“And of course most Apple people don’t even know that Microsoft and its partners had been innovating in this market for a decade already anyway.”

Doesn’t that mean they’ve been doing it badly?

Another one bites the dust. Honestly, people, when there is another product that is actually produced and for sale, have at it with the iPad comparisons. Until then,you just look silly.

They’re also apparently selling iPads at a rate of more than 200,000 per WEEK (though that is an estimate, not a hard figure).

Some day I hope to fail as well as Apple has for the past ten years.

My mother and step father visited over the weekend, and I finally got to show them my iPad. It went as predicted: once I got my mother flipping through some recent photos she hadn’t seen before, the device all but disappeared.

We were talking about my photos then, not the iPad, which only came into it when we needed to zoom or rotate something. Half the reason I got it was to use it as a digital portfolio, it worked brilliantly.

A: The iPad actually exists.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/29/hewlett-packard-to-kill-windows-7-tablet-project/

By the way, Microsoft’s Courier device concept - the other “iPad Killer” - is also a no show. True, MS never explicitly announced anything, but since the cat was let out of the bag, MS looks like it can’t make good on its promise. This is why Apple is so aggressive about keeping things under wrap until they’re ready. I’m willing to bet they’ve come up with hundreds, maybe thousands of promising concepts and prototypes that we’ll never see because they couldn’t deliver.

It’s too bad actually, the OS concept video was amazing. I’m not sure it could have actually worked as shown (there’s an issue of UI consistency and overly complicated procedures), but the thinking was creative and showed promise.

Regarding the HP Slate, I found this bit particularly interesting:

[…] our source tells us that HP is not satisfied with Windows 7 as a tablet operating system.

This is interesting to me because a week ago I posted this:

Windows is a desktop OS, designed to be used with a large monitor and a very precise interface (a mouse, trackball, or trackpad, all of which move a very exact pointer on the screen). The Mac OS suffers from many of the same problems when applied to a touch interface on a relatively small screen: Tiny UI elements with difficult to read icons and text.

I guess HP agrees, though it would be dishonest of me not to point out that the reason may also have to do with the challenges of fitting Intel hardware into a slate form factor:

HP may also be abandoning Intel-based hardware for its slate lineup simply because it’s too power hungry. That would also rule out Windows 7 as an operating system.

Either way, that’s three “iPad Killers” up in smoke (JooJoo, HP Slate, MS Courier). Hopefully Google can get something killer put together using Android and/or Chrome OS to keep Apple on their toes (though Chrome OS has been almost three years coming with no release to date). I want the iPad I buy in two or three years to make the one I have now look like a gerbil-wheel powered toothbrush.