A while back, Samsung VP Lee Young-hee was reportedly misquoted when talking about the sales of its wee iPad wannabe, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab. He was stated to have said:

As you heard, our sell-in [for the Galaxy Tab] was quite aggressive… around two million. In terms of sell-out, we believe it was quite small.

Samsung then argued that ‘quite small’ was in fact ‘quite smooth’, which sort of makes sense if you get a bit drunk. On March 4, Yonhap News quoted Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, talking about the soon-to-be-unveiled Galaxy Tab 10.1:

We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate. Apple made [the iPad 2] very thin.

Again, Samsung has presumably been misquoted. Clearly, he meant to say ‘inedible’, because Samsung’s going to go one better than Apple in making its tablet totally safe should your child get really frustrated with Angry Birds and take a chunk out of the device with its teeth.

And on the Galaxy Tab being close to $900, compared to the iPad 2’s $499–$829 range:

The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over.

By ‘higher’, Samsung presumably meant ‘lower’. After all, there’s no way an iPad competitor would today launch its product at a higher price-point than Apple’s latest device, because that would just be stupid.

At the iPad 2 launch this week, Steve Jobs unveiled his new and slightly annoying favourite catchphrase: post-PC. I say slightly annoying, because it’s clearly tech buzzword bingo fodder; but, unlike the astonishingly irritating ‘magical’ (Does the iPad do tricks, joining Penn and Teller in Vegas? No it bloody well doesn’t.), post-PC makes sense: we’re entering a world where the typical PC is no longer the star of the show.

Microsoft is currently almost dead in the water in this area of computing, thrashing around, clinging to a half-deflated lifeboat with ‘Nokia’ spray-painted on the side, and lunging half-heartedly for a favourite possession: a book entitled We Will Love Windows Forever.

Bloomberg reports Microsoft’s cunning plan to rescue itself from sinking to the bottom of the ocean and being eaten by iSharks and myriad Android fishes with pointy teeth is as follows:

[Microsoft] won’t release a competitor to Apple Inc. and Google Inc.’s tablet operating systems until the 2012 back-to- school season, people with knowledge of the plans said.

Public testing of a new version of Windows will begin at the end of this year with partners and customers, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plans haven’t been disclosed publicly.

As Bloomberg notes, this will likely pitch whatever Microsoft comes up with against the iPad 3; frankly, its tablet plans had better be nothing short of spectacular or the post-PC world will also be post-Microsoft.

John Gruber’s excited about GarageBand for iPad:

GarageBand for iPad—impressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are a bunch of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPad, and they’ve been used to great effect by many musicians. […] GarageBand for iPad is of a different scope. This is Apple taking the idea of the iPad as a musical instrument and tackling that idea with the full strength of its collective creativity. It is the most iPad-ish iPad app I’ve ever seen. Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The  interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control—every button, every switch, every slider—is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display.

I’m also excited about this app. I use GarageBand for Mac very regularly, and I’ve written loads of articles and large chunks of bookazines about the app, shoe-horning in the entire song-writing process into tutorial spaces in reality designed for far less.

However, I think Gruber does a disservice to apps that already exist for iOS. I’ve no doubt GarageBand for iPad will be polished and look great; it will likely be at least reasonably accessible to newcomers, but offer enough power for amateurs and perhaps even semi-pros to get down song sketches (although the eight-track restriction will stop many in their tracks). If compatibility with the Mac version works, that will also be fantastic (although, having worked with iWork apps for Mac and iOS, I’m not holding my breath on that front). But other apps already do the things GarageBand for iPad is being lauded for (bar accelerometer-based intensity when you strike a key at different speeds). Korg has a number of instruments with custom-designed interfaces, such as iMS-20. NanoStudio—probably my favourite iOS app—offers a highly editable synth, pads, MIDI editing and sampling. In some areas, it’s not as glossy as GarageBand, but a four-by-four drumkit grid is more usable than Apple’s picture of a drumkit to smack.

What I hope is that there’s enough room left for the pioneers in this space, and that Apple won’t just steamroller the lot of them—unless GarageBand actually proves to be far better than the competition and the competition then doesn’t make an effort to catch up. NanoStudio in particular looks to have a real fight on its hands. It’s one thing to be Korg, with many years of branding behind you, but when you’re an indie who’s effectively created GarageBand for iOS and priced it at £8.99, it’s not going to be a fun time when Apple steams on in with GarageBand proper for a third of the price.

Fraser Speirs on the iPad 2’s benefits for education:

Apple was already ahead of the pack. The [iPad 2] hardware alone keeps it ahead of the pack and, with iMovie and GarageBand on iPad, Apple is starting to stretch out of sight when it comes to delivering a hardware and software toolkit for education. Anyone can do a tablet with a web browser and an email client. Most can get a port of Kindle, Evernote and Gowalla.

Nobody else has anything even close to Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie and GarageBand on their platform far less the great 3rd party iOS apps such as OmniFocus, Instapaper, Toontastic, and the Elements. iOS is and remains the only mobile platform worthy of consideration for education.

Steve Jobs, yesterday, during the iPad 2 event:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

In other words, show what your tech can do, rather than fapping over numbers and bullet-points on a spec sheet.