The iPad, and Alternatives

So... the iPad... atrocious name. Yeah... moving on.

I'm not going to bother going over the specs and all that rot, I'm simply going to go over my own thought process on it. I've been in the market for a portable note-taking / media device for a long, long time. Pretty much for as long as I can remember, really. My iPhone suffices fairly well on the media side of things, but the ability to take easy notes on an easy to transfer medium (i.e. digital) is really what I've always wanted. The iPad doesn't offer that, though there is a degree of potential within the app community. The lack of a stylus input is huge in this regard.

The other major factor of the iPad for me is the eReader functionality. In theory sticking it on the iPad is very good for me, but in practice it's not all that great. I already own a substantial collection of ebooks, but they're primarily in the LRF/LRX system (Sony's proprietary format). There are no app store apps that read LRF/LRX that I'm aware of, and I doubt that Sony is going to want to release their eReader software on a competing format (it took them more than a year to release the book purchasing software for the Mac). I'm sure there are plenty of third-party converters out there, but I don't know that the hassle is worth it. On the other hand, Sony has done away with DRM on most of their books so batch converting might not actually be that hard.

What balances most of that out is the not inconsiderable weight of the App Store. Without the App Store the iPhone is just a snazzy phone with a few cool features, but with the app store it's a wunderkind that's able to handle just about anything. Now, in fairness, most of the games on it simply blow, but with a good sized display the potential is there. Traditional RPGs and SRPGs could thrive on the iPad, though there hasn't been much support yet (Square has announced planned releases for Final Fantasies 1 & 2, which could really get the ball rolling). Most of the major companies have scorned the iPhone (with a few notable exceptions, like EA porting a few solid titles like Need for Speed: Shift), but the independent market has been screaming for YEARS for someone to give them their fair shot at the big time, and the iStore offers just that. Low development costs could also entice companies to put out more experimental games on the system as a test-bed, or low cost continuations of existing series (EA tried this with Mass Effect: Galaxy... unfortunately the game blew, but it was a noble effort). Where episodic or dlc content has thus far really failed to take the world by storm, it could very well succeed on the iStore. And that's not even going into all the extremely useful utilitarian apps the store already has.

For my money the MSI Tegra-2 or the Cydle M7 seem like they might work out as better bets ($500 and $200, respecitvely). Although, in truth, what I really need is a Boogie Board Paperless Tablet, just with options for saving whatever I write rather than being a high-tech etch-a-sketch.

Unfortunately none of these options really cover what I'm looking for, but a few days after the Apple announcement the 8.9 inch ExoPC Tablet was announced with a 1.6ghz processor and 2GB ram. It also runs on Windows 7 and it's 32gb harddrive is expandable with a standard SD slot (a huge advantage). The fact that it runs Win7 and not Android, or the iPhone OS, is a big advantage since that means I can (in theory) download the Sony eReader software and read using that on the tablet, plus I might even be able to get it to run PC games that I have through Steam (no CD-Rom drive means I couldn't load up, say FFXI, but that's not that big a deal since the GPU probably can't handle all that much beyond Tinker or Peggle anyway (there's no word on what the GPU is, so no way of knowing it's capability... it would be really sweet if I could load FFXI on it though). No other details are really out about it just now, but if it has stylus support than this sounds like it'll be the one for me. It's also out in March and retails at the same price for the equivalent iPad 32gb hd (without 3G). I will be watching this one very closely.