Apr 1 2000, 2:00 am
At this year's AET conference Apple Senior Technology VP Avadis Tevanian
discussed and showed pictures of Apple's so far top-secret "iPad", their merging of
Palm and Apple Newton technologies. He says Apple will
distribute initial test versions of the device for a nominal cost to
attendees of this years' WWDC. The device is slightly larger than the
Palm V, translucent smokey gray, with a 120dpi 480x320 color LCD screen
and no Graffiti area. It runs off of the same LiON batteries as the Palm
V, and has a backlight, a speaker and microphone, IR port, Palm-style
docking port, PCMCIA and compact Flash slots, 16MB of RAM, and an SA7100
processor jammed into a tiny space. Though it uses StrongARM, the iPad
runs a modified version of PalmOS with an almost complete rewrite of the
graphics engine and GUI widgets, borrowing liberally from Apple's
homebrewed Quartz technology, according to Quartz team head Mike Paquette.
The iPad also sports a near-complete Unicode font, Apple's Rosetta
handwriting system, and Palm's fabled sync software. Apple and Palm have
struck a deal to jointly develop devices based on the revised operating
system.
For more information, see
http://www.apple.com/ipad/, and note the date
today.
Sean Luke
