ratbastid

Difference is you can buy it. Unless you'd rather pre-order my VaporPad, which blows Arrington out of the water on sheer specs! Only $999.99, make the check out to Cash please.

Haters are going to say "It's just an iPod Touch with gigantism!" And it's true, it's scaled-up from the iPhone/iTouch line. No argument there.

I think that disappointment comes from an expectation that this would be a computer, just little and flat and no keyboard. It's totally not that. It's a third category product, not computer, not smart-phone. You have to adjust your expectations to that.

Anyone who's used an iTouch, though, realizes it's not a gadget. It's a PLATFORM. It IS a little computer, and there are tens of thousands of applications on it, to do most anything you'd want it to do. My one complaint about mine is the size of the screen, and that's because you're trying to put computing functions into a device whose industrial design constraint is that of a mobile music player.

I'm EAGER to put my hands on an iPad. I think it could really be a game-changer.

---------- Post added at 10:31 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:22 PM ----------

You know, I'm hearing that a lot right now from various places, but I call shenanigans.

Have you used the App Store, Charlatan? Because it's ENORMOUS. And there's stuff on there that is as useless and stupid as anything you'd find on the web and download. What you WON'T find on there is stuff that's malicious or spammy. Plenty of stuff in poor taste, plenty of marginal-quality apps. And a whole lot of really good stuff, too! I've never had a desire for something on my iPhone that there wasn't a handful of apps there ready to try out.

So... I hear you about the philosophical distastefulness of having Apple vet every app that goes on the store, but in practice, I just don't have any experience of being "strictly limited". 133,000 apps in there right now, makes it hard to feel real limited.