I just have to wonder ... was this designed to solve some problem (what?) or just to make money for Apple? It sits right in between two useful things - a laptop and a phone - but I don't see any practical use for it. It's somewhat like eraseable ink pens - the great majority of people opt for either a pencil or a regular pen instead. Or both. But the bottom line is that the "middle" thing - the eraseable pen - is not used by all that many folks. I see this iPad as a similar "why would I need that?" type of thing.

I totally agree.

If I wanted an iPod that was 3 times bigger, this would be great.

But seriously? 64GB? That's SO 2001. And no keyboard? Camera? Battery? Wow. Glad I'm sticking with my PC laptop, even if Windows (and the MS Office 2007) has its flaws. Though I gotta say the Netbooks are a great convenient size. A Mac iPad similar to that could be amazing.

Ahem, when was the iPhone ever designed to solve a problem. Apple needs to stick a LASER projector synced to wireless LCD shutter glasses into the iPad along with a theremin attachment. Now that would be cool.

The iPad is not a laptop (netbook or otherwise) and it is not a PDA. I'm not entirely sure what the target market is (or what it will turn out to be) but heck, I never figured the iPod would take off (or that I'd own one either). It won't replace my laptop but it would be great to have at work or in a class setting, where a laptop can be a bit awkward.

I can think of one really great use for this thing though. My son currently uses an iPod touch for some augmented communications stuff. The iPad would be much better due to its larger size and longer life. The alternative is a custom piece of kit costing about $4,000 and weighing about 8 lbs which is a bit much for an eight year old with motor skills issues to contend with. My guess is my wife will be buying one of these for our boy in 6 months or less.

Specifications don't make something good or usable. Lots of stuff has awesome spec's but turns out horrible in real world use.

-Eric

Picking a few nits.

The A4 is at least comparable to other processors in this class of device (including netbooks).

The OS does support multi-tasking, I can listen to music while doing all sorts of stuff and mail is retrieved in the background also. Apple has chosen not to allow non-native apps to use this capability. Tough call, it keeps the app in the foreground much more responsive, limits problems caused by poor/lazy programming, works well with the user interface design/philosophy but will get complaints from "techies" who want multi-tasking.

Similar situation with Flash. Flash is a proprietary solution with a horrible reputation, it chews through more CPU cycles for a lame animated add than I need to run a full up airplane simulation with hi-res visuals. It is annoying to miss out on some of the useful content that uses Flash but I don't miss the lame adds that seem to have sprung up on every other website. Personally I think Apple should have considered some sort of opt in for Flash but they probably didn't want deal with the problems that come with it.

The less durable design thing is interesting also. The iPad has very few moving parts compared to a netbook (or Kindle), and very few user accessible bits so I would actually expect it to have a very high Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) compared to those devices. If you drop it, it will probably break, but so will a netbook etc.

So much for debating based on the specifications. The only real test is a field trial. I'll withhold judgement until after apple introduces the next generation unit and I can get to play with one for a while.

- Eric

Computers are now so pervasive that the "art of programming" (generic, yes, I realize there are big differences between a computer scientist, software developer, software engineer, and a programmer ) has to be abstracted so that people can write programs. They release "toolkits" which they like to call "APIs", which they technically are, but they're not the powerful "APIs of old".

I do not own an iPhone, but I do not understand why there are 10,000 applications for it. With a 70% share of profits and the lack of ability for anyone to preview my app, I can make some money for little time investment! Perhaps they need a "Spec" summary, with video demo?

I'm waiting for true object oriented design that uses a "drag-and-drop" flowchart or 3D simulation look to it. Maybe that ALICE program from the late Randy Pausch does that.. .hmm...

It actually was. The smartphone market was well established but mostly business oriented. The iphone took smartphones to the consumer market by making it geared more toward multimedia. Despite Apple's claim it wasn't innovative at all, phones had been out for a few years already which could do everything the iphone did but they just weren't marketed that way so not many people bought them other than corporate types so they could have their e-mail on the go. I had a touchscreen in 1999, was playing mp3's through a cassette adapter, etc,.

As I see it the I-pad is not competition or replacement for PC, laptop or I-phone. While it resembles the expected computer tablet it isn't designed to fill that niche. It is aimed at the various readers like Kindle. To this they add a few I-phone like applications.

If it's meant to be an e-Book reader, the price needs to come down - a lot!

$500 buys a lot of paperbacks.

Assuming $5.99 per paperback that would be about 83 books. I have already found around 250 free ebooks (that I would actually like to own and read) from various sources so that would cost me just under $1500 to own all of those in paper form. Sounds like a bargain to me, even for the one with 3G and 64Gig of memory. A whole lot easier to carry also.

-Eric