good morning, Jason; gadget fans.
7.45am: I just saw two cops pull over an unmarked white van. This is not the start of a horribly tasteless joke, just an observation.
7.38am: None for Lost, because they’re supposed to be in 2004…or 2037. I can never keep their time travelling straight.
7.35am: think of all the product placements on TV shows in a few months. Jack Bauer using a tablet to peep on terrorists, House playing tablet games when he’s supposed to be diagnosing lupus, and Heroes, being a lousy show.
7.31am: Or Kanye West, as he runs up on stage, slapping the tablet out of Steve Jobs’ hands, exclaiming that the Handspring Visor was the best tablet of all time.
7.29am: It’s not totally unprecedented, so I wonder what celebrities will be attending today. John Mayer? Ralph Macchio? Yoko Ono?
7.19am: Gotta say, the Palm Pre Plus Wi-Fi hotspot is pretty useful. I’m Wi-Fi connected to it from an iPhone now.
7.11am: Did anyone get in on that Klingon invasion in Star Trek Online yesterday?that must have been GREAT. Pew pew.
6.46am: It’s early. but never too early for pie. I’m eating pie.
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