Yes. My iPod Touch (and, thus, I assume, the iPhone) doesn't exactly "multitask" in terms of having more than one thing open at a time and visible to you, but it seems to keep running parts of stuff in the background (e.g. the Push notifications which you can have pop up). And if you close a game, for example, when you re-open it you can sometimes pick up where you left off, as if the app is leaving little info-cookies so it knows where to go back to.

I can get Push notifications when someone e-mails me, or IMs me, or posts to my Facebook account, or if the Associated Press breaks a news story, or if my favorite sports team scores a TD or a run or a goal or whatever. So it's like multitasking, it's just not called that.

There's the real gist of it right there...

They could have consumed much more of an initial market just by doing a few of these simple and seemingly obvious things. Most of you know how much I support Mac. But I'm very disappointed in the iPad. The biggest kicker for me is that it's running iPhone OS instead of OS X. That's beyond stupid, and I think it's the detail that will hurt them the most in the end.

The biggest market for this type of device is school/medical/record keeping roles. On the go data entry. The iPad will not allow that group to load the software they're already using. Along with Office, or other productivity software. And it will require them to take extra steps with a lot of data transfer, as opposed to just connecting a flash drive or SD card. It limits the HD space for saving things locally too. Even 64GB won't be enough in some environments.

I understand the way Apple likes to "out do" certain niche markets, and limit overall versatility to increase specialized functionality. But IMO, the opportunity to take a stranglehold to a much more broad "versatile tablet/ebook/netbook" market far outweighs that. They could have given a pile driver to Kindle, Nook, and netbook manufacturers all at once with this single nifty device. But instead they "iPhone crippled" it and priced it low to compete.

Maybe the safe move will pay off in the end, but I think most would have preferred to see the huge splash...

Totally agree.I was expecting OS X on it and more power.They really could have opened everyones eyes with this,but I can't say I'm impressed very much.

My wife uses a desk top located downstairs. It's slllloooowww and needs to be replaced. I could see getting her one of these as a replacement. She 1) plays solitaire; 2) email; 3) internet; and 4) does music. Problem is she has a Zune instead of an ipod. If we can solve the music conversion problem, this might be a good deal for a more portable, comfortable device. Also, she's a huge reader so the reader aspect would be a plus.

it just has so many things but they seem like they are functioning at 50%, kind of like the first iPhone. I think I'll wait for the iPad G2 before I would to purchase it for my own personal use. My girlfriend is an English Ph.D student and I want to get her a e-reader and after reading this thread I'm curious on what to do....I kind of want to make her the test subject and get the iPad. When does it come out? What do y'all think I should do for her in terms of the e-reader?

88 days...

Myself I'd go with the Nook, or more preferably wait for the Asus...

[EDIT]: Even more preferably... wait for the iPad G2....

The reader is the main reason my wife wants it,but I think I'll still wait for G2.

I thought it was really stupid\silly for them to exclude Flash while browsing. 90% of web pages use some sort of flash.

Going to Japan again in March. Gonna be watching movies, and playing poker on this bad boy on the way there.

The fact that my iPod Touch can't do Flash or Java is the main drawback. Half the websites I go to don't fully work. Unfortunately, I get the feeling both of those need a real OS to function, so the iPad probably wouldn't be able to get them to work.

You know you can jailbreak that, and the Flash plugin will work for it.....

it's almost like they deliberately left a bunch of stuff out of the Ipad so they had improvements to add in the next versions. Take advantage of the initial ebook rush to sell crap and then add the real improvements later on when people start to really compare the features.

:shrug:

I'll be interested in this when it drops to $349 or less. I love my iPod touch but right now, I just don't see any benefit to this Pad that I can't do on the touch other than a bigger screen and less portability. Make it $349 with the 3G already installed and upgradeable storage then we can talk. Probably will take a minimum of 2 years to get there though.

Why do people just keep mentioning ebook readers..

lol

This does exponentially more than ebook readers. I don't even know how they can compare.

The iPhone and iPod touch haven't run Flash natively in the years since their respective debuts, and it's pretty clear based on Steve Jobs's presentation yesterday that the iPad won't run Flash, either. When scrolling through the New York Times's main page, for example, where Flash ads or video might have been there were instead broken LEGO icons, big as life on the screen at the keynote.

Predictably, Adobe isn't happy about this, and is accusing Apple of "continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers." They go on to say that without Flash support, "users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web."

Let's work backwards from this. First of all, I'd be very interested to see where Adobe got those percentages. Apparently YouTube now accounts for a mere 25% of video on the internet? As for Hulu and a few of the other specific sites mentioned in Adobe's rant, now that Apple is in the business of selling content, exactly how is it in the company's best interest to provide access to that same content, through another company's platform, for free? And as far as games are concerned, once again Apple has this covered, through the App Store. Far from being limited, content publishers and consumers will merely have to adjust to a new method of publishing and consuming content: one that doesn't involve Adobe in any way.

I know anecdotal data is the worst kind there is, but in nearly a year of using my iPhone to connect to the internet, not only have I not missed Flash, I've been glad it isn't there. Flash's performance on Mac OS X is so abysmal that when YouTube announced an opt-in HTML5 beta to replace Flash, I bounced up and down in my office chair in glee. I can only imagine the bag of hurt that would be introduced if Apple let Flash run on its mobile devices.

If you want to know why Flash doesn't run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad, why Flash will never run on those devices, and why that's a really good thing, check out this piece by Daring Fireball's John Gruber. One of the key points of Gruber's argument is that Flash is, by far, the biggest source of application crashes in OS X. Flash crashes so often that Apple's engineers went out of their way to create a new mechanism for running plugins in Snow Leopard; in 10.6, Flash runs as its own process rather than being lumped in with Safari, meaning than when (not if) Flash crashes, it doesn't bring all of Safari down with it. Considering Flash's poor stability and fan-blasting, CPU-hogging performance on the Mac, gee, why wouldn't Apple want it running on their mobile devices?

Want to see something that "imposes restrictions on content publishers and consumers?" Look no farther than Flash itself. According to the company's own (possibly made-up) numbers, 70% of games and 75% of video on the internet is all shuffled through one company's proprietary plugin. I don't know about you, but that sounds awfully restrictive to me. It seems like a really bad idea to let a single company have that much control over the creation and delivery of the internet's content, don't you think?.

With the iPhone and iPod touch we already have tens of millions of mobile devices owned by tens of millions of highly satisfied consumers, and not one of those devices runs Flash. With the advent of the iPad, we can expect millions more mobile devices to hit the market, and none of them will run Flash, either. Thanks to YouTube and vimeo, HTML5's star is on the rise for delivering free video content on the internet, and the App Store has gaming covered. There's no telling what the internet will look like in ten years, but one thing appears certain: if things continue as they have, Adobe will no longer have the stranglehold over video and gaming content that it enjoys today.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/a...o-impose-rest/