How long have we been waiting for this exactly? It feels like forever. Rumours have been popping up and disappearing only to reemerge months later for years now. Apparently the iPhone was born out of tablet research and technology’s and now the iPhone and the iPod Touch get their big brother the iPad.

I have a very mixed range of emotions to it. It’s gorgeous, it’s sexy, like the iPhone it just works so simplistically while still being complex and most importantly of all i want one. However i also feel a little underwhelmed. Maybe it’s the mass of hype and build up to it that have made me feel this way or maybe it’s the fact that it is pretty much just a large iPod Touch. For me i would use it in place of my iphone while at home. It’d live under the sofa or the TV cabinet or similar and would be used mainly for the web over wifi so surfing, blogging, Twitter and probably games/apps to. I can’t see it going any further than the garden though and as a result I really don’t see the point in 3G versions.

I think the bigger news i think is the book store. It’s another business model for apple to rake it in from and the way it appears to work is very nice but again this is just a variant on the app store so is hardly groundbreaking.

I want to play with one and I’d love to own one but it seems a bit extravagant when the biggest impact it would have on my life is to preserve my iPhone battery a bit.

I will probably give it a miss and just wait for the next iPhone though

Update: Say I buy an iPad, I buy it to use on a commute. I get on the train, I sit at one of the highly coveted tables. 1 person at the other side of the table has a laptop/ netbook and is watching a movie, surfing the web, emailing or whatever. His laptop screen creates a natural barrier giving him a degree of privacy, a degree of privacy only achievable by me if I hold my iPad for the entire time. Not that great