Flash player is available for Android and Maemo and will shortly be available for webOS. It is supposed to work quite well on the more powerful ARM smartphones.

I want one of these. I have a work laptop for working and an iPod for portable music, but I don’t like the smallness of the iPhone/iTouch for the calendar/pda/email functionality. This product “speaks” to me as I have a simple phone and wanted something like this for all the other things for which they designed this (dvds/cd’s/digital photo album/e-reader/email.) I find I don’t need as my computery things in the souped-up pda device I am looking for.

I work in the IT field and really like apple design products. I inherited an iPhone that I used as an iTouch but I found I went back to my paper calendar/pda and my iPod, becuase the keyboard was too small; this looks better to me.

I also don’t need a camera in it. I like my SLR digital camera for pics; I do however, like the size of this for a portable digital album. I will also wait to see the next generation though. I just spent $$$ on a souped up, large screen iMac for my other non portable computer needs and it actually was cheaper than the windows based machine I was comparing it to.

@PRT – interesting point about the classroom barrier that laptops present. I’m a college student myself and I understand the sensation, however I don’t know if the iPad would be any less distracting. Not to mention students could just tilt it up against the desk and the same problem would occur. If it was set flat on a table it also means that you have more of an eye-flick to pay attention to the instructor than you do now with a laptop, but I don’t know if that counts as a positive or a negative.

I also chimed in to say, being female, I had the same reaction as some others on here to the name “iPad”. The MadTV sketch of an “iPad” as an actual feminine hygiene product happened years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjU0K8QPhs
However, I remember the same sort of discussion about the Wii when it came out, so it’s probably safe to say that the product name will survive the mocking.

As for me, I am now waiting for the iPud, the iPeed, the iPood, and perhaps the most accurate name: the iPaid.

We (wife, child, and myself) all want one of these. If nothing else, they’d likely replace 2 out of 3 laptops we now have littering the living room and allow me to move my desktop up to workshop as well. For me, these are the players for our a/v collection, our connection out to the internet, e-book readers (finally picked up paper back copy of Old Man’s War, after reading Tor pdf for a couple years on my work machine) and cool game players. Despite having picked up a Wii in October (that name’s moved beyond jokes so likely Apple will also bend language around to iPad use), am finding that we (daughter and I) split our game time almost equally between iPhone and Wii.

As far as gen. 1 goes, yeah, no camera’s a bummer. Kidlet has fun on iPhone, taking pics and playing around with various picture apps. Lacking Flash isn’t that big of a deal to me. A lot of sites are starting to move to HTML to get away from the dangers of security Flash exploits. More will follow. Multi-tasking isn’t all that important either. On my iPhone, I can start it checking mail, fire up some music and then start playing a game or surfing the web and it’ll let me know when email’s in. For a somewhat more specialized device than a regular computer, that’ll work for me.

The two things that I do hope get addressed are a way of streaming movies from my iTunes AV server to the pad, and not require synching movies over in order to watch them. Was really hoping this thing would be like an wireless Apple TV with built in monitor. The other thing is, I hope there’s a way to use a stylus on this. Really want Wacom Cintiq functionality with this thing. Would be sweet!

“the iPad sucks”: this is based on your extensive use of the product? that’s not shipping yet? or were you at the launch yesterday?

Why is it so hard for people to say “I dunno, at first glance it appears not to meet my needs, so I probably won’t buy one” instead of “it sux”?

[P.S. "no real computer/OS"? it's running freakin' UNIX!]

But yes, the iPad sucks, no real computer/OS, still vendor lock-in, hf.

@ 20. JK: It’s a fortune cookie?