Kudos to Apple marketing, as everybody expected - the Apple tablet was announced by Steve Jobs at an event in San Francisco. The rumour mill had been churning for a while but the expectations of the price was around $900. By positioning the device starting at $500 is really great, it'll make a lot of people want it.

We also think that the acquisition of P.A. Semi, the little silicon valley company that made PowerPC chips is also a master stroke - as Apple is using it's processor in the iPad. Before P.A. Semi got acquired by Apple, I had met the folks at a tradeshow and they were touting their low power and high performance processors including a dual core PowerPC processor. There is a little known secret in hardware design - a lot of the hardware designs are actually jump started and helped by the processor company with something called reference designs - some companies do innovate in hardware design, but a lot of "knock offs" are easily created using the hardware design provided by the processor company. By acquiring P.A.Semi, Apple is effectively making it harder and harder for people to create knock-offs.

In my earlier blog post before the iPad was announced - I had mentioned that Apple with its pricing power will make it hard for anybody to beat it's price point. This coupled with their own processor and in-house engineering team gives them tremendous competitive advantage (both technical and business) against anybody who wants to create such a device.

Some people are calling it a giant iPhone - and I say to them there's nothing wrong with that definition. I am certainly looking forward to buying the iPad as a casual computing device that I'll use on my couch while watching telvision.

The other concern people have is the lack of Adobe Flash support. Adobe has proclaimed many times that Flash will be available on iPhone however the time line as to when Adobe Flash will be available is not determined. There are genuine uses of Adobe Flash - such as Hulu and other online video sites. I think Adobe will be working feverishly to figure out how to get Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Adobe Flash will make a lot of content more accessible on the iPad and also help with lot of nicer graphics. However, if Adobe Flash cannot figure out a deal with Apple and release Flash - website developers will have to consider handling popular devices such as iPhone and iPad in a different way.

Another resistance is that no multitasking. That is something I wish Apple would fix sooner then later - but I understand their stand about multi-tasking. In a consumer device for the average user, the user experience is of utmost importance, and so Apple (I hope) is taking its time in figuring out how to do multi-tasking properly. Another issue is that as applications run in background, they could be connecting to the web, and draining the battery - another concern for mobile device. It does allow putting your own local music in the background.

Let's see what the future holds for us.

Apple's iPad page is here - http://www.apple.com/ipad