Thoughts and Observations Regarding Yesterday's iPad Event

Shawn Blanc, on the new iPad. He makes some good points, though his recommendation on 4G LTE applies only to the american market.

He points out a glaring issue for content publishers:

What is Condé Nast going to do with their magazine apps? Their current issues (which use images even for text) are going to look horrible on the Retina display and if they start making their files 4x bigger then the downloads will get even more ridiculous — growing into the ballpark of an 800 MB file. At that size, after few back issues of The New Yorker and Wired your iPad’s storage will be maxed out.

I’ve been reading Wired magazine on my iPad 2, and each issue weights approximately 400 Mb. If they have — and they do have — to increase their pictures’s resolution, the issues may weight well over 800 Mb.

While a newspaper can revolve around that by distributing text and leaving it to the client-side app to do the layout, it’s a different story for magazines.

I think it’s time publishers look at other options than Adobe’s.