I can see the attraction of a tablet PC (which, no matter how they try and dress it up, is all the iPad is) but all Apple have done is dress theirs up with their funky phone OS and a quality touch screen.

None-the-less, because of the drum banging and ceremony that goes with an Apple launch, BBC feel the need to allow people to submit their comments. My favourite is this…

Apple never just produces ‘gadgets’; they engineer solutions that people can see fitting into their lives eventually.

It’s that last word… eventually. What he’s trying to say is that Apple find solutions to problems that don’t currently exist. Whoever could accuse Apple customers of being vain, purchasing style over price and function?

Having said that, I quite like this comment…

You can just hear the money being poured into the Apple bank account as the brainless tech sheep of this generation rush out to by this fantastically overpriced netbook.

<snigger>  The worst comment award though must go to..

Finally stupid netbooks will disappear. But if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch so-called pad why not just buy a Macbook with more power, to do work, play DVDs and all that added functionality?

Yea, those stupid netbooks. Good case against them. Erm. But, yea, if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch computer, why not just buy a much, much bulkier 13-inch Macbook at not far off twice the price of an iPad<snort>?  Stupid consumers eh? And there they are buying 10-inch £200 Netbooks. What are they thinking?

So, the Apple iPad has been announced after months – and months – of speculation.

Many people were expecting some exciting name, with it often being referred to as a “slate”. In the end it’s the underwhelmingly named iPad. You see, it sounds like iPod. How they must have chuckled at their own ingenuity.

The thing is, nobody was really talking beforehand about the software – that’s the one thing that Apple are good at and with the iPhone and Mac OS already available, it was obvious that one of them would be used. None-the-less, most thought it would be the latter as they were expecting a slim, multi-touch computing device. In the end, it’s turned out to be a big iPod.

And there’s the rub – Apple have traditionally not been so good with the hardware so, to me at least, the resultant iPad isn’t very exciting.  It literally is a big iPod. Or iPhone if you buy the 3G version. Look at the picture above of Steve Jobs with the iPad – it does look like he’s got some kind of promotional oversized iPod in his hands. To me, it looks like some kind of bad Photoshop picture.

What does the iPad offer? Well, it’s got a special screen with a wide viewing angle but it’s smaller than the screen on my Netbook. It’s not even OLED – it’s just a bog standard LED with better viewing angles. And, well, that’s about it.

Apple are intending to target gamers and, particularly, eBook readers.

The former, well, I can’t see it working. Gamers either want full scale powerful gaming or a pocketable device – this is neither. Electronic Ink based eBook readers are 100 times¹ better for reading eBooks with. Why spend £500 on an iPad instead of under £200 for a dedicated eBook reader?

Okay, I’m not Apple lover but I can appreciate a good bit of kit and I will happily say good things about the iPod and iPhone, even if I don’t want one myself. But the iPad has left me cold. I just don’t get it.

1. okay, maybe I made that statistic up [↩]

I’m no lover of Apple and I think I’ve made that clear before. None-the-less, I can’t escape the dominance that the iPod, in particular, has. Yes, you can buy other MP3 players, but just try buying an accessory. And it’s not a bad bit of kit – it’s really just Apple and the way that they cripple their products in the name of style or the kind of anti-competitive practise that regularly gets Microsoft into trouble (none-replaceable batteries, making it so that only iTunes will work with an iPod, etc).

Other than that non-replaceable battery, the rubbish headphones (easily resolved, that one!) and having to use iTunes, the iPod really isn’t at all bad. Damn it, even my TomTom will only work with an iPod.

Besides, my older daughter is approaching teenage and there’s bound to come a time when she wants one. Hell, my MP3 player recently broke and even I’ve considered it.

So, I’ve taken my first tentative steps towards it. I’ve installed and began to use iTunes <gulp>.

And, I have to say, it’s not as bad as I thought (I think I might have previously called it “terrible”!). When I installed it on my Netbook and it immediately picked up and started indexing from my wireless NAS drive, I was impressed¹. I wish the iTunes store was available online, if only to peruse, rather than buy, so you don’t have to install iTunes – they might get a few more users that way, who go to peruse and then download when they see something they like.

I was aware that Frankie Boyle had a Podcast on iTunes containing unbroadcastable material he’d recorded during warm-ups for Mock the Week. I was even more surprised to find it was free! That was a really nice find. In fact I was surprised to find free stuff on there at all – quite a revelation. I’ve even bought some iTunes top-up cards (they were on special offer at a particular retailer recently) – not that I’ve used them yet.

You never know, sometime in the future I might be offering a review of an iPod on here. God help us all!

Meantime, if you do want one, the recently announced new range of iPods is available at Dixons. Dixons also has a price matching policy with the usual big internet suppliers (Amazon, Play, eBuyer, etc) so it’s definitely worth checking out.

1. although if anybody knows how to limit where it looks, I’d be interested, as my NAS drive is also used for backups and it’s been indexing multiple copies of music from that as well [↩]