Dorje
iPF Noob
I was into this hype, but in the end I feel that none of these will sell because tablets are a niche item. If one can tote a tablet around one can tote a laptop. These have been brought to the market before with no dice. Does the Ipad have expandable memory or storage?
The differance this time Terry is the full multi-touch (and multi-finger) reading surface. Before tablets had either very clunkey single press touch screens with no dragging ability and/or were styles/pen driven. This meant no QWERTY typing, just glorified hunt and peck. That or variable quality hand recognition software (anyone remember the Newton?). Most if not all of the upcoming "slate" devices have full touch surfaces.
I think for anyone who has done remote desktop control through the iPhone/iPod, there is very little question about the quality of the multi-touch sensors (and in the iPhone/iPod little question about the ability of the OS to process that input). The question for now is, what more can it do that a Netbook with QWERTY keyboard and little mouse nub/tackpad does. That goes for all the "slate" devices. The follow-up question is "who does what, and how much better then the others."
As to memory expansion on the iPad, there is an attachable SD card reader accsessor. Altough it is unclear how it's data will be acessed or if you can on/off load other items besides pictures and movies taken with a camera.