What is on Your Mind?

you may want to read this:
Daring Fireball: Apple, Adobe, and Flash
I just checked the release notes of firefox and searched for "flash". I really cannot blame apple or youtube or whoever wants to get rid of flash.

replacement of batteries:
the lifetime of electronical devices is not equal to the lifetime of human beings.

@corona688:
I will never-ever give away any of my ancient apples. And when I die, I hopefully will get an iPhone and a Macbook into my coffin.

overprized gadget for apple zealots

I read (somewhere on the net) that LCD displays do not make good eBook readers and are nearly unreadable in sunlight. This was confirmed by reborg and his discussion earlier. Then, I read more about this and how inferior LCD displays (like in the iPad) are for ebook reading.

Of course that does not matter to those who love Apple products. They prefer an inferior Apple product to a superior product by another company. For me, since I don't need an ebook reader in the sunlight, I'm OK with an LCD ebook reader, as I read in cars, planes, "that special library where the bathtub is" and my bed.

What bothers me the most is the lack of USB support and the fact that I will be locked into certain telco companies and cannot use just any SIM card for GPRS if I need it.

Apples needs to open up, IMHO.

At least the iMac has a unix/darwin BSD core, that is great.

It is time for Apple to do the same thing with the iPad and make it more interoperable and with a replaceable battery.

Also, I agree the price is too high. $499 is only bare bones entry.

On the other hand, I still might buy an "unlocked" version

Uh, so maybe some of you would like this one better:
Shenzen P88 | Tablet News
has usb, rj45, wlan, gps, cardslot ... I think even the battery is replaceable.

I think you've lost the plot a bit... we're discussing the iPad

The iPad is a nice looking device. I watched the Steve Jobs presentation, and everything it does, it does nicely. Even as an eBook reader, with the new iBooks store, looked elegant, in typical Apple fashion.

What steve jobs didn't show is what is doesn't do (or have).

And that's what people who are debating here are discussing.

Jobs did say however that the device was not locked, which is a bonus if you don't want to be tied in with a particular network.

As much as I'd like to find a place for this, I just don't see where it fits.

I have a netbook, and an iPhone.

If I wanted an ebook reader, I'd probably buy a Kindle from Amazon.

Having said that, I tend to purchase this kind of thing more on impulse than on common sense or necessity. So I dare say that having walked through a shop 49 times while managing to resist buying one, on the fiftieth visit I probably will.

Sorry, I couldn't resist, but this is too good to pass. Be sure to watch the video below the picture, and keep in mind: it's from 2007...

I agree that flash is an unstable piece of garbage on anything except Windows. Even on Windows, its a pig(in execution -- in installation, it's remained surprisingly tiny!). When they ported it, they seemed to rip out all the error checking -- one gentoo user managed to solve most of his flash crashes by installing every possible font. On Windows, it doesn't draw fonts it doesn't have, everywhere else, it just dies. I'm tempted to recompile Freetype with debugging to track down exactly what missing fonts Flash usually throws tantrums over.

It's also a software of much exploitation. It's frequently abused to cause unblockable popups. It can startle you and your co-workers with unexpected speech. (what moron decided talking ads were a good idea? You leave the page FASTER!) It's a frequent culprit for hogging the sound device, even when it's not playing anything. And when's the last time you saw a flash ad raging at anything but cpu-burning bleeding-edge maximum FPS maximum quality alpha blend gradient?

It's also seemingly airtight in a few important ways -- it may lag, freeze, popup, or crash your browser, but I've never heard of any crackers obtaining filesystem access through malicious flash. It also provides content providers like youtube and internet radio the faux-security of an application layer between the browser and the data stream. (The new flash-less iphone support on youtube has become a hole through which people can download and save video arbitrarily.) It's extremely useful despite all its faults... Therein lies the problem. Which is conveniently defined by the manufacturer as however long they feel like supporting the thing.