I've been looking forward to Apple's entry into the netbook market. They've said in the past that they'll enter the market if they can make a unique contribution to the field and I think the iPad pretty much fits the bill. If you haven't seen it yet, there's a video over at Apple's website. It's much more impressive than any words or simple pictures can describe. I have a few thoughts:

• The name is extremely unfortunate and spawned a slew of Max iPad and 'heavy flow...of data' jokes on twitter. Would iSlate or iTile or iThingy have been better? Probably not. Slate is already considered a form-factor, so they'd lose brand recognition with that.
• The screen feels like the wrong shape to me. I'm a photographer and 35mm (2x3) is what feels right to me. Widescreens are too wide and 4x3 just reminds me of outdated technology.
• The bezel is super wide. It reminds me of netbooks where they skimped on screen size but couldn't fit the innards into a matching package. This could be for technical reasons though; maybe it was too hard to hold if the screen went all the way to the edge.
• It's basically a giant iPod Touch. This isn't exactly a bad thing, but I already have an iPod touch. Actually...it's really not a bad thing and it's a big improvement on the iPod. The interface is amazing, and it runs smooth as butter...but I already have an iPod touch.
• It would be great for taking notes in meetings. My laptop gets way too embedded on my desk with peripherals and extra monitors to unplug and take to meetings for notes; an iPad would be perfect.
• It would make a great monitor for a tethered photoshoot. I can already shoot tethered with my laptop but the iPad is really sleek, so it would look great sitting on its stand so my client could see exactly what I shot. It would also be doing only and exactly what it needed to do; a laptop is overkill.
• $500 is not a bad price, but a little higher than I'd want to go for a 16GB device right now. I can fill 16GB with photos very, very quickly.
• I want one.

That's more or less what I was thinking during the keynote.

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