If anyone else had brought it out it most certainly wouldn't have been as successful as it has been.

Of course, but that is not just chance. People buying an Apple product know more or less that they will get a well designed (esthetics, hardware, software) easy to use product. That is the Apple brand that they have built up over the years. So in a new niche, people can be confident that they are not buying something that will turn out to be a useless faddish piece of junk.

*cough* Newton *cough*

Apple have fans and users – Google just has users…the vast majority of Google products are not designed for fans but for doing something (hence more people use them) – Apple kit tends to be designed to look good and appeal more than doing something – so most people who own an Apple product wouldn't consider themselves as simply users…

iPad isn't for me. Purely for financial reasons.

I can definitely see the attraction of it over a netbook though, even tho I agree that it is obviously less capable/flexible in many ways.

It's the same reason I often use my phone to surf instead of my netbook:

Pick up, instant on, surf, put down.

(versus: get out of bag, turn on, wait for boot, login, wait for Windows to start, start Firefox, get pestered by Windows/Firefox/AV updates, surf, shutdown, put back in bag)

It is just a much more 'casual' experience. A "digital magazine". Something you glance at while having a coffee.

I'd love a Windows 7 iPad equivalent – basically a full laptop but in tablet form (eg just cut off the keyboard). I do very little proper typing so it'd work well I reckon.

*cough* Newton *cough*

True, dat.

You've just bought into a weird apple publicity thing there. Until Apple implement something, it is 'battery killing', 'inefficient', 'slow' etc etc.

"Tips on Extending HTC Battery Life:

• Get rid of the large HTC widgets like bookmarks and FriendStream
• Turn off widget animation
• Use a static background rather than a live background
• Turn off auto brightness, set screen backlight at 10%
• Decrease screen timeout from 1min to 15 seconds
• Keep WiFi, GPS, 4G off until it’s needed. "

— from http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/03/tips-and-tricks-to-extending-the-htc-evo-4g-and-incredibles-battery-life-and-what-this-says-about-android/

There are numerous other blogs with similar information so I don't think this is part of a cunning Apple FUD attack.

Thanks to all the contributors to this thread but I think it is time to close it. I am going to wait until the iPhone release and depending on cost, probably go down that route.
Cheers

George

Come on Graham… all of those apply just as much to the iPhone as to any other smartphone for extending battery life, obviously apart from those features that the iPhone doesn't have.

;o)

Agreed, but it was a direct response to Joe, who suggested that I'd fallen for Apple marketting FUD by believing the stuff about HTC widgets draining the battery.