I watched, giddy with anticipation, of what wonders Steve Jobs would produce today. Some form of tablet, I've long thought, would be the ideal form for the personal computer. When Palm Pilots were the accessory du jour, I hoped for one with with a 8.5x11" screen for better book reading and web browsing. For their time, they were very useful devices (I have two), especially when they added wireless internet, cell phone capability, an MP3 player and a camera. Sadly, the company devolved and has never tried to make a tablet computer.
Microsoft, and its associated PC manufacturers, have had a decade-long experience in this field. These Tablet PC's are essentially just laptops with a slightly different form factor, but with equivalent bulk. They have not been marketed extensively to consumers.
So the iPad is the first attempt by a major player to create a mass-market tablet computer. As such, and because it is Apple, the particulars are very interesting to geeks like me, if not the entire tech-obsessed community.
The iPad name is not catchy, but that's not terribly important. iTab or i1 would have been better. iSlate would have been worse.
As expected, the operating system and user interace is the iPhone OS, a scaled-down version of OS X. When Apple introduced this with the iPhone and iPod touch, combined with the multi-touch interface, it was a major revolution--think of how terrible cell phone interfaces were (and many still are). It doesn't have the jaw-dropping sex appeal that it had in 2007, but there is still nothing better (though Android is catching up).
It's interesting that Apple is trying to position it in a niche between an app phone and a laptop, rather than an uber-device that tries to do everything. I think such a device is possible; for instance, consider an iPhone that you could also dock into any type of display: an LCD when at a desk or a thin book-sized display for around the house, and as always its own display when away. The only computer/camera/phone/whatever you would ever need.
I like the fact that Apple is using an open, DRM-free format (ePub) for books. They have still not fully embraced such formats for music and video unfortunately.
It (and all Apple devices) really should have a built-in card slot for expandability. SD cards are now available up to 64 gigabytes and will go up to 2 terabytes in the near future. Carrying around a few of those is unbeatable bandwidth.
Overall, I have a wait-and-see attitude regarding the iPad, and the anticipated slew of copy-cat tablets. Right now there are too many special purpose computers (gaming system, DVR / media hub, eBook reader, smart phone, laptop, desktop, etc). The challenge for the iPad and any other tablet computer is that they'll have to do better in at least a few of these categories if they're finally going to catch on.
