About that Apple tablet

So they announced the “iPad” today. (Insert menstrual joke here.)

It’s 10″ with a 9.7″ diagonal 1024×768 pixel 4×3 aspect ratio screen. They say it’s 1/2″ thick and about 1-1/2 pounds.

The OS is basically a slight evolution of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS. The prices run from $500 to $700 for versions without 3G and $130 more for 3G.

I’d say that the price point is pretty good, but I will not be getting one of these devices. It’s about 2 inches too big to easily fit in my purse, which means it’s not a device I can take everywhere. And I carry a fairly large Coach purse.

And the bezel on it is huge. What’s up with that? If the bezel were rather smaller and the screen were about an inch smaller it would probably fit. My Kindle 2 fits. Anything larger would likely not fit.

I’m afraid the keyboard isn’t going to be touch-typeable, because there’s no tactile feedback for the home row. It does have Bluetooth keyboard support, as well as an external keyboard/mount that will probably make extensive typing tasks manageable, and maybe the keyboard is fine for on-the-go usage.

Aside from the size of the bezel and the physical “Home” key, this is pretty much what I was expecting from Apple. I like the iBook app, at least what I’ve seen, and I think ePub is the way to go.

The big surprise for me was that they’re putting their own processor into it. I figured it would be a standard ARM, but they’ve developed an ARM compatible processor which they’re calling the Apple A4. It’s a 1GHz chip and they say it gets great battery life. We’ll see.

I think I’ll stick with my laptop, Kindle, and iPhone combo. It satisfies almost all my needs, except for mobile computing on the go. My laptop is 17″ and is a pain to take on planes.