New Apple iPad... anyone else think it;s a POS

There are a raft of super cheap tablets on the market at the mo. Would stay well away. usually lacking in processing speed, memory and use pish screens. Also Don't buy any tablet running earlier than Android 2.1. As for that one you have linked to, 128mb ram for this is poop and that tablet has almost half the processing power of an HTC Desire (I'd not look for any less than 1ghz).
The problem with these tablets though is a lot of people will get these for Christmas and be totally let down. They end up blaming the OS rather than the crap specs and Android gets a bad name as a result.

I had a contest with my boss in the months before iPads came out. I was convinced they'd be an expensive toy, he was convinced they'd be useful for everything including word processing. Within a few days of getting one, he was back to working on a laptop and admitted they're basically toys

Pretty nice toys, to be fair. It's a leisure computer, and that's exactly how Apple marketed it. I wouldn't buy one for £600, but I borrowed it for a week, and it was lovely to read and watch video on. Also, it's less disruptive to groups than a phone or a laptop. As someone who's worked running events, I know screens are deadly killers of social interaction, but people approach and pass tablets around in a very different way.

Yes - they are mostly a leisure device with a few specfic business applications (TV presenters are using them more and more). I can see those uses growing (teachers, sports coaches, medical staff) over time as they become more affordable. As Monte says above, I think they will replace paper (& clipboards) perhaps more effectively than any other electronic device to date has. Being able to use them whilst still standing and not needing to rest them on anything is an ergonomic advantage over the typical laptop form factor. Interesting comment too, Nachimir, about the screen being less disruptive.

Nachimir wrote:

Screens are really awful for groups. TVs, laptops, projectors, phones, the lot: all massively effective party killers. Tablets really demand a different type of involvement, it can be a lot more casual and people can sustain eye contact and a conversation over it.

Montevideoguy wrote:

I think anyone buying it for word processing is a proper loon.

To be fair, he didn't order it primarily for that. He did though, once pass me his old iPhone to use as my new work phone, then tell me that setting HAL as the wallpaper was inappropriate for an Apple product. I responded that it's perfect, because closed systems are inherently hostile [/quote

I'm not saying he did. But there will be people out there who bought one as a laptop replacement and for word processing. These people are nuts.

And it depends what's on the screens that dictates if i's a killer for groups of not (e.g. watching footie in a group adds to the experience if you ask me).

And closed systems aint too bad. Makes it harder for dummies to break them. Back in the UK I ended up installing linux on a few of my mate's PCs and then withheld the root password as I was getting fed up having to clean up their windows based systems from all the damn spyware and crap you pick up (and the tinkering they'd do thinking they actually knew something). Linux is open source but as far as they were concerned it was more locked down than OSX