skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried asking this question on Stack Overflow a couple weeks ago. I got some good answers, though I don't feel like I got one really definitive answer. Anyhow, I'd recommend reading through that thread to see if anything leaps out at you.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2039904/what-statistics-s...
Testing at Digg
Only if the appearance of the physical hardware is all you care about.
Nope. Notion Ink's Adam looks better actually.
The thing is that the iPad is not a computer in the sense we're used to think about that word.

Would you want root access to your microwave, your alarm-clock, your TV or your stereo system? Maybe you would I don't know, but I probably wouldn't. TVs are not developed on TVs, and it's similar for the iPad. Yes, technically it could do a lot of things you would want it to do because its components are so similar to a "regular" computer, but it's not what it is for.
In my mind:

For surfing the web:
iPad > netbooks

For reading books:
Kindle > iPad
And how do you get that stuff on it without being able to plug in a USB drive?
Maybe. I'd been thinking about getting an linux based ARM netbook or even a tablet when either showed up for casual surfing when the wife's using the MacBook. I'd also been pondering an e-book reader. This could kill two birds with one stone and maybe let me watch films and tv with headphones on in bed or the couch while the wife watches something else on TV.

On the other hand, does it do Dvorak? How does it deal with two different users with different email accounts, web histories etc? What's it actually going to cost in the UK?

If it can stream media from a linux box and it's powerful enough to do interesting things with HTML5 apps then I've probably talked myself into it.
No camera, no "real" GPS. No.
There is a dock for it... Which means that it wouldn't be very portable.
I've implemented the geolocation bit a few times. What I like to do is have the detected location in the box, but a little faded out, if they click in the box, the entire text is selected (so they can override it just by clicking), and once they've changed and submitted their location it gets cookied so it becomes the default when they come back.

I'm sure it still confuses some people, but the more common it becomes, the more everyone gets used to it.

The benefit differs across markets and audience though, so I agree it shouldn't be a rule of thumb for good design. At least not yet.
Not quite true — at $500 it's more affordable than a regular Macbook, so for people not in need of full computing power, it might be a viable alternative.

...once it gets flash support, of course.
No

No flash video

No SD slot

No USB (come on apple)

No writing input (newton 2?)

Weird itouch/iphone OS, means apps/everything controlled by apple, expensive

No eink display
that woul be true for most non verbal human communications, I'm afraid.
My latest experience is with Norwegians, who seem to make an aspirated "uh!" sound for the equivalent of the conversational "mh-mh, keep going".
I thought for a while they were perpetually stupefied people.
The TN panels they're being compared against there are terrible, though. My Eee (which is otherwise fairly similar: a 10" display at 1024x600) looks fine at those angles.

I have seen laptops with displays that are that bad, but it's not the norm, but it doesn't make sense to use them as the basis for IPS-TN comparisons.
Would also be great for her if there were a camera for video conferencing!
iPad once challenged Chuck Norris to a fight. Norris hasn't been seen since.

(Is that the kind of "iPad facts" you mean?)
It's almost guaranteed that anybody who disses a product is very likely to have never tried it.

Likely they read it on some blog that it is shit and just believed it.
The site now does an IP address location and zooms you to the state level.
I don't know what kind of screen my IBM x41 has, but viewing angle has never been any sort of problem when using it in tablet mode.
Custom chip makes it hard to hack with no documentation and possible encryption built in.
I got a login required on the FA site. Thanks for the pdf.
I agree with the article. I look more forward to a light weight Chrome netbook. I don't know if it is the offing or not, but perhaps a Chrome netbook could forgo a physical keyboard and have a popup virtual keyboard like my Droid (although that adds the expense of a touchscreen). Bonus points to hardware manufacturers: sell a Chrome netbook that looks like a iPad, but has a slide out physical keyboard like my Motorola Droid phone.
Bandcamp - best music distribution web site
Such a false dichotomy.

"Oh, you're critical of this thing that you don't like? BET YOU CAN'T DO ANY BETTER!"

"No thanks, I have more money than time, I think I'll just spend the bux on the thing that does do it better"
Yea Joshua, I was going to submit one but held back.
Not really no.

But knowing how much RAM the thing has would be nice, as well as if you can make voice calls with it.
Are you referring to the UI?

UI is a matter of personal taste.

I have an Android phone (G1) and just recently bought an IPod Touch.

I don't like the Touch's navigation. Sure, UI is beautiful but having an extra button would have definitely enhanced the navigation.

Android may have overdone it with 5+ buttons but I'll take that over just 1.
I'm downloading it for about an hour now.
The iTunes stores! It is monopoly at its finest. Apple could eventually half the price if the masses by their books and software and rent or buy their movies all from Apple.

Eventually, there will be an iPad to Apple TV interface, and they can cut out the cable companies too.

Scary now that I think about it.
I am quite surprised how poor the showing is for live coverage.

Fox news had a very delayed high quality video feed which dropped several times. CNN had a feed which went to "back soon" as soon as I joined it. Ustream had a feed which was solid up to 16,500 viewers with good quality audio and awful video until it collapsed.

Ars Technica had a "LiveCoverage" plugin thing which fell over all the time, their IRC server timed out twice. Even Engadget who are by far the best site I found failed to load several times.

Twitter stayed up, but wasn't quite what I was looking for.

I ended up with a Leo Laporte laptop/webcam stream restreamed via justin.tv with unusable video and near unusable audio. They claimed 90-150,000 viewers at times, so well done to them.

What happened to 2010, broadband, P2P, multicast, memcached, cloud scalability? How can IRC crash with too many users? People have been shunting text around for several decades.

If multimillion dollar media press companies can't do this properly what hope does everyone else have?
http://movies.apple.com/media/us/ipad/2010/tours/apple-ipad-...
Not even AMD own their own fabs anymore.

Also, they still don't make the screens/memory/etc...

The chips sounds pretty good though (HD Video for 10 hours on one charge).
I actually agree with you 100% that people love something that's easy to play with. That's what I meant when I said that Apple's simplicity is their strength. What I'm talking about is a difference between "open" turnkey and "closed" turnkey.

I love turnkey, and so do a lot of people. Who wants to fuss with installing new software, etc.? That's my perspective.

Closed-systems are much easier to make turnkey, but they aren't the only alternative.

Just because something is open, doesn't mean that it can't be simple. It CAN be tinkered with, but it doesn't have to be to make it work.

That response is shorter than I'd like, but I have to run unfortunately.
Yes: don't until you're asked. iPod demos and tech specs pages on Apple's website don't advertise what formats it doesn't play. An iPhone demo wouldn't show dropped calls, at least not if it were easily preventable.
Arg...I found it through Google, so they didn't give me that. Sorry :(
Global Warming vs. Clojure
YanTheBlackMan Reviews the iPad
No camera; that was a surprise to me. Apparently there's a "camera connection kit" to let you copy photos from your camera or SD card though?
An Affordable $199 Tablet for Everyone -- And It's Not From Apple
Yes, but he's not your grandma. If he'd done the standard geek thing and said "why would anyone buy this..." and listed some obscure geek reasons then fine, but he didn't.

I'm actually thinking about buying one for myself but it's true that the competition I'm weighing it up against is one or more cheap, no-brand, linux devices (openinkpot e-reader, cheap netbook, tegra webpad, openpandora) at a fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure you've killed the metaphor yet.

Because, in fact, the sale of gas is subject to a great deal of regulation. That's to prevent someone from selling you adulterated gas that destroys your car's emission system. Or from selling you leaded gas that pollutes the air that our kids have to breathe.

And the reason the manufacturer doesn't need to enforce your use of the roads is that it's already being enforced by a higher authority. We have cops for that. And they very much do dictate that you keep your car on public roads, and not go driving off across someone else's lawn, or the National Mall.

If you think these extensions to the metaphor make no sense, you're missing the elephant in the room: Personal computers are insecure, and the average web surfer is more likely (probably, alas, by an order of magnitude) to have their computer steal their credit card numbers or grind to a halt under a flood of malware than they are to crack open the box or write a single line of code. An enormous number of people don't want the freedom I want, any more than they want to own an acetylene torch.
Not at all. I'm glad the iPad inherited it's core user-experience philosophy from the iPhone and iTouch - Apple has positioned the iPad as a device suited not just for entertainment but as a tool to G.S.D; a tool that is actually FUN to use.

I'm personally very excited about the potential for applications that really take advantage of touch and gesture to make more mundane tasks not only bearable but enjoyable.

That said...yeah it's a giant iPod Touch.
My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos

Oh, but they can't because those are on YouTube and it doesn't do Flash. Simple doesn't have to mean purposely disabled to make more money.
For the record, I literally /facepalm'd when I saw the keyboard/dock.
Yes, because most people don't want a device. They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.
How do you get the text you're reading right now on your computer without being able to plug in a USB drive?
An interesting up-and-coming alternative to a recently hyped, closed-platform tablet.
I know of no other company that can charge $100 for 16GB of flash memory. Differentiating on real features like 3G is good and expected. Differentiating on commodity hardware like memory is unfair.

With the ubiquity of SD and micro SD and need for more and more storage due to the explosion of digital media, they don't even provide a port. Obviously, they don't provide a port because it would destroy their product line. When you have the cheapest digital electronics providing these ports and high-end hardware like the iPod/Phone/Pad not providing it, that says a lot. It says "we don't care about anything except our product the money in your wallet."

It's ironic that MS gets so much flack from developers in the OSS purist and Apple fanbois camps about their closed products. They've always been the most open from the hardware perspective and they've always been great to developers. Apple is just the opposite.

If we care about an open future in computing, we need to think clearly about which platforms to develop for.
The Free Software Foundation's Reaction to the iPad Launch
It is almost certainly based on the Cortex A9 instead of the A8 that current Snapdragons use, which means multiple cores. Apple knows how to use multiple cores effectively and the ability to stop them when not using them is a nice power savings.

Snapdragons extend by adding in the wireless circuitry. I'd wager that A4 left that to other chips and extended with someone's graphic rendering engine, say Imagination Technologies?

But I think the most important reason is that it lets Apple make the design decisions that make sense for their projected use, not what some chip house thinks will be the focus three years down the road.
In addition to looking for what people say about you, you should look for what people don't say about you because they don't know you. Plug your keywords in those things and be there when conversation touches the subject you care about.
I can see why the makers of the Modbook weren't exactly shaking in their boots, totally different target market for this thing.
The market is people like myself I guess. I'd like something I can leave in the living room or bedroom and be able to surf the web or check e-mail without being limited to my iphone screen. It would also be wonderful for plane trips. My 17" MBP doesn't work too well on most US domestic coach seats, so having a smaller, 10 hour batt life eBook reader, video player, etc... would be great. Yes, I've tried watching videos on my iphone on the plane. The screen is small and you have to either hold it up the whole time, or bend your head down, neither is comfortable. Also with iWork and projector support I could bring things on many day trips/business meetings instead of lugging my full laptop.

It's basically an iPhone only bigger screened, a Kindle only better and bigger screened, with color, a video player, and enough of a laptop to get me by on day trips and sales meetings. Well worth $499, and in fact well worth $829.

Your needs may vary from mine, but don't assume just because you don't want one that means there's no market. I and my five closest friends are all getting them, so out of tech folks I know personally, that's a pretty decent indicator.
Exactly. The iPhone put a smartphone into the hands of people who were not gadget freaks. If this device gets moms and grandmas surfing the web from the couch, then it'll outsell any netbook. There's still lots of blue ocean there.
David Thorne (of 'spider drawing' fame) attacks again
What's wierd about what you've just said is that you obviously don't have a web tablet -- a Nokia N810, a Samsung Q1, a Viliv S5, a UMID mbook... ?

What really makes the iPad any more special, especially considering the price?

Please don't say the UI, as it's not so well loved by everyone...
As others have pointed out, a front-facing camera sounds like a good idea until you think about how you'd have to hold the iPad "just so," so that you'd get the right angle for the picture. It certainly wouldn't work well if you were trying to prop it up in your lap, unless you're going to hunch over to look down at it.

Now if they could come up with a clever solution to that problem, I'd definitely like to see a camera in a future iteration of the iPad.
erm, 'thief' is spelled wrong both in the domain name and in the page name.
Custom dock connector, since I'll need to cary a dock converter with me to plug in usb devices.

I'll probably by the first version with a standard port onboard and a camera.
I'd much rather have a device with lots of hardware controls and a touchscreen, so that I can control the device without looking at it, or even taking it out of my pocket.

That said, the bottom touch bar was an absolutely terrible idea; I don't know how that made it through dogfood testing. Closed vs. open aside, what makes Apple unique is that they would have scrapped such a design and started over. We can only guess how many design iterations it took to result in the iPad.
Damn, I hope the chip isn't that big.
I think a front facing camera was probably just too awkward to use. If you're sitting with your legs crossed resting the tablet on your knee a front facing camera isn't going to be showing your face. People will get a good look at your shirt though. If you have it laying down at a usable angle on a desk (say 30 degrees inclined) you're going to get a shot of the celling. I imagine this is something you'd see in the form of a third party accessory with a movable camera.
Was that actually stated? I thought they were just saying that use would last 10 hours and then made the separate statement that you could watch movies for an entire flight.
It is monopoly

In what market and by what definition?
Improved Python Traceback Module
My iPhone can watch YouTube videos and it doesn't have flash.
Park your Horse, Code Cowboy: Pro JavaScript Workflows, Part 1
Same story submitted earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1075903
P.A. Semi is fabless, meaning manufacturing is done by someone else.
Maybe he meant "fully control the portion of the supply chain that matters".

Which I'm not sure is the case either...
Search is getting more social
I still like to believe that openness and usability / polish / "shinyness" are not mutually exclusive. Maybe it's idealistic (I definitely can't point to any irrefutable examples)

Mac OS X itself is a good example. Normal users can just click on the dock icons and never need to have any awareness of the Unix layer underneath.

In the mobile space, Android is 80% there.
Personally I think good font rendering solves that problem. It goes back to the pricing issue though. They obviously wanted to deliver this for <$500 and that's difficult to do using an extremely high screen.
How an applicant's handshake influences hiring recommendations
I find it strange, perhaps ironic, that an association devoted to learning how to best present oneself has such horrible web design. It isn't just this link; the front page (http://westsidetoastmasters.com/) is actually much worse.
You may be on to something there.
In public browsing (in Firefox) I'm unique. In private browsing I'm 1 in ~17000.

Interestingly, removing some of the non-standard fonts I have installed made me unique, even in private mode. This surprises me, because I have some pretty unusual fonts installed.

edit: And actually, now that I test again, it does find one other match even in non-private mode. I guess that it's counting each me as a new person each time I do it, even though I'm connecting from the same IP with the same exact browser configuration.
From here: http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Wi-Fi + 3G model
UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)
GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz)
It doesn't need Flash to play h.264 video. There is, as they say, an app for that (just like the iPhone + iPod Touch)
For some additional crap, check http://www.ipspotting.com/ - also easy to remember and fun in new places.
That's a good point that goes a long way to proving Apple right. Yes, a small subset of people create software that the rest use. And every day, that small subset desides what that software can and can't do. Apple decided what their software AND hardware can and can't do, because they make both. Apple never promised the world that all their hardware would be able to run arbitrary software.

At the end of the day, for the layman, non-techie user (ie: most of the population of the world), whether they are buying Windows, or an iPad, or using a Web app, they see it as something that enables them to do certain things and not others. They don't see the same restrictions we see as developers, and most of the time, they either don't understand them or don't care. At the end of the day, they got the product they paid for and use for what they wanted. If you want something different, buy something different.
But, this isn't about giving the users freedom from choice; with 140,000 options in the App Store, that's a lot of choices.

This is explicitly about locking developers down, and not allowing them to do things that Apple does not approve of. Want to write a competing web browser? Sorry, you can't. Want to write an awesome JIT that optimizes itself for their shiny new chip? No can do.

Imagine if this policy had been in place on their desktop or laptop computers. Half of the technologies that they themselves use and tout as great would not exist. LLVM/clang? WebKit? Heck, the Mach and BSD kernels that this is all built on. None of this would have been created in a closed ecosystem with restrictive policies, and yet Apple is perfectly happy to take advantage of it while not letting anyone else play in their sandbox.

The hypocrisy of their policies makes me sick.
RAM: Steve says you don't need to know. It may be in the (NDAd) developer docs, in which case it will take a few hours to leak. Slow news FTW.

Voice calls: No.
> For us as hackers, computers is more like politics... For most people, however, computer use is more like a meal.

Very well put.
No. It's like a big IPod, which I have but don't use often anyhow. I'm sticking to my combination of a Laptop and an EBook reader (I have a Kindle).
Which is why Apple has an App store.
They have a USB adaptor for loading photos. See http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
treating me as a user like I was a worthless money machine

Could you be more specific?
This would be a valid concern if it were true. If:

1. Youtube DIDN'T have an HTML5 video mode (both non-web and web).

or:

2. Apple were somehow asking people to pay for Flash support and profiting from that.

Since neither is true, your concern here seems unsupported.
Let the camera swivel, and make it possible to control from software (throw in face detection, and let it auto-trace your face when you shift the tablet around). It needs some thought, but I'm sure it's not impossible to do well enough for Apple's standards.
We had a fairly conservative cross-validation function that tested the results of the genetic optimization for a first pass. Following that, Omnivore was put into "observation" mode, so we could verify that the results it generated were predictive going forward, and not just biased towards the test set. Over the course of the past few months, the model has held up quite successfully.

Since accusing a customer of being a spammer without non-heuristic proof can be an emotion-ridden experience for everyone involved, we were conservative and optimized for accuracy over efficiency pretty much every step of the process.
The Snapdragon and Cortex A8 are both implementations of the ARM V7A architecture, but are completely separate designs. The Snapdragon is Qualcomm's version and is unique to Qualcomm, whereas the Cortex A8 is licensed by ARM to third parties.

It's the same as Intel and AMD both making x86 chips; the ISA is the same but the design is different. However, ARM is more than happy to let Qualcomm design thier own.
Well, If I were an OEM making a tablet, I would be very happy about today's announcement. The only thing surprising about it was the total lack of surprises. Everyone's been expecting basically a large iPod touch with books in its app store. That's exactly what they got, and it doesn't even have that many books either, with only a few publishers signed up.

So if I were making a tablet, the iPad we saw today would be what I'd consider best case scenario. Do you think the cell phone OEMs felt that way when they saw the first iPhone? My guess is their reaction was quite the opposite. Guys at RIM and Motorola were probably like "holy shit, I didn't know a phone could be this good at web surfing." They still weren't going to shut the company down and give the money back to investors due to pricing and single carrier, I'm sure, but they undoubtedly weren't happy because what they saw was probably a lot better (or at least different) than they expected.

So the point is, the iPad is what they've been planning around since the rumors started picking up steam forever ago. I think if the JooJoo or any other pad doesn't make it to market, it won't be because of what you saw today.
I see the iPad not as a "PC" but as an appliance, albeit a really sophisticated one.
Surely aristus is making an homage, otherwise, this is too rich
My 13" MacBook and Kindle are a better combo, IMHO.

More portable, more reliable, better software, better user experience.