Gadgetman: Apple iPad – It’s Official!

All over the Interweb this morning is news of the latest Apple product, the iPad.  Rumored for months if not years, the iPad was officially announced by Mr. Jobs himself.

The specs of the device are already on Apples site.  It has an almost 4.3 format display instead of the 16:9 widescreen of the iPhone and iPod Touch.  It has an Apple designed CPU and it runs iPhone OS 3.2.  The device is synced to a Mac or PC and content is loaded via iTunes, just like the iPod/iPhone.  One of the best features is that there is an option for Wifi OR Wifi + 3G, making it a truly portable product, and a great web browsing device anywhere.

For a hands on check out this Engadget post.

And being an Apple product, the world is going stupid and already media/technology type people are being asked for their feedback.

Overall I think this is a really nice product, but I feel it may have a very small niche market; of course being an Apple product it will sell really well to fan boys and Apple lovers, but I am not so sure.  It can do web, email, books, audio and video etc, but it is still controlled by a PC; it has no life of its own.  Sure I guess you could use it without syncing it, but this would limit the content dramatically.

Oh, and there is a cool keyboard dock to turn it into a computer like thing.

Pricing starts at $499USD, and availability is supposed to be the second quarter.  Of course we can expect it sometime latter this year in New Zealand with the inevitable delay down here.