UK iPad Release Announced
At long last Apple have released the iPad for pre-order on the UK Apple site. After the resounding success of the release of the iPad in the US which has been confirmed to have sold over a million devices in the first 28 days, the fastest Apple product to hit 1 million sales beating the iPhone and iPod.
While the release of the device has seen a lot of sales, controversy surrounding the iPad and its ‘no flash’ policy has stirred up some strong opinions about the product. The iPad has been described as the ultimate internet browsing experience by Apple, however quite a few sites still rely on Flash or use Flash for Call to Action which will end up leaving gaping gaps in any site that uses the technology.
Apple (Steve Jobs) released a statement explaining why Flash will not be support by mobile (iPad/iPhone) devices as it ultimately reduces battery life and creates a poorer user experience. Apple seem to be pushing the development of sites forward in my personal opinion moving towards HTML5 and less clunky technologies, but my view is not shared by all of our team.
While HTML 5 has the canvas tag and allows some animation, as does jQuery and other JavaScript libraries my team do not feel that it doesn’t allow the same flexibility that flash has. It is my belief that this will improve over time and while they also believe there is no market for this product I can see general consumers of content making better use of this over a standard laptop.
The Release date on the 28th of May will be another big day for Apple and may show us where the website design industry needs to move away from and push forward. My only concern is the price and how that effects sales, in my opinion its a bit steep.
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Posted By: Martyn
Hi, I'm Martyn, the Lead Designer for Web Design GM and really hope you find my existing and upcoming articles useful. Please leave comments below and I will try to respond to any questions as soon as possible.
