Photo taken on April 6, 2010 shows people try Apple's iPad tablet computer at an Apple store in New York,the United States. Apple Inc. on Monday announced that it had sold one million iPad tablet computers in 28 days, hitting the mark twice as fast as the company's first iPhone. (Xinhua/Wu Kaixiang)
Apple Inc.'s much-hyped iPad, sold pretty well a month after its debut, may herald big changes in personal computing, a veteran Silicon Valley analyst said during a recent interview with Xinhua.
"We are not sure what the final ramifications are, but the iPad is the beginning of a change, much like the personal computer was the beginning of a change," said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, which is based in San Jose, California.
The iPad is a device heavily tied back to the Internet, or so- called "cloud", and gives people the first really large-scale cloud client, the analyst noted.
Apple's tablet computer is a product that "lives and breathes as it connects to the Web", and will force people to probably not look at having laptop computers or even smartphones in the future, but move to devices that are always connected, always with them and provide information related to their health and medial well- being, Enderle said.
According to the analyst, the iPad may turn out to be " revolutionary" primarily because it more heavily uses the Internet and will force the industry to think whether to put the processing power up in the cloud or in the Internet rather than in devices.
"That change in thinking is probably going to cause us to do a lot of things very differently," he told Xinhua.
People have always wanted a personal computer (PC) that is much more like a telephone, but the PCs on the market so far have been much more like mainframe computer and too complex.
"Folks really want something they don't have to worry about, kind of more like a refrigerator, and the iPad is much closer to that," said Enderle.
Featuring a 9.7-inch touch screen, iPad can let users perform various tasks including browsing the Web, watching videos, playing games and reading ebooks.
Apple first rolled out iPad in the United States on April 3 with Wi-Fi only models, followed by 3G versions hitting U.S. stores on April 30. Unexpected strong demand in the U.S. has forced the company to delay the international release of the gadget by one month until the end of May.
Apple on Monday announced that it sold one million iPads as of April 30, claiming that the product reached the milestone twice as fast as the company's first iPhone.
Enderle believed that the demand for the iPad is actually higher than the latest sales number reflected, as Apple launched the product in two stages -- first the Wi-Fi versions then the 3G ones -- and many people waited for the 3G models to come out to buy.
"If they had both versions on day one, we will have much more than one million (of iPad) sold," he said.
Still, the number demonstrated Apple's capability in marketing and demand-generation.
"If anybody else came out with this kind of a product, they would have trouble reaching 200,000 by this time," Enderle noted.
Tablet computer has been available since the 1990s but failed to catch on in the mass market. However, the launch of the iPad marked the "true birth of the tablet computer" and "now you got a category," Enderle said.
Though the technologies used in the current iPad models are not ideal and there are not enough applications and other contents at this moment, people are still getting excited about the product, a success which Enderle attributed in part to Apple's marketing prowess.
"Apple's capability is in selling the dreams, Apple has the way to convey a message so that people think a product is much more than it is, it's about how they presented it," the analyst pointed out.
Enderle saw the current iPad models more of an experiment and expected the product to continue to improve with added contents, change of display to enable users to read outside.
"The concept is good and as the product matures and addresses each one of the problems, it's only going to get better," he predicted.
