Is this game by apple for apple fanboys so they keep spending money for some smaller updates???
-RAM is only 512MB compared to 1GB for Xoom.(This may limit/control future iOS upgrade for sure)
-No 4G support (Need new iPad3 for that,spend more money on i*!!!, LOL)
-No USB
-No Flash(Expected),but really need for pc/tablet experience
-No SD Slot to expand memory. (Go Ahead spend some more to get bigger memory iPadx, LOL)
-Display resolution inferior to Xoom and same as iPad1
-No Widgets which are much more usable for tablets.
-Extra money for HDMI adapter while is is part of Xoom
-Hack, Camera doesn't have flash support and front is VGA only
-Xoom has same battery life even with all of those supported.

All features like Duel processor, front/rear camera, Gyro, HDMI, USB, Flash support,
Widget support, 1GB RAM,SD Card slot to expand memory,4G support, better resolution display are already part of Xoom.

Yeah but I don't care about all that on a tablet. I care about what's easiest to use.

I love my Kindle, but I only paid $139 for it. Nearly all my friends have either an iPhone or an android based smart phone. I don't get why they pay what they do for them, but they seem really happy. Until they drop it, or lose it, or it gets damaged someway and they have to pay out of pocket for a new one because they agreed to a two-year contract. They complain loudly of course, but they still cough up the money for a new phone. I have yet to see an iPad (or a tablet) in real life.

But I don't get why you need an iPad. If you are a huge consumer of history books with their maps, educational books with their diagrams, cookbooks, etc... an iPad is far superior to a Kindle, but how many of these books even exist for the iPad and how large is this consumer pool? I get it if you are in a trendy field, fashion, entertainment, etc... You need it to show to your clients. As a computer they seem so crippled that they are no where near completely replacing a laptop for a businessperson. The only useful apps I've seen on a smart phone are, well, available on a smart phone which every tablet owner already has. I watch the iPad commercials, but don't see anything compelling. I still need someone to explain how a tablet computer is a mass market consumer device as opposed to a niche product. When you consider the price and then factor in a data plan from a wireless vendor (sure you can use WiFi if you live in San Francisco and never leave, but what about everyone else) they seem like ridiculously expensive toys.

Jobs' personality alone turns me off from buying the iPad. Whenever one of these product releases happen you just feel like he is a used car salesman who is trying too hard. What angers me even more is how many people are brainwashed into listening to his heaps of marketing jargon and then make themselves religious devotees of Apple products, shutting themselves from rational consideration that any other brand could be better.

That said, I concede it's good business. It will be interesting to see how dependent Apple is on a single personality once Steve Jobs dies.

I would love to own a tablet computer - but I am definitely going to wait a while before buying: I believe that competition will drive down prices both this year and next. There will be lots of Android 3.0 tablets available from several different manufacturers by the end of this month. Also, I am not yet sure what the best choice of screen size (and other features) will be. I doubt if I will end up choosing an Apple: it is undoubtedly true that eventually most of the plethora of free flash games on the web will be available in HTML 5 format - but it is equally certain that this will not happen quickly (a quick setting change to Flash (stop hardware acceleration) prevents most of the widely reported crashes it causes). Also, I think that dramatic price falls will happen MUCH sooner in the Android world than they will at Apple.

@caribis: the Kindle is not like an iPad or Android 3.0 tablet computer: it uses electronic paper rather than LEDs - so cannot do anything that requires fast-changing pictures (though it is better for reading). It doesn't have a touchscreen, so would be no good for music-making applications, for example. It uses raw Linux as its operating system - not Android - so IMO should be seen as a proprietary device for a particular purpose.

I tried to be an apple fan. I really did. I was an "early adopter" of one of the earliest ipods, for which I paid an insane price. Within 2 years my computer stopped recognizing it. I tried it on various machines, futzed with all the cables and connectors, etc, but even though the ipod thought it was plugged into the computer, no computer ever thought there was an ipod plugged into it.

Rather than give up on the company, I foolishly went and bought the current latest and greatest version, which was thinner, had more storage, had a better display, etc. Within 2 years, again, the audio started cutting in and out and then quit completely. The "geniuses" at the Apple store in Reno put it through its paces and told me what I already knew: an unrepairable internal hardware failure. So, I now have two ipods; one still has its original selection of music in it, which I can play whenever I want. The other won't play music but I can use it as a 20 G portable hard drive. About the time that the second ipod quit, I found a sansa mp3 player lying in the street. Nobody came back looking for it, so I started using it. The display isn't as pretty, and the user interface is different (not necessarily worse) but I've been using it for many years now, tossing it around and generally treating it like it was free, and it just keeps on working.

I don't care how slick Apple's industrial design is, how innovative their product concepts, or even how much intangible value there is in feeling like I'm cool if I own products that are practically holy relics of St Jobs. Two products, with two different hardware failures, each shortly after the warranty expired, is enough for me.

I'll by products that are unreliable if they're cheap, and I'll pay a premium for reliable products, but I won't pay a premium for unreliable products. The interesting undercurrent in this article is that it appears Apple may finally be competing on a basis of bare cost as well. The unspoken pitch is "Ours may not be as good, but look, it's $300 cheaper!" That's a huge marketing shift for Apple.

Why are people so negative?

Apple didn't manage 15million unit sales by 'brain washing' consumers (I would expect for from economist commentators than comments such as these), they did so by releasing a tablet that seems to work reasonably well for the vast majority for consumers at various price points consumers are willing to spend and then consistently updating the platform with a regular development cycle to ensure it stays competitive/ahead of the curve.

Now what's wrong if people choose to buy into that, with all it's publicised drawbacks, I for one am an early adopter and will be eagerly awaiting the next release in a years time before updating.

It's interesting to me that some people cannot see that these small, light, touch-tablet computers have and will continue to revolutionize multiple industries. I was at a store the other day and counted no fewer than four full aisles of products that will be replaced by tablets/apps (not even counting the book, music, and video aisles). All of those Leap Frog-like interactive kid's toys - gone. GPS devices, voice recorders, use-specific devices like book readers (as the weight and price of full-blown tablet computers comes down), etc. are history. Telephones - gone when full video plus voice takes over. Pico projectors will eventually be incorporated and then laptop projectors will be largely gone. Smaller TV's - gone. DVD players (i.e., iPad can now act as a video streaming device to your TV) - poof. They'll all hang on a bit by virtue of inertia, but it's just a matter of time. If you're a stock holder I'd look carefully at the product lines of your companies and how they are adapting - and if they can.

"Android-based smartphones have rapidly eroded the market share of Apple’s popular iPhone."
Please elaborate, I think this is incorrect.

@MikeBobo

Actually, this is correct. See for example http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/apple-leads-smartphone...

Someone should finish eating that apple.

All the talk about features, flash this, HDMI that, RAM this, RAM that. I think the real question that remains is this:

which will be more expensive?

the entry level ipad 3 or 1 share of Apple stock?

love friend-welcome come to website :
www. ( vip s hop per.us ) ( Please enter the website
... , you can leave the url written in can see the place or brain
) Have what you want
..Smart oh great

love friend-welcome come to website :
www. ( vip s hop per.us ) ( Please enter the website
... , you can leave the url written in can see the place or brain
) Have what you want
..Smart oh great

Weird how Apple draws such responses. Remember, without Apple, we would be dealing with the lousy interfaces the phone companies foisted on us. And there wouldn't be a tablet market to speak of at all; the iPad has sold significantly more than all other tablets have ever sold.

A big point in the post is absolutely correct: the iPad is priced lower and it seems Apple has a real pricing advantage because they invested a lot of money in their supply chain. This is the opposite of the PC wars. Apple also has an advantage because the App Store generates real cash for developers: $2B paid out so far. Apple users buy more apps, perhaps because they're curated and apps don't have to compete with ripoffs and junk. An advantage Android has is Google's coding model allows for more rapid upgrades.

As for "market share" for phones, it's hard to describe that accurately because the iPhone was only sold on one carrier until last month, the market is growing very rapidly and across all carriers. If there has been a loser - or two - RIM is one and Nokia would be another, with Microsoft's position still to be worked out (see Nokia deal). So the iPhone stimulated massive growth in smartphones but was only available on ATT and so it's kind of hard to see a failure in the other carriers selling other smartphones. That's like saying it didn't do the impossible, which is getting silly. iPhone sales kept going up but the market got bigger and most of that increase was of course in carriers that couldn't sell the iPhone.

As to the iPad, it's difficult to say what will happen because we don't see much actually out there now. The Xoom doesn't yet support flash so we don't know how that affects battery life and everything else is just a bunch of promises. Samsung had the embarrassment of saying they put 2 million units of their first iteration into the channel and then admitted they hadn't actually sold many - and those had a high return rate. It's early.

But behind or beneath the scenes, there is an utterly massive change in the development of iOS and Android, one which changes the entire relationship of a user to a computer. The two lightweight OS's make a different future. The next Apple OS brings iOS features and usability to the desktop and that kind of change, along with Google's Android and their ever-expanding cloud services, are big steps that diminish traditional desktop OS thinking - which should worry Microsoft. Imagine a world with dramatically faster peripherals - as with the new Thunderbolt extremely high speed ports - that then can link at high speed to cloud based services through devices that connect to each other. You can control your tv, your lights - and soon, your oven - through a phone or tablet.

Since I value both iOS and Android, I don't have any silly potshots to take. But I do note that a potentially huge problem cropped up the last few days on the Android marketplace: because it is not curated, a person or group took apps, reworked and reposted them with elaborate code injected that roots your phone, steals your data and then downloads more code. This info comes from a big Android site - androidpolice.com. These apps averaged 50-200k downloads over 4 days. Google pulled them as soon as this site notified them, but you can see that freedom has risk.