Analysis: iPad's impact on mobile entertainment

Apple unveiled its iPad tonight, with the biggest surprises being its price - starting at $499 - and the fact that it runs almost all existing iPhone apps with no modifications required.
But looking beyond that, what is the iPad's impact on the mobile entertainment industry - including existing iPhone developers, and external industries like book publishing and print media?
It's certainly a seismic thing for the latter, even more so than Amazon's Kindle was. Judging by tonight's launch, Apple has created a hugely powerful platform for e-magazines and e-newspapers.
Well, as long as they take advantage of its interactivity: embedded videos, contextual pop-up menus, weblinks and hopefully social features and comments.
For e-books, it's too early to tell if the ability to change font will trump Kindle's reader-friendly e-ink display. Even if not, it's still going to be a big new market for publishers.

What about iPhone developers though? The fact that they don't have to do anything for their apps to be iPad-compatible is good.
That said, there will be few additional revenues here: iPad users can sync across their existing iPhone or iPod touch app libraries to the new device - and I'd be willing to bet the majority of iPad purchasers will already own one of the devices.
So, developers will be faced with a decision about whether to develop new tabletised versions of their apps and games to take advantage of the iPad's bigger screen and more powerful processor, not to mention those contextual pop-up menus.
There are some unresolved questions. Will the device allow several apps to run at once, some in the background? It was unclear from tonight's launch - but will be of huge interest to developers.
What about push notifications? The question of what OS the iPad is running exactly, and whether the iPhone OS will evolve along those lines too, will also be exercising the minds of developers.
Even so, this much is clear: lots of people are going to buy an iPad because it's a sexy new product from Apple - but judging by tonight's event and the price of the device, it has a shot at winning a more mainstream market too.
These two groups of users are going to want iPad-optimised apps - with particular focus on games, entertainment and social networking.
Thus, the iPad is an important new mobile entertainment device. Not least because it's not the only tablet in town. Believe the hype or not, tablets will now be high on the agenda of mobile developers and media companies alike.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/35807...-entertainment