It is a big iPhone. Really big one. If you love your iPhone, you are going to love this one. I am looking at the iPad home page at Apple. Steve Jobs proved himself wrong by creating a computing device that starts at $500. Sometimes proving yourself wrong is a good thing.

This is going to be the best YouTube player on the go for a while. Clam shell designs are outdated. They make the overall size while use uncomfortable. Nobody took that clue from cell phones, until now. Also an inch think tablets are not comfortable for lot of purposes, like reading books and magazines. The user interface is made for multi touch. Not just adjusted to multi touch. Touching on text to get things done is lame. Text should be there to assist when needed.

It is very thin. Thin enough to hold while lying down to read a book or using while traveling.

There is no clam shell to flip open. That is a no no for bed time, travel and such. I would rather carry a phone to do my computing than to carry a flip open computer while traveling.

No convoluted navigation to launch applications. iPhone already has a reasonably intuitive way to list applications.

App store. All your apps you purchased for your iPhone will download and work on iPad. There will be apps specifically designed for iPad as well.

iBooks. This is a huge improvement over what exists out there. The format is ePub. Now you don’t need to carry two devices for computing and reading. Let’s not go to the argument “you could always read on PC”. Since the format is ePub, you should be able to read books from multiple providers, technically. I see my Sony e-book reader going away. It is black and white and its battery doesn’t last this long.

Maps. There is definitely a big advantage to having a bigger screen for maps than on a phone. If Google can get the turn by turn navigation on to this one, it is an instant winner.

The iPad Case is has an amazing design. It allows you to use iPad in various positions to watch video and type.

The WiFi only models may appeal to some but in my opinion you may miss out on great apps that will require GPS. From what I understand only the WiFi+3G have the GPS.

I am an audio/video nut and the specs for iPad video specs doesn’t appeal much to me. It should have been 1080p. I know that would have meant lower battery life and higher price. May be a future version will have that.

The biggest gripe I have is same for all Apple products. No standard output connectors. Only the proprietary Apple connector. It solves the problem of having too many ports though. May be when we get to streaming everything, it wouldn’t matter. For now it means more accessories and cables.

Other OS vendors and their “partners” can start working on tablets now that everyone knows how a tablet should look and work. All they have to remember is what is important is not what is on the surface.

May not be the first version. But I have it on 2 computers now. I installed it only after SP1. Actually I had Vista even before the public beta. But then something changed and it became slower. Vista with SP1 is actually pretty good. I also like my OpenSuse Linux servers. What I don’t have is OSX. It is an annoying product. I am sorry, the OSX users are an annoying group, mostly. Also, Apple doesn’t care about openness, not even as much as Microsoft does.

I do have an iPhone, which is the only Apple product and I hate the fact I have to install and use iTunes for syncing the phone. The whole iTunes bundle is a hog on the system. My friends disable the services installed by Apple and run them only when they want.

Why I am writing this now? Well, I was reading some comments in a blog about the new Vista ads. Comments like Vista is a productivity killer, never works, completely broken.

In my experience the only thing that is broken on my Vista PC is the iTunes. It is a piece of crap. It messed up my music folders. Why does it have to physically move around the files to organize? Also, any time I sync my iPhone with iTunes, I cannot use anything else. It holds the whole computer hostage. Will I evere buy a Mac? Don’t know. Definitely not now. Not with the limited experience I have so far with iTunes and iPhone.

If Microsoft wrote Vista for one single set of hardware, it would have performed way better than any OSX crap. Apple fan boys are glotting over an OS that only runs on an extremely limited hardware set. A friend of mine recently sold his only Apple Macbook on ebay. He was fed up with OSX. All along he was running Vista with bootcamp. What a waste of money to get a Macbook to run Vista. That was about $2400? Now he has a Shuttle box in his living room that costed about $1000 including Vista.

Do I like Microsoft. I used to. Even today I don’t hate them but I am not a fanboy. But I like the Microsoft users. They are the most polite users you will see on any message board or blog comments. No matter what the other OS fanboys say, that is where I like to belong.

I have never installed iTunes on my work computer based on my experience with it on my home computers. It installs stuff that runs in background and now it installs a device driver for iPhone etc. My colleague who also has an iPhone installed the iTunes 8 today and it bricked the computer. It was the device driver that caused the trouble. It blue screens while booting. All afternoon he was trying to get it back to working. The last I saw him doing was trying to use system recovery. Not sure if it will work. While loading drivers, it is faults in KERNEL32.EXE.

For the past few days I have been postponing the update message from Apple Software Updater on my home computer. I think I will wait until the issues are completely resolved. I only recently rebuilt my computer to Vista. I do have completely PC backup though.

I am tired of waiting for the ultimate Windows Mobile Phone in the US. Meanwhile everyone else is enjoying the benefits of iPhone. Two of my friends who were waiting for the coolest Windows Mobile phone had already switched to iPhone. None of us like the closed platform that Apple provides. But Windows Mobile doesn’t seem to be delivering on its potential. Microsoft’s dependence on mobile phone manufacturers doesn’t seem to be working. I know they acquired one, but there is no news about what their plans are and such.

Today I went ahead and purchased the 8GB black iPhone 3G. Right now it is syncing with iTunes on my Vista machine. It looks like iTunes is frozen because it is not responding to my mouse clicks. I never liked iTunes anyway. Compared to Windows Media Player 10/11, it is pretty primitive. I hate the way it moves around files on my computer. iPhone says the sync is in progress but I doubt it. I do not have too many files to sync.

As for the hardware, these are little things I have noticed. iPhone has one of the best designed chargers I have ever seen. It is just a small cube that plugs in to a power outlet with a USB port on the other end. I completely dislike the custom cable required to connect the iPhone to anything else. I am glad that they provide a cable with the phone unlike old Motorola phones where you had to purchase a cable and then you got the software along with the cable. Motorola already switched to standard USB cables like most of the rest of the world.

I don’t know yet the quality of 3G, but even without update to software version 2.0.2, the Internet access speed was good. I just updated to the latest version. I didn’t know that the download size was almost a quarter of a gigabyte. The best updates I have seen are from Microsoft where the updates are not like the entire OS.

Even though the iPhone 3G had been out for almost a month now, there was a line to get it in the AT&T store. Not too long but everyone had to wait like 30 minutes to an hour. With all the recession and all, I was not expecting the line for a phone. I am not sure if this is how it is always done, but the AT&T was only able to transfer my contacts to SIM card and then that SIM card to the iPhone. Other data like ring tones, pictures etc were not transferred in store.

The quality of Apple movie downloads are only near DVD quality. I would not bother to download them. But Microsoft has nothing right now and Apple well may start HD content before Microsoft even comes to this market. Cinemanow has been doing Movie downloads for ages now at a better quality but they did not market it well. The sound quality on these downloads are also poor at Dolby Surround. These movies are good enough for portable devices but definitely not for a media center.

My preferences are for true 1080i/p movies with Dolby Digital sound. WMV had the potential but Microsoft is slow as usual. From the T2 days things haven’t changed much. My experience with T2 extreme edition DVD was quite bad and never went back to WMV. I consider myself as a techie and could not get it to work without some tinkering.

I never had an Apple product but I have been thinking about a laptop after they went Intel. If Apple makes the HD move first, I might jump to Apple camp. I have had a big screen HDTV for 3 years now and am frustrated about lack of true HD content. Initially I had Dish network with HD receiver and now I have Comcast with HD receiver and they are good.

I don’t mind downloading HD content over my Comcast connection which is pretty fast. I download tons of stuff including Vista builds that about 3 gig over this connection. There definitely is a market for such content but these companies are not willing to make real improvements in user experience.