Tech that...
A ROUND-UP OF THE LATEST NEWS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
GOOGLE IO
IF YOU’VE even the faintest interest in what Google is up to, you should save the date of May 12 in your diary.
The company will launch its I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, close to Google’s HQ in the Bay Area of San Francisco, on that day with another two days of events to follow on May 13 and 14.
The event usually kicks off with a big showpiece keynote address by the great and the good of Google, including Sundar Pichai, who is now CEO of both Google, and its parent company Alphabet.
In the past Google has used the event to showcase incoming innovations in its software, including Android. It has also revealed new hardware – last year the cheap Pixel 3A and 3A XL phones were unveiled alongside the Nest Hub Max smart speaker. The word is that a Pixel 4A is in the works, so that may make an appearance at the event…
You can find out more, and apply for tickets if you’re an interested developer, at events.google.com/io
IPAD’S BIRTHDAY
IT WOULD be remiss of us if we did not pause to celebrate the birthday of the iPad.
Incredibly, Apple’s tablet is 10 years old this week.
In January 2010, the late great Apple CEO Steve Jobs settled into his leather armchair on stage at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco and introduced us to a whole new world of web browsing, email efficiency, video watching, and book reading.
It was later revealed that Apple had been working on the iPad for years, even before it had come up with the idea for the iPhone.
In fact, internet magazine The Next Web later uncovered a speech by Jobs from 1983 in which he said: “What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes … and we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.”
It took him only 27 years to realise that vision.
It’s a great shame Jobs is no longer around to shape the tablet industry’s next 10 years.