So I was in JB-HiFi the other day. It is, rather sadly, the last local place one can see a wide selection of PC games. Naturally they sell other junk, their main gig being music. However, I was looking at the Macs and while I know oh so little about the actual use of them, I do appreciate their attractive external look.

Several friends of mine are excited about the iPad and I am curious myself. The iPhone so small and with my bad hearing was never going to be a go for me but the iPad may be. So I found myself looking at the keynote speech on the device and I must warn you. It is horribly long.

Apparently the main speaker Steve Jobs (the CEO/face of Apple) has had a liver transplant. I hope to look so good if I have my parts replaced one day.

No blog post on the iPad is complete without mentioning the iTampon thing. Really shows us how childish we are collectively ‘sophisticating’ and poo and pee style jokes. “Teabagging” is another one. Still the name is a marketing gaffe.

But let’s head into the actual device. Once you get past their self congratulations, they launch into the “third category” sandwiched between the small but ultra mobile devices like smartphones and the all growed up Laptops.

This “third category” most people know as netbooks. And right away he says no no this is not a netbook. In a way he’s right. It’s both far better and far worse than a netbook. But it will compete with netbooks, oh yes!

So onto the pros and the Apple team have obviously set certain minimum standards fairly high and stretched to reach them. The question is how much is broken on the way?

The sleek device is 9.7in and only ½ an inch thick. That’s ideal. It’s not as portable as a phone but still very readily moved around. A homewide/homeroam, bigpocket or knapsack device. The display looks “gorgeous” as they say. Crisp, clear, responsive. And it has the multitouch screen as well as the flip to landscape or portrait concept the iPhone uses. So far so good.

One of the most obvious touchy points is the ‘keyboard’. Really part of the screen space. They say it’s nearly as big as a netbook. One wonders what it’s like to type on.

It browses, it does movies and pictures and Google maps and email and ‘apps’ and books oh my! And it sells apps and music and videos and books oh yes! And they claim 10 hours battery life while on and a month while off. You can even run your iPhone apps on it.

And then we start hitting the snags. Far far too much of the speech was taken up by “gorgeous” and “great”, “terrific”, “exciting”, “amazing”, “tremendous” and “thrilled”. It doesn’t take Einstein to see quite quickly that they have more to offer in words than in product.

Apple is obviously a closed source type company and the dependence (can one run other apps etc?) and prominence I see in their selling portals makes this device look like a sales con. How difficult too, to share with friends and family? Will that be stifled?

Then there’s the technical problems. The first of which is no multitasking. So no music while you iWork. No browsing this while flipping to that. It’s a fairly serious weakness which may be solvable later depending on that A4 chip and the software side of things.

It doesn’t have a cam. So no photos, no videos, no Skype etc. Not quite a deal breaker but corner cost cutting taken too far in my opinion.

It doesn’t play any media you throw at it. It has too many quality and format limits which are too strict and worst of all it won’t do Adobe Flash. This is going to degrade it’s value especially in browsing.

And a few minor missing bits

• no USB/Memory card reader etc. Solved with adaptors. Thus too many clunky adapters.
• no GPS. Not exactly demanded but it would be more useful than mobile tower tracking.
• local issues for Aussies and maybe other internationals. Such as no iBooks here and the device’s heat tolerance is crappy.
• questions about using carriers besides AT&T

One more trouble might be that tech-addicts have less need for the device if they already have similar devices such as the iPhone or Kindle. Newer users have to face the learning curve of how to use the touch interface.

Now we come to price. It’s $US499 for the basic 16GB WiFi only version. Up to $US829 for the 64MB WiFi & 3G. I think this is very competitive. In a way this allows a badly delivered iTampon joke about just how messy this is going to get. Very bloody messy. Every corporate in the mobile devices market from Microsoft to Google to HP etc as well as suppliers to them such as ASUS are going to get busy offering this and that. I rather suspect it’s going to be good for consumers of regular netbooks once we find our way through the trash that will invariably be offered.

Overall I think the iPad will do well enough despite the issues but be whinged about fairly heavily. It may also widen Apple’s market.