At first glance, what interests me the most about Apple’s just-announced iPad 2 is its innovative new “Smart Cover,” which fastens to magnets built into the frame of the new tablet, allowing easy removal. When closed, the cover puts the device to sleep, and when opened and folded back, it forms a triangular base upon which the device can rest. Through and through, this strikes me as a truly clever design, the kind of protective layer that only Apple — and none of the third party case manufacturers vying for this market — can come up with, because they can make all the pieces fit together. It also strikes me as the kind of intelligent engineering that Apple should be coming up with, meaning it corrects the blight on industrial design that was Apple’s old iPad cover, a chintzy, polyurethane rain slicker of a cover; I found it ill-fitting, remarkably un-Apple like in nearly every way. It always seemed to me more like something you’d find sold under a generic or unfamiliar brand name at Staples than something designed in Cupertino. Good riddance.
The new Smart Cover has its own marketing page here, where a video shows it in action.
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