When we think and talk about Apple and their products, we generally focus on two key aspects, form and function, both of which make devices like the iPhone, iPod and iPad stand out in the marketplace above all competition. The iPod portable music player revolutionized the way we think about and listen to music. The iPhone was one of the first smartphones to fuse together advanced features with an almost flawless design and the iPad brought about what Apple is calling the "Post-PC" era, and looks set to go from strength to strength.
The Apple loving world had five days to recover from the announcements made by Tim Cook and his team during the media event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts last Wednesday. The new iPad and Apple TV units are set to hit shelves around the world this Friday and if recent reports are anything to go by, then the user take up is set to be huge!
Apple's iPhone wasn't the first foray into the world of voice communications for the Cupertino firm, and the latest device to show up on eBay suggests that landline telephones were once an area that Apple was looking to revolutionize, even all the way back in 1993.
Ever since that media event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, consumers, bloggers, analysts - in fact everybody in and around the greater gadget-sphere has been talking about Apple's "new iPad" with scarcely any relent.
When anyone mentions a touchscreen device, or to be more specific; a touchscreen tablet device, you instinctively think about Apple and the iPad. Ever since the creation of the ground breaking iPhone in 2007, and the subsequent release of the iPad in 2010, touchscreen devices seem to be synonymous with the company. Apple obviously weren't the first technology company to come up with the idea of controlling a mobile device through a touch based interface, but when they entered that segment of the market, they managed to totally reinvent it and almost assume ownership.
During the course of the last year, there has been much speculation circulating Apple's future plans to delve into the fiercely competitive connected TV market, implementing features of its current products to create a purportedly new experience, unofficially dubbed "iTV".
The anticipated Apple media event, held in familiar surroundings in San Francisco, has come and gone, and judging by the permanent grid lock on all of Apple's online and telephone sales channels, it looks as if it has left the iPad-loving public very happy indeed. The event brought everything that we had anticipated, throwing very few curveballs and unfortunately lacking the drama of the famous "one more thing" which we had become so used to hearing from the late Steve Jobs.
Although the iPad has been a revolutionary product since the first iteration dropped some two years ago, it has, in the eyes of many, taken a backseat to the Cupertino company's smartphone.
As expected, the Apple media event in San Francisco brought the world the next-generation iPad, available to pre-order immediately for mass launch in nine days time on March 16th. The event was handled and presented in a manner which we have all come to expect from Apple, with Tim Cook and Phil Schiller being joined by Eddy Cue on stage to run through the new features of not only the new iPad, but also the revamped Apple TV set-top box which will launch alongside it next week.
In line with the recently updated iPad and iOS 5.1, Apple has also released an update to the iTunes content player/store, which brings a couple of minor new features as well as the usual array of bug fixes.
