iPad sold out at Best Buy nationwide

Branding experts say jokes that the iPad sounds like a feminine hygiene product won’t keep women—or men—from buying the Apple tablet

By Connie Guglielmo

When Steve Jobs announced in January that Apple’s new tablet would be called the iPad, some fans ridiculed the name, saying it conjured up images of feminine hygiene products rather than cutting-edge mobile gadgetry.

Two months later, branding experts say the name has punchy appeal and that jokes won’t deter women—or men, for that matter—from buying Apple’s (AAPL) tablet computer, which goes on sale in the U.S. Apr. 3. “The minute you hear it, you know who brought it to you, how it’s going to work, that it’s high quality, and how it even looks,” said Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer for brand consulting firm Landor Associates. “The name does all that in just four letters. That’s amazing.”

The “i” prefix on product names has become a convention that many consumers associate with Apple. Products including the iPod digital music player, iPhone, and iMac computers employ the designation. Apple bought the iPad trademark from Fujitsu for an undisclosed sum, according to records with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. The iPad will be capable of wirelessly serving up Web pages, e-mail, music, TV, and electronic books and periodicals.

Businesswomen in Silicon Valley said jokes about the iPad’s name don’t ring true. Esther Dyson, a longtime computer industry commentator , said the feminine hygiene reference to iPad wasn’t her initial reaction. “I guess I have been i-conditioned by Apple,” she says.

3G wireless iPad models due in April

Jennifer Jones, a veteran Valley marketing executive and creator of a series of podcasts called “Marketing Voices,” says the iPad name “works as part of a product line. I did not think of the feminine side of it.”

Apple plans initially to sell three iPad models, starting at $499, with built-in support for Wi-Fi wireless networking. Three additional models that can communicate over high-speed 3G wireless networks will go on sale later in April.

Jobs didn’t respond to a request asking why Apple chose iPad as the name for the touchscreen tablet. Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, says the iPad is “something new,” reiterating comments by Jobs in January.

Apple may sell 2 million to 2.5 million iPads this year, according to Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros. David Bailey, an analyst at Goldman Sachs (GS), says sales could reach 6 million units. Apple shares gained 4.35, or 1.9%, to close at 230.90 on Mar. 26. The stock has more than doubled in the past year.

Jokes about the iPad’s name began circulating after Apple’s Jan. 27 launch of the device. Some referenced a 2006 sketch on the television program MadTV about a mythical Apple feminine hygiene product called the ‘iPad.’ Public relations and media professionals publicly lampooned Apple’s brand name as off-putting..

jokes about Wii didn’t hurt sales

Elsie Maio, president of branding agency Maio & Co. in New York, calls the puns “sad.” She says they never occurred to her nor to female colleagues—one of whom, she notes, lives in Germany, where the word “pad” isn’t used to describe feminine hygiene products. “It is short, distinctive, and memorable,” Maio says of Apple’s appellation. “It’s a pad of paper that you grab and go.”

Libby Gill, a Los Angeles-based branding expert, dismissed the puns as “a middle-school reaction.” Jokes about Nintendo’s hit Wii videogame console didn’t squelch demand for that product when it went on sale in 2006, she notes. “The ultimate thing about a brand is: Do they deliver on their promise?” she says. “If it delivers what they say and it does what people want, it will sell.”

Perhaps the final joke on the subject belongs to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, now chief scientist at computer storage vendor Fusion-io. The iPad name is reasonable, he says, although it sounds too much like iPod. “Programmers know the problems with similarly spelled names that introduce chances for ambiguity,” he says. “What a horrible problem,” Wozniak adds, “trying to find the ultimate names for hot product categories.”

Apple finally gave us the date the first iPads will hit store shelves: April 3. We’ve been closely following the touch-screen tablet since Apple first announced it in late January, but here’s a quick guide for your most essential questions about the device.

First things first: How big is it?
The iPad’s screen offers a maximum resolution of 1,024×768 pixels and measures 9.7 inches diagonally, 5.75 inches wide, and 7.75 inches tall. An 0.86-inch bezel frames the screen (with a hair extra room on the bottom to account for the home button), making the front of the iPad a total of 7.47 inches wide and 9.56 inches tall. The total thickness of the iPad is half an inch at its thickest point, which tapers down to a quarter of an inch near the edges. Total weight is 1.5 pounds for the model with Wi-Fi only, or 1.6 pounds for the version with 3G.

What hardware features does the iPad offer? Many of the iPad’s hardware capabilities are identical to the Apple iPod Touch, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, a stereo audio output (headphone jack), built-in speaker, an integrated lithium ion rechargeable battery, and NAND flash memory. A built-in accelerometer and ambient light sensor are also included on the iPad.

Hardware features that distinguish the iPad from the iPod Touch include a 1GHz A4 processor, an oleophobic screen coating, integrated digital compass, built-in microphone, mute switch, and support for 802.11n Wi-Fi (in addition to 802.11b/g). The 3G version of the iPad includes a SIM card tray, as well as assisted GPS capabilities.

What’s the deal with the wireless plan?
Apple and AT&T are offering a pretty good deal on 3G service for the iPad. There are two options: $15 a month for 250MB of data, or unlimited data for $29.99 a month. The bonus is that you don’t have to sign any contracts that bind you to the device for two years. Each option can be prepaid for a month in advance. Again, you need the iPad 3G model, which bumps up the baseline price of the device to $629 (16GB), $729 (32GB), and $829 (64GB).

If I already have apps for my iPhone or iPod Touch, can I use them on the iPad?
In most cases, the answer should be yes. Older or existing apps can run on the iPad at their native iPod/iPhone resolution (taking up a small portion of the iPad screen) or used in a full-screen mode that artificially doubles the resolution. So long as the apps are in your iTunes library when you connect the iPad to your computer, most should transfer with no problem. There are exceptions, of course. Apps designed to take advantage of unique hardware characteristics of the iPhone (such as the photo camera or video recording) may not transfer, and would be useless on the iPad anyway.

That said, many popular apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch will likely be offered in a new iPad-specific version that makes better use of the device’s larger screen. These apps, designed specifically for the iPad, will not be backward-compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I’ve heard the iPad is basically just an oversize iPod Touch. Is that true?
In some ways, it is a supersized version of Apple’s touch-screen iPod: same basic look and functionality with its multitouch screen and reliance on iTunes and the App Store to install applications and download media. But there are plenty of differences.

The operating system is a version of the iPhone OS, but with a slightly different look and feel. Many of the same apps are there–e-mail, photos, notes, an iPod, calendar, contacts, maps, YouTube, and Safari–but have been tweaked to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen size.

The 9.7-inch screen offers far more screen real estate and also makes the iPad much more realistic to use an e-reader. That brings us to iBooks, the e-bookstore Apple created specifically for the iPad. It’s an app that features a virtual bookshelf with content from five major publishers: HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Shuster. The iBooks store will feature both popular books as well as textbooks. Readers can choose to read in portrait or landscape mode and change the size of the text.

But that’s not the only iPad-only software Apple has cooked up. The company had its engineers completely rework iWorks for the device, including Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Keynote (presentations). Each iWorks app will be sold separately for $9.99.

There are accessories that will cause some major iPhone/iPod envy as well, like the keyboard dock accessory. There’s also a camera connection kit that lets users import images from their SD cards, and a charging/docking accessory, that when used in conjunction with the photo app’s montage mode turns the iPad into an electronic picture frame.

What else might I need to use the iPad?
While the iPad can be used without a computer for the majority of its features, you will need to connect to a computer running Apple’s iTunes 9.0 or later to initially set up the device. Computer specification requirements for iTunes 9.0 can be found on Apple’s Web site.

If you plan on using the iPad at home for surfing the Web, and you do not have a 3G-capable model, you will need to make sure your home is set up for wireless Internet. A power adapter is included with all iPads, but users should consider investing in a charging dock if they wish to take advantage of the iPad as a photo frame. Users who anticipate using the iPad heavily as a word processor may want to consider buying Apple’s keyboard dock or a compatible Bluetooth wireless keyboard.

What’s missing from the iPad that I might find in a competing product?
The iPad is in many ways one of the first products of its kind–making it hard to draw easy comparisons. When weighed against high-end smartphones, users should know that the iPad is not designed for voice calls or text messages (though there are apps that can work around this limitation). More importantly, the iPad does not include a built-in camera for taking photos or videos.

When compared to low-end laptops and Netbooks, the iPad can’t run common full-fledged applications (such as Microsoft Word), or use multiple apps simultaneously. Conventional input and output ports, such as USB, SD, VGA, and LAN are also missing, though some adapters exist to address this. Critics routinely point out that the iPad does not support Adobe’s Flash media format, which is required to view content on many popular Web sites. Lack of an integrated hardware keyboard or high-resolution video output are also common complaints from the laptop perspective.

Finally, compared against dedicated e-readers (such as the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook), the iPad’s reflective glass front and backlit color LCD screen arguably strain the eyes more than a passively illuminated non-glare e-ink display.

When and where can I buy it, and how much is this going to set me back?
There are two versions of the iPad. Apple announced Friday that the Wi-Fi version will launch in the U.S. on April 3, followed by the Wi-Fi and 3G-capable edition later in the month. Both versions will hit Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K. in late April.

The price depends on your 3G needs and how much storage you require. The iPad’s Wi-Fi-only version will start at $499 for 16GB of memory, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G edition will cost $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB, and $829 for 64GB.

You can preorder both versions starting March 12, and you can order it for delivery from Apple.com or reserve a Wi-Fi version to pick up on April 3 at any Apple retail store. Apple has also said it will make the iPad available at Best Buy, but hasn’t disclosed details on when that will be.

A new survey has found that 13 percent of respondents are likely to buy Apple’s forthcoming iPad, a number greater than the 9 percent who planned to purchase an iPhone before its launch in 2007.

Details of the survey from RBC/ChangeWave were released Tuesday by RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky. He said the responses from 3,200 participants show strong pent-up consumer demand for the iPad, which could bode well for Apple’s new product.

One of the strongest assets for the iPad is its $499 starting price. While 28 percent of respondents in 2007 said the iPhone was too expensive, only 8 percent in 2010 said they would not buy the iPad based on its price. In addition, while 19 percent said they are interested in the $499, 16GB model, another 19 percent said they would opt for the high-end, $829, 64GB model with 3G.

The survey also found that lack of a camera, support for Adobe Flash, or multitasking have not had a significant impact on buyer interest. Most consumers plan on using the iPad for a variety of functions, suggesting it will serve as more of a netbook than e-reader. Of those surveyed, 68 percent said they would surf the Internet with the iPad, 44 percent would check e-mail, and 37 percent are interested in reading e-books.

The survey also found the iPad will also have an effect on sales of other Mac products: 25 percent of respondents said they will delay planned purchases of one or more Apple products due to the iPad. MacBook purchases will be delayed by 9 percent of respondents, while 10 percent were prospective iPhone buyers that will now postpone their purchase.

The survey’s positive outlook for the iPad led Abramsky to maintain its prediction of 5 million units sold in the calendar year 2010, resulting in $2.4 billion in revenue and 33 cents earnings per share.

“This data, while preliminary, suggests iPad may have greater potential than expected, to expand Apple’s addressable PC, iPod markets and to capture a segment of the home PC market,” Abramsky wrote.

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