The iPad Is Here: Now What?

By FITSNews || Apple’s “magical and revolutionary” iPad arrived in U.S. stores on Saturday – not three days ago, as ABC’s new show Modern Family suggested.

Seriously, people … we were actually sort of enjoying ABC for the first time in three decades (even laughing at the show’s token gay couple) until we realized that we’d been sucked into a half-hour infomercial for the iPad.

From CNET’s latest “Technically Incorrect” column:

This was less of a product placement and more of a product kidnapping a show and holding it by the neck very tightly indeed until it handed over a pile of money. Even the Apple store was featured. And I am sure that Steve Jobs being the largest shareholder in Disney, via the Pixar acquisition, had no influence at all in the creation of this work of art.

Yeah … “what he said.”

Anyway, though, the iPad is here – and having deleted three or four spam-mails asking us if we’d like to have a free one, we’re now debating whether we want to drop $500-700 to pick one up the old-fashioned way.

Seriously, we just got our first iPod (a 32 G “Touch”) a few months ago, and this looks … well, bigger.

In fact, with a 9.7″ screen, it’s somewhere between a smartphone and a netbook, as far as we can tell – a device that’s great for receiving information (i.e. webpages, movies, documents, spreadsheets, digital books, etc.) but not as great for creating it.

So … is there a market for something like that?  Apparently so.

Thousands have already pre-ordered the devices, and thousands more lined up at stores Saturday to buy them.  In fact, Apple estimates it will move 7 million iPads this year.

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Apple iPad (Official Site)