“Our headaches are over. Here comes Moses with the tablets!”

- Unknown (but maybe Alan King…?)

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Hah! I was right! Okay - I was right along with about a gazillion other people. But now that it’s here, what do we think…?

I wondered about the lack of camera and phoning capabilities, after all people will want to Skype on this thing and do video messaging, etc. But then someone in my office made an excellent point - Apple doesn’t want to compete with itself. If this thing did all that the iPhone did, it would very likely steal sales away from it. That being the case, I have to ask - will the new iBooks app be accessible (and scalable DOWN) through the iPhone the same way the regular iPhone apps are scalable UP to the iPad…? Doubtful. But if so, then you’d really have no need to buy an iPad, would you? And when will iBooks be available outside the U.S.A.?

The Brushes app is total bullshit - no one will buy it for that alone, so what’s left? Well, what everyone’s been speculating about all along - newspapers, magazines (which were specifically absent from the demo - although Hachette does publish some decent rags - Elle, Car and Driver and American Photographer) and books. Which, in turn, means TEXTbooks. This will be a huge boon to textbook publishers and students. Imagine carrying ALL of your textbooks — with annotation, highlighting and bookmarking capabilities — in one unit. (How long before some small software company creates an iPad app called ‘Dogear’ so you can REALLY bookmark those pages…?!)

Following that, it stands to reason the the low end iPad — the $499 model — will likely be the big seller. I really don’t see people shelling out $900 for 64GB and 3G access. Although, some online have already noticed that the iPad SDK (Software Developers Kit) has references to both video and telephony, so….

Of course, this little unit can and will eat Amazon’s Kindle for breakfast, if only for the hi-res colour screen and ePub text aspects.

Like more than one pundit said after the press conference… wait for six months. The original iPhone (the 8GB version) debuted at around $US600 and dropped to $US400 soon after launch - remember that consumer blowback? My new 32GB 3Gs was only $199! I’m sure it’s part of the reason Apple is launching the iPad at $499 which is $100 to $400 less than the street predicted it would cost.

It doesn’t launch till the end of March, but San Francisco’s Macworld Expo is in barely a week’s time. So I imagine at Macworld we’ll see a slew of new iPad apps, new publishers, new newspapers and new magazines, and maybe the whole iTunes TV store issue will be settled too. Then, by Labour Day we’ll see an upgrade, including a bunch of new ‘made specifically for’ iPad apps, and likely a lower price. Mostly because others are readying ‘tablets’ as well, and any friction caused by what this version DOESN’T have or DOESN’T do, will be met with the usual Apple ’shift in strategy’ to maintain/increase market share. Market share for a mobile segment that barely exists yet. Yup - that’s Apple.

Even with all that… yeah, I SOOOO want one!