To start I will first explain exactly what the iPad is. The iPad is a hand held tablet devise due to be released by Apple on April 3rd 2010. It has a 9.7 inch multi-touch (which means you can use more then one finger at a time) glossy LED back-lit display which has 132 pixels in every square inch of screen (for comparison a Droid Phone has 265 and a iPod Touch has 163). it has a ten hour battery life which is very good (an iPod Touch gets 6 and laptops get between 2 and 6). It has a processor which is a tad less then twice as fast as a iPod Touch's and just as fast as our super lame laptop. It is 1/2 inch thick (think a deck of cards). It costs between $500 and $830 and comes in six models and three memory options: 8 gig 32 gig and 64 gig.
Now IMHO.
I think the iPad is not worth 500 bucks here is why:
It falls between two different devises 1. a portable media player 2. a PC
its like a portable media player in that it has to be synced with a computer and it plays music video and you can view photos, pretty standard stuff but it is not portable like a PMP is supposed to be. It is like a pc because it can run programs (or apps) on it but unlike a pc it cant do anything on its own like, you cant plug your camera into it to put photos on it. instead, you have to first put the photos on a computer then sync your big ol' iPad with the computer. Lame. it leaves you missing something that you can only get by getting an ipod touch ($200) or a net book ($200 to $400) both cheaper then this. Also say you want to type on it. You can ether hold it with one hand and peck with the other or you can hold it with both hands and try thumbing which does not work unless you have big long thumbs. Which is also lame. apple keeps on implying that this is breakthrough tech like the iphone was. But what is so funny is it runs the same software the iphone and itouch use (slightly different to accommodate the bigger screen) but still... Lame. There is nothing on it that has not been done before except the ten hour battery life so that is why id never dump 500 bucks or more on it.
