The forthcoming Apple iPad will have a folding case/stand available (price not announced), visible in several configurations if you scroll down the technical specs page. When closed, the case looks like a fancy leather cover for a legal pad. Open, the case could have several modes, including one that reminds me of an old friend…
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Uses for iPad case:
* easel for digital photo frame, portrait or landscape
* TV stand (in landscape position)
* prop to use iPad as monitor with bluetooth keyboard
* typing stand, with on-screen keyboard… This also could be called,
* “cooler-user” mode, since it puts the iPad an inch or two above the lap or knees. (None of the info pages give a bottom-of-case operating temperature, but if it’s anything like my MacBook…)
With the case folded into a typing stand, I think the iPad looks like the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 I owned 25 years ago! (Of course the iPad should do a few more things. Well, a few hundred thousand more things.)
mild-mannered reporter who found computers & the Web in grad school in the 1980s (Wesleyan) and '90s (UNC); taught journalism, media studies, Web production; retired to write, make music, photograph sunsets & walks in the woods.
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At least the TRS-80 has a real keyboard and replaceable batteries.
True. I’m glad to hear that it will take a bluetooth keyboard… but I’m still thinking of it more as a color e-book reader than a replacement for a laptop, at least not in the first release.
I just saw the case and had the exact same feeling… My parents had a TRS-80 model iii technically the first home computer I ever used.
At any rate, this little factoid is interesting, via wikipedia… the introductory price of the TRS 80 Model 100 in 1983:
$1099
($2,401.37 in 2010 dollars.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
🙂 I think the desktop was $2-3k in 1980s dollars …
Yes… By the time I got mine in ’85 or ’86, I think the price was down to about that of… an iPad.
[…] keys are pretty close in size to a MacBook, just not having that tactile goodness. Although, some have noticed that the iPad with the on-screen keyboard in use, looks a lot like the much-loved-by-journalists […]