It weighs how much? It costs how much? Doesn't seem like a winner.
AFAICT the only advantages it has over a less-expensive netbook is that it has a little more screen real estate and it has a better form factor for interstitial use. If it were priced competitively with the Kindle it might catch on, but I don't see that happening.

See, I'm almost with you there. I can't decide if this meant to compete as a really badly formated netbook substitute, or as a suped-up kindle substitute.

Most people I know who have netbooks basically use them for browsing and word processing, but I'm a student. If ebooks were to start to become more useful for students (higher number of academic volumes released as ebooks, at the same time as the dead-tree version), then I can sort of see the iPad becoming more popular as a sort of glorified plug-in for someone using a cheaper desktop at home. THAT configuration would probably actually be priced competitively, when compared to a laptop.

But in terms of price- the Kindle is $250, with free 3G network. The larger version is almost $500. A netbook runs from $300-500 dollars. With the keyboard that you can buy for the iPad, this might be all the laptop some people need.

My experience with my netbook have made me question this. The only times I've used the optical drive on my MacBook has been to upgrade the OS (once), rip a mix CD a friend sent me (once, and she could have just sent me mp3's), and to watch a single movie on a plane (once, which I could have downloaded beforehand or gone without). Optical drives just aren't that useful to a lot of people anymore.

Well, I guess I tend to think of my laptop as a substitute for a lot of things: TV, DVD player, CD player, speakers, camera (for certain kinds of pictures), telephone, word processor and news paper. Some of those tasks are really optical drive specific. You can work around the lack of an optical drive pretty easily if you have to, and if you are working with newer media. What I like about the optical drive is it means that I can go back and look at older stuff I put on CD- loosing that would mean transferring a lot of data to my harddrive and just keeping it there.

I dunno. I think the iPad is very pretty and shiney, but I think I would wait for them to work through the first generation's kinks before I put any money down.