[dmaul1114]

My take on it from the announced details:

As I've said repeatedly, I'm very interested in a multimedia tablet personally. I already have a laptop provided by work to go along with my office PC, so I really have no need for a netbook.

But I'd like something smaller and lighter than my 15" Thinkpad for travel etc. where I just need internet, e-mail, video, e-books, games etc. for a short trip, afternoon at the coffee shop etc.

Even more, I want something that I can read scholarly journal articles, magazine articles etc. on a large screen and mark them up with a stylus (the articles, not the mags) like I do print outs of PDFs now. It sucks reading them on a laptop/netbook. But it also sucks lugging marked-up printouts around when I'm working on an article, class lecture etc.

I love my Kindle for reading novels, but I need something with a bigger screen and stylus mark up to make the switch to e-versions for my academic work. And large screen e-ink devices with markup like the iRex and Que are just too pricey for buying do just one function--when I can print out and mark up PDFs at work for no cost to me.

Getting to the impressions....

For the iPad the pros I see are:

-Great Screen. HD Video looked great. Would be fine for me to read on since LCDs (and especially the LED monitors on my office PC and my laptop screen now) don't bother my eyes).
-Nice form factor--very thin, 1.5 pounds so it will be easy and comfotable to hold and read etc. Much more so than trying to read on a laptop or netbook
-Good price. I expected much more than $499 for the low end model (and 16GB and no 3G would be fine for me in a tablet)
-Very good battery life for this kind of device if their 10 hours of video watching claim is true
-Keyboard dock for when you need to do more text entry than can easily be done with the onscreen keyboard


But the Cons for me are:

-No stylus support built in, so likely it won't fit my need for marking up academic PDFs
-No Multitasking. Lame, would want to listen to music while reading, have a web window open while marking up an article to allow searching for other articles etc.
-Lack of flash--means no hulu and some other video sites.

But in all, it's better than I expected price, battery life, and size/screen wise for a first gen tablet device. The price and battery life should really put pressure on other tablet/slate manufactures to put out product that match it and improve upon it by adding stylus support, multitasking etc.

So I'll be very interested to see what else rolls out on the tablet front from other companies in the next year or so to compete with this. Particuarly stuff aimed more at the academic/business user. Again, here are things like the Plastic Logic Que--but it's overpriced, and being e-ink would be limited to only suiting my reading needs and not able to do other stuff--and thus not nearly worth the money to me.

And seeing what this tablet can do kind of killed my interest in a large screen e-ink device. Might as well wait for a tablet like this that does all I need to come out, rather than spend even more on a large screen e-ink device that I'd only use for my academic reading.