Alot of buzz around iPad before and after it’s launch. Most of what I expected was there. Some missing features left me wondering why I would bother getting this.

Some of the expected features (I thought) would have been:

Webcam (if not 2 for potential 3D)
Why no webcam? I was even expecting 2. Wouldn’t it be great if this thing could be used for augmented reality?

Cellular voice phone capabililities
When paired with a bluetooth headset, you essentially have yourself a phone. I doubt that will make for a useful phone.. but at least it’s an option.

USB port
noticable lack of peripheral support unless it was an apple product. They clamped down on software and hardware. Worth noting though, with an adapter, you get usb port to use a webcam, however I don’t believe you get to plug ANY usb devices. This is basically an iphone OS after all.

Full Webbrowser
like the iphone, the browser in this is nice and slick to scroll around. However flash is absent, and DHTML and Javascript support isn’t complete. It’s enough to view most websites, but leaves me wanting a desktop OS with a browser of my choosing with all the bells and whistles.

Not a Tablet
No pen input. Therefore no handwriting. Buttons and inputting will be somewhat large similar to existing iphone UI.

So who is it for?
Really it’s just made for the print media businesses. They wanted a device that they can sell subscriptions of their content without direct competition from websites. Certainly with the crippled browsing capabilities and locked down approach to apps and subscription approach to content in itunes clearly works to limit the consumer of choice. The demoed subscription content looks virtually identical to a typical website one would see from the mobile safari if flash and video capabilities were available. Should this device captivate a large enough audience. We should see alot more iphone/ipad friendly websites.

A posting at wired got me worried. We’re starting to see alot of cheap 3D tricks to catch in on the rush. These half hearted attempts at giving 3D could undermine the entire effort in making 3D video a mainstream delivery.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/star-wars-3d-retrofit/

I saw superman in 3D which was a lame attempt at doing this very thing. having only parts of the movie in 3D. And what’s worst is that the 3D effect was basically 2D live action animated objects superimposed onto each other. In effect, you get what you see from Paper Mario. or something similar to a 3D birthday popup card. Lame indeed. To the movie execs, please do not encourage this. Star Wars in true 3D would be great. But I would wait another 10 years if they would perfect it.

In an effort to get RemoteApp behaviour on my Mac OSX and Viliv S5 I looked into SeamlessRDP. After spending countless hours trying various configurations I’ve come to a conclusion. It works! but only with WinXP sp2 (sp3 unconfirmed). Vista and Win7 do not work. Server 2003 and Server 2008 of course will work provided you have the TS license. The source of the problem seems to be that the RDP host is ignoring the application execution request unless it was “server 2003 or above” or WinXP. Vista and Win7 appears to be hard coded to ignore regardless of my attempts to change the behaviour through group policies.