I’ll give Apple credit for one thing: they do know how to market a product. The hype has been swirling for months around their new tablet, and they unveiled it today in San Francisco amidst much hoopla. It was almost impossible to watch the event live on the web due to bandwidth issues; I had to switch around from site to site. I wasn’t able to connect at all to Apple’s own live broadcast on their site.

So it’s finally here and there was at least one surprise: it’s called the iPad instead of the iSlate. Well, that makes sense – sounds more like iPod, and as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much what it is, an iPod Touch on steroids. It doesn’t run OS X; instead it runs the iPhone OS, which has plenty of “apps” (many of which are completely useless) but isn’t exactly a powerful full featured operating system.

I’m sure the faithful members of the Apple Fan Club will all run out and buy one, but as for the rest of us … maybe not so much. You all know that I’m not much of an Apple fan myself, although I do have a Mac Mini that lives over in the corner of my office, which I use when testing hybrid network configurations and doing OS comparisons. But in order to put my own personal feelings about the company itself aside, I looked at the iPad and asked myself: If this were made by Microsoft and ran some flavor of Windows Mobile 7 but had all the same features (or lack thereof), would I be likely to buy one?  And the answer is still “no.”  I’m not planning to purchase its (so far) most high profile competitor, HP’s Slate, either.

There are quite a few problems, some of which apply to the whole slate-style tablet market in general and some that only apply to the iPad in particular. I had done a “quick and dirty” run-down of them here, but I’m removing that list and am going to do a more detailed and better structured writeup of it for TechRepublic, so look for my article, Ten Reasons I’ll be Passing on the iPad, at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1324&tag=content;leftCol 

Here’s the bottom line: I’m supposed to spend a minimum of $500 for a device that won’t fit in my pocket and won’t take the place of my laptop/netbook, with no way to expand the storage capacity, and I have to buy another data plan from AT&T in addition to my cell phone’s plan. That’s why I call it the iDon’tThinkSo. If you buy one, let me know how you like it.

Meanwhile, I’d rather spend my money on something like the Gigabyte Touch Note, which also has a touch screen, and has a real keyboard, runs a real OS, supports both 802.11b/g/n wireless and wired Ethernet, has a 250 GB hard drive but also lets you expand that with USB ports and a  4-in-1 memory card reader. Oh, and you can get it with built-in 3G, too (actually 3.5G HSDPA) – not to mention a removable, user-replaceable battery. And you can multi-task to your heart’s delight. And all this costs less than the 32 GB 3G version of the iPad. The Touch Note is just one alternative; we can expect to see a large number of new tablets coming out in the next few months. I suspect most of them will have more to offer at a lower price than the iPad.

UPDATE: At first glance, the iPad doesn’t have USB ports or a flash memory slot. Now I’ve been told that there will be a way to use USB and SD with the iPad – you just have to buy a bunch of extra dongles. Leave it to Apple to find a way to up their revenues even more by charging extra for all the things that come built into every cheap netbook. It reminds me of how annoyed I was when I discovered that I’d have to buy an adapter to connect my Mac mini to a standard VGA monitor. The Apple brand adapter was $30 – although I did find a third party version for $7. And then, after shelling out more money, you have to carry all these little gadgets around with you if you want to have a truly usable (well, at least slightly more usable) device when you’re on the go. iDon’tThinkSo.

 
deb@shinder.net   www.debshinder.com