55 minutes to go

[Clippy]

2 things millions and millions of people around the world have never done with any phone they've owned

That aside, I think I'm accidently replying to a fanboi parody

Amended.

I think scooter has lost his sense of perspective.

[Sysman]

That HP sauce looks decent.

FTFY

[NickFitz]

Can someone please summarise what is new (apart from being bigger than an iphone), it's USP, and why the world and his dog are going to be buying them?

Any new killer features in the hardware?

Having had a chance to catch up on various things around the net, including watching the video of the launch, I can now offer some kind of answer to your questions.

From around the four minute mark in the video, Jobs makes the point that Apple's primary business is now in mobile devices: not just iPods and iPhones, but also the fact that most Macs sold are laptops. (He then points out that, in terms of gross revenues, Apple is now the biggest player in this field, having revenues greater than those of any of Sony, Samsung, and Nokia: but that's not relevant right now, unless you're an Apple shareholder.)

At around the seven minute mark, he finally gets around to introducing the iPad by explaining that they are aiming for something that fits in the space between smartphones and laptops, but is far better than either for the key tasks for which it is intended.

These key tasks (list completed by the eight minute mark) are:

• Web browsing
• Email
• Photographs
• Video
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

So basically, the USP is that the iPad is much better for all those things than either a smartphone or a laptop, primarily because of the work that has gone into multi-touch interaction and into completely rewriting the relevant applications for use on a handheld device that offers laptop-style screen real estate yet doesn't need any kind of pointing device beyond the ones found naturally on most people's hands.

(He also dismisses Netbooks in quite scathing terms from eight minutes fifteen seconds onwards, pointing out that they may be usable to do those things but don't actually do them better: they're just cheap laptops.)

It's worthy of note that a number of the other people involved in the launch demonstrations stressed the fact that it was all about the software: in other words, rather than focussing on technical specs, they believe that the things which truly make the device meet that goal of being much better for these tasks can only be properly appreciated by using it, not by reading data sheets.

Turning to your question about hardware: apart from the big multi-touch screen, the key thing about the hardware is probably the Apple A4 processor. I haven't found an enormous amount of detail about this yet (although I presume there's info in the SDK), but one thing really stands out: it seems that everybody who actually tried the device yesterday comments on how blisteringly fast it is. These comments aren't just concerning things like the responsiveness of the UI for things like rotating the display or launching apps, but also things like Safari's rendering speed and zooming in the Google Maps app.

Some reckon that it looks as if Apple now have the best processor for mobile devices, given that it clearly has extremely low power consumption to give the ten hours of usage/over a month of standby battery life yet manages to absolutely scream along, even with complex apps like the iWork programs.

One thing I'm curious about is what happens to iPhone apps that have optimisations written in ARM assembler (which is one of the nice aspects of iPhone development, and was something I intended to make use of as necessary in my own stuff). I assume the iPad will cope with that, as it runs most existing apps out of the box and they are of course compiled to ARM code. I wonder if they've been using some of their expertise gained from building things like Rosetta, the subsystem that allows PowerPC code to run at pretty much native speeds on Intel Macs.

EDIT: Oh, and the screen is IPS, giving an extremely wide viewing angle - some people have commented that this fits in nicely with the idea of a bunch of people sitting on a couch all being able to see the screen without having to cram their heads right up to the person holding it.

Anyway, that's about all I've got for now, but hopefully it addresses your questions

[PAH]

Anyway, that's about all I've got for now, but hopefully it addresses your questions

You're wasted on here.

While you make a compelling case for the defence the device itself isn't all that hot, but maybe you're right in that it's the application of the device that is the real selling point.