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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

It's a lot of fun reading posts like this and mentally replacing any statement along the lines of "existing tablets do this already" with "existing MP3 players do this already".

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yes. and to go after another one of matt's points, i doubt the people at nokia, motorola, et al were all that scared of the iphone in the beginning, either. ed colligan, then the ceo of palm, famously said "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." no matter how cool the iphone might have seemed, they just couldn't fathom it doing well in the tightly-controlled mobile space.

having said all that, i agree with matt's main point. i'm a little underwhelmed with the ipad as well. the scuttlebutt was that apple had tried making tablet computers for years, but jobs always torpedoed them with "what is this for, other than reading the web on the can?" since they were finally releasing a tablet, i figured they had thought up a compelling use case, other than reading the web on the can. personally, i'm not seeing it.

seems foolish to bet against jobs, though. if he thought it was a good product, i think it might catch on.

colligan quote here: http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9110/colligan-laughs-off-...

That quote from Colligan is from before the iPhone was announced. Matt's entire point was that after it shipped it was clear to everyone that this was the future of phones, and that other cell phone makers were scared. History has shown that that is precisely what they believed because 3 years out every mobile phone maker has an iPhone clone. On the other hand, Matt is saying that after the iPad was announced, most mobile PC makers did not think to themselves "how on earth are we going to go up against this" (whether they are right or wrong is of course another story). I agree that its not like every tablet/netbook owner now wants to throw their tablet away and get an iPad (the way a lot of phone owners wanted to throw their phones away and get an iPhone), however this may be because their simply aren't a lot of tablet/netbook owners or its a young market or whatever.

"...most mobile PC makers did not think to themselves "how on earth are we going to go up against this""

What I've been hoping ever since yesterday is that someone should release an "iPad" with a heavily customized open source OS on it. Add some Amazon integration (ala iTunes for books/music), customize the main apps to suite the form factor and a semi-open repository/app store for extra apps.

I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Several such machines were demo'ed (usually by chip-manufacturers) at CES earlier this month. The marketing blitz around the iPad makes it much more likely for someone to take these and build an actual end user product. Possibly your telecoms provider would want to sell you one with a contract and their branding.

There appears to be a distinct lack of touch based 'remixes' of Android or Ubuntu though.

To be fair, it's also fun listening to people predict how successful the iPad will be, and mentally replacing every mention of "iPod" or "iPhone" with "Macbook Air" or "Apple TV."

Those two products don't have the i prefix, you dummy ;-)

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