The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: All about the iPad

Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap!

This week’s news was dominated by Apple’s iPad announcement this past Wednesday. Steve Job’s unveiling of the iPad was well received by some and left others disappointed. Below I recap the speculation at the beginning of the week, a run down of the specs that were announced on Wednesday as well as the reactions to all the news.

** Also, hurry up and submit to win a top of the line iPad that we’ll be giving away.

The Anticipation
Monday brought us the last couple days to speculate about what the Apple tablet, or whatever it was to be called, was going to look like and the features it was going to have. It was our last chance to dig up internal memos, speculate about possible designs such as this and this, and discuss the profound implications of the unreleased device. The excitement reached astronomical levels the day before the announcement when Job’s had some very positive comments to say about how Apple’s upcoming products would positively effect Apple’s bottom line in 2010. The one solid piece of information that did come out before the announcement was due to a slip up by McGraw-Hill’s CEO who confirmed the device would run iPhone applications. All of this pre-announcement hype caused us to take a look back at how Apple rumors start and how to manufacture them.

The Big Day
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010…the day that many had been waiting years for was finally here. The excitement reminded me of the original iPhone announcement. Live bloggers from around the world were ready to see what Job’s was about to reveal. What Job’s revealed was the iPad, a 9.7″ touch screen tablet device. Check out Martin’s great summary of specs, models, apps available, pricing and availability. Also make sure to watch the official iPad Keynote video as well as Apple’s iPad promotional video.

The Aftermath
For some, like our man Alex, the iPad was a big “iLetdown”. In his reaction he goes through his laundry list of iPad complaints including pricing, storage capabilities and lack of multitasking among many others. While I agree with many of Alex’s complaints, the iPad does remind me of the original iPhone which was too expensive to become a mass market device and also lacked many standard features when it was launched (such as copy and paste). The one big thing that I do agree with Alex on as being a complete fail is the lack of Flash support. For a device clearly positioned for consumption, the lack of Flash support and inability to watch things such as Hulu is somewhat confusing to me and many others. Sure, the promise of HTML5 will make this a non-issue eventually but that doesn’t solve our problems when the iPad is released in March.

Quick Hits

• Tweetdeck launched a job centric version of their popular Twitter/Facebook Adobe Air client.
• Google maps goes inside and provides their “Street View” 360 degree views for the San Diego Zoo.
• Twitter’s Chirp conference dates are officially set for April 14th and 15th in San Francisco.
• Technology blog TechCrunch was a victim of a major hacking effort on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday this week.
• A great infographic comparing traffic from MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
• Google announced it was phasing out support for IE6, do they have the power to finally kill it off?
• Electronic car company Tesla formally filed paperwork to go public. Paperwork indicates a $100 million IPO.
• Recent rumors indicate that Amazon is considering purchasing Netflix.
• China denies hacking Google and calls the US hypocrites among other harsh comments.
• iPhone users are likely to happy after hearing that the iPhone is likely to be on all major US carriers within 18 months.
• A new report by RJMetrics indicates that Twitter, for its billion plus valuation, only has 10-15 million active users.
• Google Voice now works on the iPhone using a newly release web application.