iPhone News Updated

iPad Has Familiar Feel to an iPhone User

With its introduction of the iPad, Apple Inc. has created a big brother to the iPhone. But it may also have redefined the laptop.

On Wednesday, the company allowed journalists to spend a few minutes playing with the iPad after it was unveiled. The most surprising thing about the gadget was its familiarity: Anyone who has used an iPhone or iPod touch would be able to start using the iPad right away.

The large glass screen— which is prone, like the iPhone’s, to collect finger grease—is controlled by tapping and sliding a finger around. While some new applications and games make special use of multiple fingers and hands, there are no new gestures to learn or secret handwriting codes to decipher.

“They’re not diverging too much at all from what we already have grown to expect from them, but that suits me just fine,” said Mark Rolston, chief creative officer of design firm Frog Design, who followed the iPad’s unveiling online. “It’s truly the ‘casual computer.’”

With its larger size, the iPad’s virtual keyboard comes a step closer than the iPhone’s to replicating a real keyboard, with “keys” people can touch with two hands and all of their fingers. But using it is still slower and more mistake-prone than typing on a mechanical keyboard because the virtual keyboard offers no tactile response.

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Why old media loves Apple’s newest thing

The cream of the New York publishing industry rose to the occasion of the Apple iPad launch, then sat in the shadows for almost an hour as chief executive officer Steve Jobs extolled the gadget’s utility for just about everything – gaming, networking, browsing, watching videos – except reading.

The legendary Kindle-killer of the book trade’s imagination made no appearance among the iPad’s multiple personalities.

But then Mr. Jobs introduced the print brigade, beginning with a New York Times executive. As the executive previewed a nimble, full-colour application of the influential newspaper, it became obvious how important the iPad was to him and his competitors.

Although it may not be designed primarily as an e-reader, the device Apple introduced in San Francisco yesterday was greeted as the potential lifesaver of a drowning industry.

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