Well the worst part about it on the iPad is, when you buy books with it, it'll only work on the iPad (and possibly other apple devices). It won't work on just any old epub-capable reader.

Isn't B&N selling DRMed ePub books right now too though? I had a friend *****ing endlessly about how much of a pain it was when he bought a book from B&N and had to strip the DRM out to get it to work on his Sony Reader.

I won't be buying another e-reader if I get an iPad But I see your point.

>.>

There's no way this will push out the current ereaders in the market. At least, dear god I hope not.

The Apple corporation is a marketing genius. I would argue, and probably get a lot of crap about, they're better at marketing than they are at anything else, including creating products.

MSI has a 10-inch Tegra powered tablet running Android coming for $500 this year:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/01/msis-10-inch-tegraandroid-tablet-coming-this-year-for-500.ars

The specs are at least as good as the iPad, and it runs a better OS.

How much can I get the stone for?

iPad has an eye-searing backlit LCD screen and a 10 hour battery life.

Kindle has an e-paper screen and a 1 week battery life.

Neither of them can play Flash.

I think it's funny that the HP tablet that Ballmer showed off at CES got trashed because people said it wouldn't be able to compete with the Apple tablet. Now looking back at it, it does everything the Apple tablet can do and more. So yeah, the only way it can't compete is marketing really.

and it would be great, if it didn't look like crap.

CNN says Apple's stock bombed after this was announced.

Haha, my wife called it a MacsyPad.

I lol'd

Not ever ever for your whole life?

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:AAPL

It dropped hard right as the iPad was announced, recovered somewhat after the keynote, and then continued to fall all day today.

What, the industrial design of the thing? I don't expect to take significant market share from the iPad. It doesn't even matter how it looks, the iPad could look like a pile of puke and the MSI a pile of gold, people would still buy the Apple product. I brought it up because on all other fronts (i.e. the ones that matter to people who want to use the device) it looks superior.

Also, if you look closely at the stock price, you'll see that it drops when Steve Jobs starts talking, and rises when he stops.

more like WiMaxiPad

half the price of the iPad!

the onion story is up. I almost mistaken it for real news lol.

[url]www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/frantic_steve_jobs_stays_up[/url]

Yeah, that story was up before the announcement...

I must admit I read about half of a story about the Science channel before I thought... "hang on a minute" and realised I'd been linked to theonion.

I'm still pretty much erring on the side of "I'll give this a go". The only things that can screw it up for me is price (if there's a straight $-£ conversion I'll be too poor to afford it for instance), and if they **** up the ebooks stuff. As long as the price is right, and I can read it easily in a variety of lighting situations I'll be happy.

That and I expect some really clever applications to come out for it. Travel chess anyone?

Frisbee throw trainer. Uses the orientation of the pad to determine whether your throwing technique is improving.

In all seriousness, you could get packs and packs of board games on it.

Ars Technica has an interesting article on whether or not the lack of a camera on an iPad is even an issue. While I do think that it's better to have a feature that's reasonably easy to include & I think that they should include a webcam in future versions (it appears that they already have that option on the table as far as the software goes), a camera on an iPad would most likely only be used as a webcam (instead of an actual camera like we see on an iPhone) & it's not really something that I care about. I personally have an iMac that has a built-in webcam that I never use, a laptop that has a built-in webcam that I never use & a desktop PC that has a USB webcam that I used for a few months to video chat with my wife when she was in France & then threw it in to the closet with all of the other junk.

I'm sure that there are several people here that would probably write me off as a "fanboy" because of my "defense" of this product, but the fact of the matter is that it's almost exactly what I've been waiting for & I'd feel the same way about a product like this if it was coming from another company. For me, a computer is a tool that I use to access internet content, to keep in touch with family/friends via email & social networking websites (both of which are generally short & to-the-point messages where the lack of a hardware keyboard wouldn't really matter) & to read eBooks (I'm currently reading eBooks via my iMac, which requires me to sit at my computer desk for hours & hours & I would much prefer to read in bed, on the couch or at a park). I'm not going to pay for an eBook unless I can't find it on BitTorrent. However, if I need to type something that's a bit longer, I can simply connect to the docking station & go at it. Even if someone wanted to carry the docking station around with them (I wouldn't), it would still be smaller than the average laptop (a little larger than a netbook). I don't download music or movies because I stream all of my media, so the limited hard drive space doesn't bother me (we use less than 16GB on my laptop). I could almost see myself selling a few of my other computers & using this as my primary system. The only thing that prevents me from doing so is that I'm running a server from home on my desktop PC, the laptop is there for my wife to use when I'm on the iMac & I use the iMac for programming (I'm assuming that the iPad won't be ideal for this).

However, I must admit that while they're getting a good deal with AT&T, I'm not a big fan. My AT&T contract just ended & I was really hoping to switch to another provider. That being said, I've avoided getting a smart phone because of the large monthly payments (I still have a simple phone that your grandmothers could use), but with the prices that are available for the iPad, I'll have to consider it.

Wow, that article is like someone was reading my mind posts

http://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?t=56403&page=2#post1060844

<.<

Just go with someone like Sprint which has much cheaper plans. Seriously, AT&T is the most expensive phone carrier in the US right now, followed by Verizon.

How is AT&T more expensive than Verizon? Their plans are priced pretty much the same, except Verizon likes to do things like charge you extra for stuff like visual voicemail, so I'd say that makes Verizon slightly more expensive.

Verizon charges extra for everything. The reason iPhones aren't on Verizon's far superior network is because Verizon scoffed at Apple's flat-rate pricing plan.

Around here, it's a non choice. All we got are Verizon towers. If you're on another carrier, you're connecting to a Verizon tower anyway.

Verizon just a week or two ago dropped their prices to be cheaper than AT&T.

They dropped their unlimited plan. What did AT&T do right after that? Drop theirs as well. They're the same price.

Ah, I must have missed that article. Oh well, still irrelevant, as Sprint's still cheaper

HEY THANKS FOR STEALING MY JOKE.

Wired just posted an interesting article that shows that Apple has "updated the iPhone software development kit on Wednesday to allow internet telephony apps to work on the 3G network." This is good news for Skype but unfortunately they're "still examining" Google Voice, which is really just code for "**** you Google".

Verizon dropped their unlimited plan price for new customers.

**** you very much, Verizon.

Ars Technica posted a poll asking whether or not you think that the iPad should have flash support. I would encourage you to read the article & to also take these blog articles (also linked to in the Ars Technica poll) in to consideration before voting.

"DON'T SUPPORT FLASH ON THIS DEVICE THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ALL ABOUT BROWSING THE INTERNET, THAT'LL SHOW ADOBE!"

Nope, no retarded opinions here...

598, how the **** would you get every flash game to run well on a touch screen device? How it distinguish between hover and click? Do you want to see crappy ads everywhere, blinking and annoying you?

Lego brick icon > flash.

Distinguishing between hover and click is easy: pressing and holding is hover, press and quick release is click. Click and drag is tap and then hold. You know, exactly how it works on every touch interface in existence.

Also, ads are a very poor argument against having Flash, because there can simply be an option to turn Flash off.

And let's not forget that at the moment, video on the internet is entirely dominated by Flash. There are other, invisible uses for Flash as well, like multiple file uploaders (Flickr for example), which work around limitations in JavaScript.

No, sorry, but every argument against Flash is a cop out. The real reason is what Jon`C pointed out: Apple would have to sacrifice complete lock down of their platform.

The only thing that isnt making me order for at work for me it no multi user function, I can se it sitting in the middle of the living room for any one to play on and use, like a normal family with each user account for each content, now thats whats going to sell it for most people the family function and easy use, mum making something using online cook books, going to have some wikced times writting software for this, now only if i can get our imacs of the cashs desks and replace them with iPad and wireless barcode readers....

Very cool, no flash boohoo HTML5 will take over, and no camera, yeah well theres not one on the touch either and people still buy them, and dont see the point in the nano. It will sell in the bucket loads and if I could pre-order them I would already have about 100 on order from customers.