I think it’s great. I had heard tons about it but thought this would be some useless gadget that was awfully nice to play with and little else.
Seeing it made me change my mind. Especially for older or otherwise handicapped people who can’t sit for long, have bad eyesight but are book nerds, or just generally avid readers, this might really be a much better alternative to the Kindle or similar devices.
I’ll wait for the second revision, but this is something I’ll definitely buy for my mom who has a huge problem holding a laptop while lying down and unable to sit either. This looks like the idea device for people with limited mobility and eyesight!
My question to you guys is: Is it going to get rid of laptops?
Right now yeah features are limited but in the future there will be other major companies creating products like these and there would be better features.
I doubt it’s going to replace the laptop, but I do believe it could become a very interesting device for consumers who use a netbook or laptop for lighter tasks such as surfing the web, checking emails and the like. I think the ebook devices and low-end laptops as well as netbooks could be facing signifiicant competition sooner rather than later.
It’s also quite handy to travel with, much more convenient than using a laptop, I’d like to think.
For greater tasks, I don’t think laptops will be obsolete any time soon, just like desktops still have their place for heavy-duty tasks.
I think it’s a real shame they don’t want to put OS X on a tablet, that they want their locked down closed environment to spread to computing. The choice of iPhone OS for the tablet was the most disappointing to me. I own some AAPL stock because I thought the company was on a really nice track, but I’m not very happy about this direction. I’m sure it will sell some devices, but I sure hope this isn’t a prelude to phasing out OS X this decade like they did OS 9 in the last.
And honestly, I’d never buy a tablet that can’t play Flash, because watching Hulu on it would be my #1 use case :o
I think for a certain market or purpose, it might. There’s nothing in Apple’s lineup that is truly low cost/casual use, like a netbook.
For iPhone users, this is a nice familiar netbook-esque product you might buy just to pootle around on Facebook on the couch, or read blogs, or whatever it is you might want. This is a purpose that the MacBook line is really a bit too overpowered/overpriced for. So as kohoutek said, basically.
I doubt that I’d buy any tablet type device. One thing that would be on my list of requirements if I was considering buying a tablet device would be if your restricted as to what apps you can install. Just having a quick glance at the specs, it mentions having an iTunes Store account as a requirement so possibly it is locked down to the apps that they approve.
For video playback, I’m not sure if I would want to be staring at a 9.7" screen for watching a 2hr film. I think that typing on the screen would end up being a pain, especially if you was sending lots of emails, there is a dock-able keyboard. I think that if I had to choose between a netbook or a tablet PC i would prefer a netbook.
I think that any tablet computer screen will be more prone to breaking when they are being transported around unless they have a strong enough cover. It lists the flash drive sizes as being “16GB, 32GB, or 64GB” for a multimedia device i would have expected it to use the same size hard drives as they use in the iPod classic instead of the flash and be at least 120GB in size.
For me the iPad seems more like a “king sized” iPhone. I think a tablet computer should be more like them ones seen in the tv series “Stargate Atlantis” (like the kind that Rodney uses). Ok they would be more bulky but would have enough room for a full sized keyboard to be docked to them.
Lack of built-in USB support, flash and multi-tasking is a deal-killer for me.
Chances are, if I was using something like that I’d want to be able to listen to an MP3 whilst browsing the web, this thing presumably can’t do that due to the lack of Multi-tasking support. YouTube recently announced HTML5 video tag support, so the lack of Flash will not affect YouTube per se, but there’s a lot of sites I’m likely to want to visit which will use Flash videos. Lack of support for that would infuriating.
They’re going to need to upgrade the iPad dramatically before the Chrome Tablets arrive or they’re going to get slaughtered in the market place IMO.
Still … it’s the nicest tablet I’ve seen so far. I just think they’re going to struggle against Chrome OS once it’s released; price wise, performance wise and feature wise, unless they make some fundamental changes.
I definitely intend to purchase a tablet of some sort in the future to replace my aging Asus eee PC, but this iPad isn’t up to scratch for my purposes.
Ability to run a local web server would be nice too But I doubt I’ll be getting that unless I buy a tablet with a full-blown OS unfortunately (which I wouldn’t buy, since it kinda defeats the purpose).
Up what, 1%? Essentially unchanged. It was dropping quick as everyone was underwhelmed, and only just made it above the opening price when the low price point was announced.
Well, that definitely does put a new spin on things. 
