Retailer purports to show 'iPad mini' in Wi-Fi, cellular models priced from 250-650 euros - Page 4

 

No it doesn't because if it has the same pixel density as the iPhone 3GS so we KNOW that the physical size of ANY UI target will be large enough to meet Apple specs.  Yes, it will be physically smaller than on the iPad but it will be large enough to meet the iOS UI spec.

 

Don't argue about stuff you don't understand please.  This is called FUD.  Every app properly designed for the iPad will work perfectly fine for the iPad Mini INCLUDING being large enough to interact with.

 

ONLY if someone violated the 44 point HIG recommendation might something be too small on the iPad Mini that could have snaked by on the iPad.

I believe these are really dumbed down versions as we have already examined the comparison between the actual print versions of middle school science textbooks from both McGraw and Macmillan and there is no comparison to the richness of the data. The digital versions are significantly less comprehensive in terms of illustration, photographic content, graphic design and  typography.

I don't see why that's an issue since it's considerably more interactive than a regular book. You determine if a student has read a book by testing them on it so you don't need to have the app run up a counter for the average time the app is open, average time on each page, results from chapter quizzes, etc. That is not to say it would not be a nice addition to the iBook model for textbooks and you can include URLs that could take a student to a webpage that could test their knowledge as they progress, but it's not a requirement for a text book.


How many classes do students have per semester that would require the extra large textbooks? For literature I recall having several smaller books, some classes no books, and only for the sciences were their beefy textbooks. I suppose i you are a hard science major in university and taking 6 classes for 18 credits you might find 8GB not enough for your digital textbooks as those would tend to have lots of diagrams, 3D views, and perhaps videos but should Apple consider the most advanced and obscure scenario they can for the start of this trend or should they start small and build up to it? I'm going with the latter. By the time digital books become the norm in a scholastic setting 128GB will probably be the minimum size you can get with your handheld device. Institutions are so to change.

 

iBook text sizes will need redone. They're designed with a larger screen in mind. Yes, I know you can resize much of the text, particularly with simple ePub files, but when it's a set size and the formatting depends on that size, making the book smaller requires them to be redone.

 

Edited because tirade, apparently.

Edited by Tallest Skil - 10/14/12 at 7:53pm

What $50? It's $100 and might and rumor has it Google is bumping up for 8/16GB to 16/32GB which will make it a $150 difference.

 

 

If you guys don't believe that the usual suspects are not porting their LMS to iOS...well...I dunno what to say.  If you think Apple never thought about tests as part of iBook textbooks...well...I think you give Apple too little credit.

 

A good number of LMS suites are depending on their existing web clients but it doesn't take much foresight to guess that many are developing native iOS and Android apps.  Blackboard bought TerriblyClever for $4M way back in 2009 and piloted their Blackboard Mobile Learn last year and it's now live.

 

http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Mobile/Overview.aspx

 

Note: I'm more aware of higher ed than K-12 stuff...

Edited by nht - 10/14/12 at 7:53pm

Yeah, but every major corporation I've ever dealt with used "shadow databases" to prototype new schema changes -- and often to model performance where new content or structure will have a major affect on activity.

Also, it is common practice to include "inactive" records in a database that beome "activated" at the throw of a switch -- like the Apple Store database after an announcement...

I suspect that an Apple mini iPad will churn the database servers -- and any new SKUs are already in the database as "inactive" records.

There are lot of unknowns. For example we really don't know which Apple ID is going to be used to download the textbook and trying to integrated it with a different website for quizzes and progress evaluations is just another layer of complexity. The fact that most of the animations in iBooks is already using javascript you could just as easily deliver it within a web browser. I see the iBooks format as a compromised format to appease the publishing companies who have millions invested in hard cover print. The whole thing needs to be delivered over the web in a browser in my opinion.

 

If the font size is an issue for the books then every iPad app will also be unusable.  This strikes me as highly unlikely.

 

Are you 2 years old?  Did you really think that changing my username in the quote is clever or funny?  GTFU please.

 

It strikes me as highly unlikely that "every iPad app" will be unusable, but it doesn't preclude the need to change set font sizes in either books or apps. 

 

Why not calm down? It's called Mountain Lion auto-correct. I don't touch a thing.

Yeah but in those cases they know that the switch will be thrown, which is my point.

Paper textbooks suck because they weigh a ton and you have to carry the entire thing from August to June... even if your class doesn't use the entire book.

Digital textbooks solves the weight issue... and downloading only the chapters you need would solve the capacity issue.

I'm not sure how elementary school textbooks are now... but when I was a kid... we used the same English book all year. If they just split the book in half by semester... that would reduce file sizes by a large margin.

In college it was quite different. I had to buy a Calculus book... but I only used the first third of the book for my Calculus I class. I didn't need to take Calculus II and III but I had to carry the whole damn book!

It would have been nice to buy a smaller Calculus book that only covered just what I needed for that particular class. Or in the digital world... have a digital book here I could download each chapter as needed.

IMO, the big question is, from Apple's perspective:

What is the job of the iPad mini?

...price, capacity, availability & all else evolves from that!

 

If you've done the comparison and given that I haven't then I'll defer to your opinion.  For now. :)

 

That said, I still think that downloading chapters will solve size issues as well as give school systems the flexibility to pick and choose from the best content available...assuming that the K-12 textbook companies don't clobber that from the get go.

 

However, I believe that on the higher ed side both McGraw-Hill and Pearson are testng at per chapter sales through Inkling and Cengage.

The euro price not only includes VAT, but but also higher distribution and retailing costs, higher take-back costs, and protection against exchange rate uncertainty.

My prediction is $249 -- not $299 -- for the starter iPad mini.

 

It seems people are looking at this from the perspective of high school or post secondary. Sure there are textbooks that clock in at 1-3GB, but these are 1,500+ page books heavy in content. I've downloaded a few iBooks for my kids and you'd be surprised how much information you can cram into 500MB if you're smart about it. I see this as ideal for K-6 and solving a couple big issues people have about giving iPads to kids this young (the cost is half a regular iPad and the tablet is smaller, lighter and easier to handle).

 

iBooks Author already has the ability to include content from an online source, so that pretty much eliminates the problem of not enough storage anyway.

I don't disagree entirely however there are still some unanswered questions that school boards need to understand. Apple is not presenting a comprehensive guideline for implementation which leaves IT managers for school districts with a lot of uncertainty. Do the parents own the device, does the classroom own the device, do the kids have the ability to check out the device for home use, does the device stay with the classroom the next year. Who's Apple ID is used to download content, etc.

 

Until the source decides not to host the content anymore.

 

I'm getting less confident in your assertions.

 

I haven't looked at the iBooks Author SDK since it launched (HTML5 is not my cuppa tea) but peeking at what others have done since then I now see that others have built a quiz widget that can report results to the teacher.

 

"iBooks Widget's quiz widget seemed to be a perfect match. This widget creates quizzes with a variety of question types (including multiple choice, text answers, and picture ordering) and report results to the teacher. The student can immediately review which questions he got right, but he cannot modify his answers."

 

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/26/ibook-lessons-bookwidgets/

 

And as near as I can tell from the Inkling sample of Mader's Biology iPad book (chapter 4) appears to have the same content as the print...and in fact if it were not, you'd be completely screwed if you bought the chapters on Inkling as opposed to the whole book from Amazon when the professor cherry picks only one or two chapters from the book for his class.

 

 

Why?  It'll be somewhat smaller but not terribly so.  Even with my aging eyes I probably won't notice the difference.

 

 

Then why not fix it?  And if you didn't "touch a thing" then ML wouldn't have auto-corrected anything so I'm calling BS given every other quote on here has not be "auto-corrected".

Yeah, I don't get all the harping about "textbook" sizes.   If you're not a student you don't need textbooks on it.  If you load it up with massive books you'll hit the wall on a 16GB shortly after you did on an 8 GB, and even 32GB wouldn't give you everything you need with the examples given if you put a full course load on it.

 

It's not for holding your interactive encyclopedias, both your Art History books and that dreary volume your Soc prof wrote and made you buy.    

 

It's like complaining about a banana because it's not crunchy.

I'll check it out, thanks for the info however I doubt it will change my opinion that the content should be delivered by web browser as I am a big proponent of open standards.

 

Edit: Did you actually read that page? It is all beta and totally undocumented.

Edited by mstone - 10/14/12 at 9:05pm

 

Well, you should fry them...good point BTW.

Edited by nht - 10/14/12 at 9:00pm

I'd say that most won't need more than 8gb for 2 reasons.
They'll either be youngsters so won't have loads of stuff on there or they will successfully manage their contents through iCloud meaning you don't need massive storage.

What with Amazon cloud streaming too it's all good.

 

Half the content delivered by the web browser for my kids requires Flash.  Which is what I use the $99 HP touchpad for.  

 

So I'm not sure that web content insures open standards.  And you could just go the ePUB 3 route and not iBooks although I believe that ePub 3 support is somewhat spotty at times on iOS.

 

I also think the Khan Academy is better as an app than directly off the web site for viewing the lessons.  If it had the drills on the app too we'd never hit the web site again.

Say no more.

 

A lot of schools have already been deploying the iPad. I haven't done any in-depth research on them, but the few reports I've seen said the results have been promising so far (esp for young kids). It would be interesting to see what decisions they made in regards to device ownership.

 

However, as to Apple ID it would be the parents. They pay for texts already so why shouldn't they pay for the digitial versions? It's not hard to add your Apple ID to a device and at the end of the school year it's just as easy to "forget" the device. This way content ownership belongs with the family, even if the device is the schools. As to iCloud you create a separate ID for your child so their "progress" follows them independent of the device.

 

 

 

Really? Who says the book publisher has to host the content? My bet would be on school districts hosting content on their own servers. Hell, it's so easy to set up a server these days that individual schools could have their own, which would eliminate heavy internet traffic for much of the content.

 

I'd bitch at the school but given they are running all 27" iMacs in the computer labs I'm figuring it's not because they are Apple hostile...it just is what it is.

We all have iPads – a mixture of iPad ones twos and threes.

In our household there are two adults and three teenage kids 12, 14 and 16.

Tonight after the end of the Giants Cardinals game we started a new book Lincoln's Last Days.

We sit around in a group, with one person reading aloud -- and the others following on their own iPads. The reader will periodically handoff the reading to another person. Anyone can stop and ask a question about the meaning of a word, the correct pronunciation or emphasis.

The youngest was at the bottom of his reading and comprehension class a few years ago… Now he is at the top of his class and reads with great confidence!

We cannot put a price on this!

 

How I would do it is to make the app free to download, provide a few sample chapters/drills and then provide access to other content either as in-app purchase OR via a logon on my server.

 

The school issues each student their own id and password and has access to whatever content they contracted for.

 

All the quiz results would go to my server and only reported to the student and the associated teacher.

 

Then the Apple ID is immaterial.  As long as you have a school issued id and password you can use a school iPad or your own.  Doesn't matter.

 

Cost could be borne by the parent, school or in our case, the PTA which ponied up the cash for some of the online learning materials.  

 

You're taking the page and cutting it down to half its size. We could pretend it isn't a problem if the pixels were there to handle it, but they're also quartering the pixels. If the text doesn't get any smaller, things need reformatted. If the text gets smaller, it becomes potentially unreadable.

 

Keep imagining whatever you want to imagine.

 

Just to be clear, you're not talking about schools each having their own books with their own content (talk about your real fragmentation), just that the schools would host publishers' content locally, right?

In that case, what's the point of the format. May as well just host PDFs of the content locally and download them when you need them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of calling out to the Internet from within textbooks.

 

That's another way you could do it. There are lots of possibilities and I don't think it's nearly as hard as some would make it out to be.

 

 

They can do both. There's no point in schools re-writing existing standardized textbooks so they can have their own versions so no fragmentation. Likewise there shouldn't be any worry about the major textbook publishers suddenly not making the online content available anymore. However, not all schools (think rural) would have access to reliable high-speed internet. For them local storage would be a viable option. Schools and districts already have a lot of their own content and it would make sense to store their own stuff locally.

 

There are several reasons for going to the internet for data. You can get updates on information that could possibly change or add additional information as it becomes available. Another example is an English class. I remember the teacher giving us a choice of several books and having us write an essay on one. No need to store everything on the iPad when I'm only going to read one book. Or watch one video. The biggest reason would be for those texts where only some of the content is applicable to the class (and we've all bought those huge textbooks before and ended up using 1/3rd of it).

 

Bottom line is having content stored in the cloud or off the iPad brings many advantages, and the few problems that might occur are easily avoided.

 

They aren't quartering the pixels.  It has the same number of pixels as the iPad 2.  It goes from 132 ppi to 163 ppi. Yes, the text gets smaller.  Whether it severely impacts readability depends on your vision.  Obviously for older folks bigger is better.

 

Of course they could change the resolution on us completely.  /shrug  That doesn't seem likely though.

De cloud, boss... de iCloud...!

16GB and above have retina display

The price jump from 8GB to 16GB shouldn't be such a mystery, everything there and above will have a retina display.  This shouldn't be a surprise, Apple wants everyone to use a retina display.

 

As with the 9.7" model, only the entry level model doesn't have the retina display.

I think this is just too optimistic, I can't see retina minis until the next years refresh.

 

5 pages of comments and so many specifics over a table that someone could easily have faked. Has Apple even announced what the 23 October event is about? Has Apple even confirmed it's happening? All I've seen so far is rumours.

 

Interesting take on where Microsoft is going with the Surface here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100008016/on-the-eve-of-the-ipad-mini-microsoft-admit-that-apple-was-right/ – I'm even more skeptical that that will go anywhere.

I'm thinking exactly the same. 

Kind of old iPod touch, new one more expensive with better display,  or iPad 2 and the new iPad, or if you think this was only because of keeping old generation hardware, the MacBookPro  and the more expensive MacBookPro with retina display, released at the same time, same event. 

I have many Apple products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the iMac.  I am also a "serious" stockholder.

 

The Android threat is not perceived; it is real.  Generally, I tend to side with Rogifan that an 8GB-device at $250 would be insulting.  Apple is entering a new area with this new product, and they need go for the kill early.  Not "testing the market" or whatever.

 

I do not yet know what the iPad mini will offer.  I haven't seen it and haven't heard Phil's marketing.  I do know what the Nexus offers.  So, this is how I am making a judgment on the $250 price.

 

Like Dick Applebaum says, Apple has to show us what is the purpose of the iPad mini and what it can do.

 

Apple's strategy is to charge a premium for iOS and the ecosystem, better long-term value, and beautiful design.  I seriously hope they aren't focusing on targeting the masses with a $250 price-point.

 

Today, from the rumors I've heard, a $250 iPad mini with 2-year old hardware and 8GB is a very bad idea.