I’m going to have to agree with Juan on this one, not sure I have a need for it. I have a Mac and an iPhone with a Kindle app, so I’m covered. The dedicated readers have much longer battery life BTW, which would be more of a selling point for me.
This is what I want- you can buy your media (books, music, newspapers, video) anywhere and download it to anything. That’s really the step we’re missing in all this.
Ninja’d. Sorry, BadgerSpoon, epic fail on the backread here.
LOL…I wondered if it had “wings” when I heard that was the name. “Always a happy period.” 
You’d have to wear some big-ass “ganster” pants to get that into a pocket!
As this graphic illustrates, the lack of multitasking is also a pretty big drawback
Multi Task? Really?
Doesn’t even run two programs at the same time. Pathetic, even for Apple.
I don’t understand why they would cripple such a promising device with such an easy to implement feature. I can’t believe I just called running two programs at the same time a feature.
Here’s a thought: For the same reason the iPhone doesn’t user-multitask – because similar devices that do are unstable, unusable, and unreliable. As one who’s developed for mobile for a lot of years, I can tell you that there’s a rule that developers often forget: It’s not a desktop. It’s not a laptop. It’s a mobile device.
The iPad (and the iPhone) certainly multitask under the hood. I’m fine with switching apps until there’s more than enough power in the device to handle user-multitasking as well as a laptop.
But hey, that’s just me. And certainly the hoopla behind the iPad will make it an easy target for everyone. We’ll know down the road a bit whether there really are people who have a use for a device filling the gap between laptop and phone. I can. But who knows how many others are with me.
I hear what you’re saying, but today’s mobile devices really do have plenty of RAM and processing speed. Heck, even my 15 year old Pentium 133 MHz system with 16 megs of RAM could multitask between several apps in Windows 95 just fine. Battery life would certainly be an issue, but I’d like to think that the iPhone OS would be pretty robust since it’s based on Mac OS (and Free BSD).
I feel forced to come back for a moment and state my thoughts…
everything announced was OK nothing extraordinary just OK, but not bad just nothing worth me rushing out to drop 600 bucks, but i will offer this at the risk of being roasted alive for actually supporting an awesome concept Microsoft has brewing, admittedly this is not a finished project, but it just seems superior in not only form but function shudders in the thought that Microsoft is catching up.
Hear, hear! I agree!
The more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. Beyond what’s been said already here in this thread, no Adobe Flash, no ability to print, no HDMI, how many iPhone apps do you REALLY use all the time? … I love my Macbook Pro and my iPhone, but I guess I was hoping the iPad would run Mac OS X and be a real option to picking up a Macbook. I guess I just don’t understand the market segment they’re trying to fill/define, aside from people who will “just buy it.”
I know what you mean, though I think with HTML5 the flash thing will eventually become less of an issue. No multitasking is an unfortunate limitation that may hurt them in their competition with netbooks - also ironic, considering how heavily Microsoft was criticized during Windows 7 development when they announced that Windows 7 Starter Edition would only run three applications at once. It seems like everyone in the industry is determined to call this a spectacular success or failure without even a single unit shipping yet. Guess that makes for good publicity and page views. 
Personally, what it comes down to is this: I would love to play around with one of these for a couple weeks, to see if I could find a use for it, but at the moment its not something I’m willing to drop a bunch of money for.
Exactly. The multi-core Cortex-A9 inside the Apple A4 is more powerful than the single-core Snapdragon in the Nexus One, and the Nexus One can multitask like a champ. Outside of battery life considerations, there’s really no reason not to allow the OS to multitask, and I don’t really think that battery life should even be considered that much of an issue. Everyone that I know who owns a smartphone has become accustomed to plugging in their phone to charge up overnight and that behavior can easily be applied to other small devices.
i used to have ipod touch envy until my wife got one. i have a classic 120GB and i often dreamt of a 64GB touch, but now that my wife has a 32GB Touch, I find myself glad I didn’t sacrifice a truckload of storage for apps and other features, since I just like music, podcasts, and occasionally movies (not enough that the screen size differential is a large concern for me).
So now there’s a REALLY BIG iPod Touch, and I just can’t help but feel apathetic towards it. I would love to have a PC someday that is normally as small as a Touch that has lots of SSD memory and has a screen you can unspool and flatten for stationary use, and until then, I don’t think a halfway device like the iPad has much of a use for me.
And those who cosnider it an e_reader killer might be right, but I anticipate the Kindle, Nook, Alex, etc. will drop in price, and their e-ink technology still provides some big advantages in outdoor situations.
I agree with the points everyone’s made - especially multitasking, which I think is the most problematic, and battery life, if it is meant to be a kindle killer (10 hrs - if it’s even really 10 hrs - is fine, but kindle has what, at least 1-2 weeks, which makes more sense as a book) - but to be fair, the first generation iPhone wasn’t really the bees knees’ either. A lot of positive things we’ve come to associate with iPhone/iPod Touch weren’t in their first incarnations either -they only developed into something awesome in the later generations. Perhaps iPad will have integrated usb ports/cameras/multitask/flash/etc later. I don’t see myself ever buying this, but while it does suck now, but it is possible it’ll be better or perhaps even awesome in the future.
Mostly though, the name really sucks. There’s no ifs and buts about that. iPad? No. Whatever happened to iSlate? I could live with that name. iPad? Not so much. Though, it’ll be interesting to see how they’d market the name into sounding cool within a year or something.
My favorite name joke is that New Englanders won’t know which portable Apple device people are referring to unless you hold one up.
iPaaahd
iPad sounds like a condo decked out in Apple gear.:rolleyes:
iPad reminds me of:
Seriously, what kind of a marketing team would decide on the name ‘iPad’?
The new iPad… ‘with wings’!!! For when your body feels ready to download, or bit torrent.