LCfiner said:
Oh, I remember it being tongue in cheek but i was a little annoyed that I was trolled that time. I read your whole damn post (it was rather lengthy) and then you threw that 200 dollar joke in there at the end and I threw my fist in the air and yelled "Shog, damn you!!!" /shake fist :lol
I was SOOOOooo sincere in that post! *tear*
And, sure, the hardware can be duplicated. it's the software that's the big deal with this. i think the only two impressive hardware features of the ipad are the IPS screen and the bigass battery in the trunk. Everything else that has gotten people excited about it is software.
I agree with you up to a point on this. The biggest accomplishment of iPad for me personally, is that it showed me without question that the time has come where you can actually accomplish very impressive and usable software with ARM processors. It's definitely the first product to show the potential of none X86 environment that is more than a mere toy. And all they did was to clock up a Cortex A8 to 1GHz. With legacy free software, you can get what was considered a baseline desktop performance only a few years back. Ironically, after experiencing iPad in action, I can believe those Courier videos much more now.
Where you and I have to part is the thinking that iPad's performance magic on Apple's software is something that can't be easily replicated by others. I think it's much easier than you think. Even the likes of HTC is able to do some impressive front end UI stuff with far less impressive hardware than Cortex A8, and that riding on top of someone else's OS that is really long in the tooth and with years of legacy crap weighing it down. E.g.: my Touch Pro 2 has some nice UI stuff going on thanks you HTC's TouchFLO.
With someone taking some actual time and decent effort, you will see similarly slick OS on these competing devices sooner than later. Sure, they won't have the equivalent of the App Store, but they can always tap Android's marketplace. It doesn't have to be 1:1 equal experience since they will be selling their devices for far less. They just have to get close.
I am anxious to see how quickly the Android tablets ramp up the UI experience to be as polished as the ipad. I think Tobor is right that the Win Phone 7 UI is going to be the biggest competitor to the iPad in providing a really consumer friendly and eye-grabbing UI
Fancy UI is nice, and they will get there sooner than later, but I think a far lower price point will do bigger wonders for sales for these kinds of consumption toys IMO.