Sorry Steve... I'm not impressed...

I'm sitting here in the HUB on campus, waiting for my girlfriend to get done work, so I figured to kill the time for the next hour, I'd write a little blog entry. Being that I'm madly in love with tech and love blogging about it, I feel that I have to get in my two cents about the recently unveiled Apple "iPad".

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdorobek/ / CC BY 2.0

Being the huge Apple "fanboy" that I am, you can imagine how excited I was for this thing to be unveiled. I've been following the rumors of this thing for months now and just like everyone else I had my expectations for the product. The last time that I was really "wowed" was back in 2007 when the iPhone was unveiled. I just remember watching the Keynote and being like "I need to have this" and sure enough I got it. I paid $500 for an iPhone the month of release. I had the same excitement as I was watching this year, but in the end, I wasn't impressed.

What we were all expecting (well, what I was expecting) was a product that would be Apple's answer to the netbook and an ereader. I wasn't expecting a giant iPod touch though. While I was impressed with some of the features like with Mail and especially iWork, there were many things that I was expecting to be there that weren't. These things were flash, USB ports, expandable memory (SD/MicroSD) and a camera. I would have also liked for it to run a variation of OSX, not the iPhone OS. Look at the HP Slate, it's going to be running Windows 7 which makes it much more netbook-like than the iPad. With all of these things missing, the iPad seems to fall short to me.

Don't get me wrong though, it is very cool. There are lots of things I do love about it, one other thing being the ereader part. I would love to have this for books and to automatically get all of the newspapers I read. It would make that so much easier, also since I don't like e-ink, which devices like the Nook and Kindle have. I can't see myself spending $850 on this thing for using mostly those functions, although the screen seems beautiful. Maybe in the future, with the second or third generation, I'll consider investing in an iPad. I think I'll stick to my controversial hackintosh netbook for the moment though. It's much more practical.

While I still love Apple computers, I feel I'm starting to stray away with their other products. I think my next phone may be an Android phone, for I'm falling in love with that OS. I love the openness and I'll admit it, the little Android logo is awesome! I also like how other products like Nexus One have expandable memory so you can just switch out MicroSD cards. One last thing, why can't iPhone have a camera flash by now? It would make it so much better. This is what the 4th generation iPhone already and only has a 3-megapixel camera with no flash. All this being said, I'm looking more forward to the possibilities of Android tablets for the time being. I'm interested to see more with what the Dell Streak will have to offer in the near future and the dozens of other Android tablets being developed.

In conclusion... iPad=Fail!
Sorry Steve...