A little background before we start on the iPad. Anyone that knows me knows i prefer my PC (not Microsoft) to the products apple produces for assorted reasons. Mainly the cost… cause well, anyone who knows anything about technology knows to purchase an apple product you gotta pay the “apple tax”. Secondly, mac nerds are kinda scary and their reasoning for owning a mac and justifying their cost is usually a lot of smoke and mirrors, when the real answer is they want to be trendy. A simple example of this is a recent open source software conference i attended for work. Yes, i had to attend one of these nerd-fests. At first glance it’s exactly what you would expect out of a conference involving computers. However, being an open source software conference i was foolishly expecting users to be using open source software. However, 90% of the attendees were sporting their mac laptops. Only a few (including myself) were using Linux or Unix for which an open source software conference is usually based upon. And to drive the point home on the trend factor, many of these mac users had stickers slapped all over their latops covering the entire case with the exception of one place. Yep, the apple logo. Would you buy an HP laptop and slap stickers all over it and leave the HP logo to show off? No you wouldn’t. Obviously apple has done a fantastic job marketing, so kudos to them. I guess i just expect better out of someone who considers themself tech savvy.

Don’t get me wrong though, i’m not one of those Microsoft fan boys or straight up apple haters. I generally pick and choose my apple products to take shots at. For example, I don’t have a bad word to say about the iPhone or the Mac mini. Both great products at respectable prices. However, when i see someone paying $2000 for a mac book to check email, browse the web and type up some documents i just kind of shake my head. Why not go buy a laptop from Dell, HP or whatever PC brand you like for $500. Now if you are a power user that does a lot of multimedia work and love the iLife software suite that comes with MacOS, then paying the extra price makes sense if you are going to utilize all the software you get. Otherwise, paying $600 for an operating system is just silly.

Anyway, on to the iPad. First off, it’s sexy. Of course it is, it’s an apple product. They do a fantastic job on the finish and general product look and marketing. However, the general flaw of the device is that it’s simply a big iPod Touch. There is no multi-taking and you can’t really consider it a computer. If you want to use it as a casual web browser, you don’t have flash support. On the iPhone it is tolerable, but on a device like this you think you would want the full web experience while browsing. There is a lot of hype about the book reading capabilities but if you have ever looked at the Sony book reader or Kindle, you know you aren’t going to want to stare at an LCD screen for hours reading a novel. It just won’t work. For casual reading it’ll be fine, but your avid book reader won’t be buying it for this. The biggest plus in my opinion is the gaming possibilities with this device. The need for speed demo they did looked really good, and there looks to be a lot of potential for a lot of cool games. However, i don’t think apple is playing this feature up as much as it should. The base price is $499 USD which i was actually surprised about. Apple is usually known for gouging it’s fans with inflated prices. Although you could get a netbook for half the cost and have more power, the appeal of a touch screen is awfully nice. Bottom line is it’s going to sell, but they could have done so much more with this device that would have killed the competition. Instead of using the iPhone OS, they could have slapped Mac OS on this thing and made a true productivity tablet instead of just a fun toy to have to browse the web and play video.

Personally, i’d rather cough up the extra few bucks and wait for this guy to come out later this year. Media interface for the tablet that turns into a productive laptop. Pretty sweet if you ask me. No way apple could compete with this.