Summary of iPad Part 3: Software

So, the outsides and insides of the hardware have already been analyzed. Now let’s take a look at the software involved in this feat of technological engineering.

It claims to be able to run every one of the thousand’s of apps already on the App store. Now, obviously, the screen resolution is bigger than that of the iPhone. So the apps all double pixel and run full screen, which is good because they look stupid as a small picture with a huge black background.
However, not all is good, engadget say the scaled apps look silly, especially the facebook one. I wonder what the twitter ones would look like? Probably terrible if that’s how bad the facebook one is.
However, this machine could be a pretty neat gamer; with big titles such as Need for Speed Shift being available on it. But I still think touchscreen gaming is not going to beat pure button. There is also no word on multi-tasking, Scott Forstall said

While we wait for those apps to come out, we can all run our existing apps... and that is the app story for the iPad."

However, one of the main selling points is iBooks. Again, an inventive name. Steve Jobs pretty much blew Amazon out of the water by saying

"Isn't that awesome? These guys only had two weeks. So we've seen some really great apps. Let me show you another... one of our apps. That's an ebook reader. Now Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this... we're going to stand on their shoulders for this. Our new app is called iBooks."

The iBooks store seemed to sell most books for $4.99 which isn’t bad. It even had one of the Twilight books for sale. They have 5 big partners for books: Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon and Chuster, macmillan and hachett. No McGraw-Hill publisher though? Could this be due to yesterday’s mishap? The format used is ePub. Hopefully there is no DRM, otherwise it will face a mountain of problems.
There is also iWork for iPad. Although it is a different version of it so it can run on the iPad. Phil Schiller was nice enough to tell us all about it. It isn’t that exciting, but it does offer a lot of functionality.
The next and final summary post by me will be on design, accessories and usability.