Apple has finally unveiled their tablet, the iPad. (Which, I think we can all agree, is a name just begging to be made fun of.)
And, with that unveiling, Apple is jumping into both the eBook reader world, and the tablet world. So lets take a quick moment to compare the iPad to two of my personal favorite devices in those categories: Amazon’s Kindle and Always Innovating’s Touch Book.
| iPad | Kindle | Touch Book | |
| Screen Size | 9.7″ | 6″ | 8.9″ |
| Touch Screen | Yes | No | Yes |
| Color Screen | Yes | No | Yes |
| Multitasking | No | No | Yes |
| Physical Keyboard | No (1) | Yes | Yes |
| Developer Access | Yes (2) | No (3) | Yes |
| WiFi | Yes | No | Yes |
| Free Wireless | No | Yes | No |
| Battery Life | 10 Hours | 7 Days | 10 Hours |
| Storage | 16GB - 64GB | 2GB | 8GB |
| Operating System | iPhone OS | Linux Based | Custom Linux, Ubuntu or Android |
| Weight | 1.5 lbs | 10.2 oz | 1.49 lbs (4) |
| Price | $499 - $829 | $259 | $299 - $399 |
So where does that leave us?
Well, if you’re interested in primarily an eBook reader… the Kindle still looks like the way to go. Significantly cheaper with significantly better battery life (7 days compared to 10 hours). Not to mention the always-on (and 100% free) wireless connection and the far lighter weight.
But what if you’re looking for something more than an eBook reader?
Well, the iPad has a great screen. But no multitasking. No multitasking in a tablet is definitely going to be a deal breaker for some people.
The Touch Book has a (detachable) physical keyboard. Basically it’s a transformer that turns from a tablet into a netbook. Whereas the iPad has no keyboard (unless you count the optional dock that you purchase separately and place on a desk).
But, really, this comes down to two things: Price and Nerd-Factor.
The Touch Book is quite a lot cheaper. In fact you could buy both a Touch Book and a Kindle or the cost of the iPad. So it definitely wins there.
Then there’s the “Nerd-Factor”.
This is a tough one. It all depends on what kind of nerd you are.
Are you an Apple Nerd? Do you like sporting Apple gear? Then you obviously just need to buy an iPad. Hell, you should probably by three.
Are you more of the “tinker with things” nerd? More of the “open source” nerd or the kind of person that complains about DRM? Then you need the Touch Book so you can dual boot between multiple Linux-powered operating systems (the Touch Book supports Ubuntu, Android, Mer and Gentoo as well as their own custom distro).
Plus, and I’m just going to throw this out there, the Touch Book would make a killer digital comic book reader.
One final thing worth noting: The Apple iPad won’t be available for 2 months (3 months for the 3G version) and the Touch Book currently has a 2 month lag time according to their store.
Notes on the table:
1 - iPad has a physical keyboard docking station that can be purchased separately.
2 - iPad has an SDK but applications (like with the iPhone) cannot be loaded onto devices directly.
3 - Kindle SDK is reported to ship in February of 2010 (a few weeks from this writing).
4 - Weight of the Touch Book is without the detachable keyboard.
January 27th, 2010 - 9:34 pm
Good comparison, Apple certainly know how to make WOW! machines and the iPad has this in spades. The screen you could just fall into. But it looks too much like a jumped up phone, but without the phone. No camera, no multi task and faux pas of faux pas, no flash which showed up in the keynote presentation as the familiar blue lego brick…whoops!. On balance the iPad has the killer screen and baying fans who will lap it up by selling their children. I think I’ll wait, I have an iphone and a macbook…I’m not sure where the iPad fits in this scenario..its doesn’t seem to be between them…Pass me that Kindle a minute…
January 27th, 2010 - 9:50 pm
I recently looked at the feature set of the iPad, and I can’t seem to make out what makes it any different from the iPhone - except that it has a larger screen and larger storage capacity? Why would you buy this if you already have an iPhone? I just don’t get it.
January 27th, 2010 - 10:01 pm
If the iPad ran full-blown OS X, I might be interested. I know, it’s ARM-based (thank God), so it’s not going to happen. The iPhone OS doesn’t really impress me. I love my WebOS phone (Pre), and can definitely understand why people love Android - if the Droid were available on Sprint, I probably would have got that instead of the Pre.
I had no idea the Touch Book came with a pre-installed multi-boot setup. That’s slick! My Aspire One appears to have died, and my Thinkpad is on its way out. Honestly, the only thing keeping me from ordering one right now is that it’s powered by a Cortex A8. A good chip, don’t get me wrong, but A9-powered beasts are right around the corner, if CES is any indication.
January 27th, 2010 - 10:28 pm
@Jeffro Tull
I’m on Sprint with the HTC Hero, and it’s pretty decent. That said it’s not running Android 2.x, so there are some really decent apps out there that won’t run. And HTC apparently doesn’t know how to make a proper “|” (pipe) character on their onscreen keyboard, which makes navigating the CLI kinda worthless.
I was all about the iPad as it was being announced, until the glow wore off and I realized what they DIDN’T announce along with it. No multitasking? No camera? No phone functionality? I’ll stick with my HTC Hero.
January 27th, 2010 - 10:56 pm
@Benjamin M. Strozykowski
I played with my cousin’s Hero a bit, and the “Really, guys, it’s not a face-lifted Hero!” Droid Eris. Pretty slick phones, but dammit I loves me a physical keyboard. Though I really miss having a “tab” key.
Anyway, yeah, Android and WebOS (no matter how much Bryan and Chris might like to hate on it) are in a much better position under-the-hood for larger form factor devices that are supposed to replace netbooks.
January 28th, 2010 - 12:02 am
Hey Bryan, thank you so much for such a neat, nerve-steadying comparison. As a long time Apple user (Mac SE » MacBook Pro; Newton), I was feeling very sucked in to the iPad launch vid/pix/data, and ambivalent about whether or not to cancel my pending Touch Book order. But, I’m happy enough with Nokia N95 phone, and ‘only’ need something better than my Nokia N810 linux tablet (too small, not powerful enough at multi-tasking). So here’s why I guess I’ll stick with waiting for my Touch Book to arrive:
• Multi-Tasking OS – thanks for highlighting this difference
» iPad = single, single-tasking, iPhone OS; it’s a shame Apple has committed such an errant omission
» Touch Book = multi-boot, multiple, multi-tasking flavours of linux OS
• Storage
» iPad = fixed at time of purchase, AFAIK, 16GB – 64GB
» Touch Book = easily expandable by USB, eg: 128 GB and 256 GB flash thumb drives, which can be mounted internally or hot-swapped externally
• Battery
» iPad = built in at time of purchase, inaccessible
» Touch Book = both batteries (tablet and keyboard) are user-replaceable
• Ethos
» iPad = closed, proprietary, expensive; Apple are the benign (or not so) dictator of your tablet-oriented conspicuous consumerism
» Touch Book = open, open-source – in both hardware and software, and relatively inexpensive; and commons-based peer production is the way of the future in our networked information economy, in the opinion of myself and Harvard Prof. Yochai Benkler – see, eg:
• ‘The new open-source economics’
» http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html
I’m aware there must be a market for one-trick-pony e-reader hardware, but digital convergence increasingly enables blending multi-functional tablets, so I reckon I’ll keep my place in the order backlog queue for a Touch Book.
January 28th, 2010 - 5:54 am
I’ve been doing some research into this whole matter, as I have a group of somewhat less experienced users who use my advice, and it is still too early to call anything in my honest opinion.
The price of the iPad is somewhat high, and I don’t think, Brian, you are considering the class the iPad falls under: I would consider it a MID, where I forcast that it will perform much less spectacularly.
Where things really start getting hazy is hardware. From the articles I have read, it contains a Apple A4 processor, designed by remains of P.A. Semi after they were purchased. Further research shows that P.A. Semiconductors in the past made PowerPC architecture software, not Arm. As they have been purchased by apple, they have lost their licensing agreement with IBM to continue design of such architecture (This could be incorrect). Either way, according to IEEE Spectrum, the founder of P.A. Semi was Dan Dobberpuhl, who worked previously at DEC with StrongARM and DEC Alpha.
Here is a selection from the article:
“Last summer, the rumor mill speculated that Dobberpuhl was running a team of low-power experts to design a chip that would give a cell-phone higher power and longer battery life than its competitors. It looks like instead of a cell phone, Dobberpuhl has been working on the iPad project. If that’s the case, given his track record, this is good news for this new product.”– http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/design/inside-the-ipada-chip-from-a-design-veteran
However the architecture, as inferred by ”Jeffro Tull” to be ARM, I would say is still unknown, and will likely to continue to be unknown for at least a few days to months when the iPad to be released. While the alleged abilities of the processor are admirable, I have seen a person, writing in Tom’s hardware, claiming that it is better than the Qualcom Snapdragon even without a test. In addition, the fact that the device can use the iPhone applications natively could be a simple matter of of emulator/abstraction layer, not necessarily being an ARM architecture. It certainly has the clock speed to preform something as simple as emulation of a iPhone application. This would be not the first time such a thing had been pulled off by Apple.
But there are still issues with this comparison of the A4 processor and Arm Cortex A9. Arm Cortex A8 is last generation’s technology. Arm Cortex A9, which features multiple cores (and from what I understand about the architecture, each core contains a GPU which acts additionally as the core’s FPU). The first device I have seen is the ViewSonic VTablet 101, which uses a Tegra 250; However the price for the first Cortext A9 is marked at $440 U.S. In addition, the Tegra have built in Flash 10.1 acceleration. All of these things makes this tablet a very strong contender, having dual cores running at 1 Ghz.
Source: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ViewSonic-VTablet-101/
So the results I find for Apple are inconclusive if they are nothing more than a status item to prove how much of an Apple fan you are, and how much money you have to spend on a sub par device. The signs at the moment do not look good.
Fif this is a double post, I am sorry, as the previous attempt still has not shown up.)
January 28th, 2010 - 11:57 pm
I still want an iPad. In my opinion, proprietary software and DRM don’t really phase me. They aren’t serious issues in my opinion. But here’s why I want it:
The battery life is 10 hours.
The browser is Safari, and I like Safari, especially from a web developers point of view.
I’m already an iPhone/iPod Touch developer, so I have the tools to develop new applications.
I can read my PDFs in color, wherever I’m at in all it’s beautifully rendered fonts glory.
I like grapes.
It looks neat.
Accelerometers give everything +2 clever points.
And for those reasons, however stupid they seem, are actual reasons why I like it and do plan to buy one. I’ve got plenty of programming books I wish I could read on the road, but I was cheap and bought the PDF only versions, so I can’t read them on the road. With the iPad, I could, and then browse the internet after a good 10 minutes reading. Programming books are dry, and I like to waste time watching Beer is Tasty when I’m not reading.
January 29th, 2010 - 4:34 am
Hmm…I seemed to have missed the Touch Book’s existence. Thank you for bringing it up. That device looks better than the iPad. I just have to make sure it does fine on being able to read during the day (in the sun), and if I can run standard linux apps on it.
Also, I thought it was amazing (to the point where I thought it was worth a rant on my own blog). The Apple event completely overshadowed the USA State of the Union that same day.
January 29th, 2010 - 3:34 pm
The touchbook seems the most interesting to me here because of the open source access. A good developer can make nice tight applications that can change how business is done. Waiters can take orders on the touchbook which would link directly to the kitchen via wi-fi and can save a trip back. Less waiter collisions!!!
February 2nd, 2010 - 5:12 am
[...] the new iPad. I’m not going to comment on the features it has, doesn’t have or compare it to other devices. What I’m most concerned about is that I’m sick of reading about [...]
February 2nd, 2010 - 2:04 pm
[...] iPad has been covered to death, and writers from all walks of life have torn it to shreds, completely destroying the assumptions that Apple made about the tech [...]
February 2nd, 2010 - 5:54 pm
@Matt - The touchbook also has accelerometers, also if you are a iphone/ipod developer you can probably develop cool apps for the Touchbook as well. Some iPhone apps have already been ported. The touchbook has a similar ARM architecture to the iphone.
February 18th, 2010 - 3:42 am
The touchbook also has 7 usb ports and upgradable memory (primary memory is just an sd card).
Also, the feature I’m excited about, the touchbook comes with magnets so you can hang it on the refrigerator!
February 20th, 2010 - 9:01 am
I don’t think the Ipad will be as successfull as the iphone, as it is not as knew and revolutionary.
March 29th, 2010 - 2:45 pm
I have followed the TouchBook with interest for months
BUT
because it seems to be “flying under the radar” and the company is small
I’m concerned about reliability, serviceability, up-grade-ability, app development
I’m not nearly savvy enough to dig into the physical or software “guts” and perform patches suggested by various “forums”
Should I just wait for HP or Dell?
May 14th, 2010 - 9:31 am
i am planning to buy an iPad since it looks lighter than a regular desknote and i don not use much of the features of a laptop.,:.
July 27th, 2010 - 4:12 am
The touchbook is out of production till summer, FYI….