This sounds like a good attitude to take -- don't draw too many premature conclusions until you've held one in your hands.
I expect the iPad to do well, though. In an unintended way, it might turn out that all the competition coming down the road might be a good thing. Everyone seems to be conceding an early lead in the marketplace to Apple -- HP was surprisingly explicit about this, telling tech reporters that they'd been waiting for Apple to reveal its product details and pricing before finalizing the design and feature set of the Slate. This may or may not be a smart move. But one thing it does is create a situation where, for at least a few months, the iPad is THE tablet device on the market, giving it time to create a set of expectations against which newcomers will automatically be measured.
This might be compared to the early days when the iPod was slugging it out in the market with a brigade of competitors, some of them pretty worthy. Most of these other contenders I can't even remember the names of anymore. Which is maybe because there were so many of them, and no single competing mp3 device emerged as the big potential iPod killer. My son was the first among his circle of friends (in our small Maine community) to get an iPod. His friends got various other products that were on the shelf at the local Wal-Mart or Radio Shack or someplace. But none of these other things enjoyed the same kind of "ecosystem" that Apple created with iTunes and the Music Store, and reinforced relentlessly with an impeccably hip ad campaign. Today the only question among this crowd is WHICH iPod to get.
I can see this playing out again. There is a whole host of new tablets out there getting positioned for launch, and expectations are running kind of high for some of them, like the HP thing and the more vaporish Microsoft Courier. But it seems like the sheer number of these Real-Soon-Now devices will make it harder for any given one of them to command a lot of attention. The Slate will hit the shelves at more or less the same time as a dozen other tablets, most of them running a touch-modified version of Windows 7.
At this point, the choice facing consumers will be: Do I want an iPad, or do I want Something Else? And really, when Something Else has Windows at the core of it, how exciting is it going to be? And how well is it even going to work?
Here's an early harbinger, maybe:
A review by David Pogue in the New York Times of multitouch computers now on the market from HP and Toshiba. These are
computers, not tablets (which means they probably have a lot more power at their disposal), but according to Pogue the actual experience of using them is "slow, slow, slow." Of the HP TouchSmart, he says, "it feels overwhelmed by the simplest tasks."
What kind of name is TouchSmart, anyway? What kind of name is "Dell Mini 5"? This may seem trivial, but if you're fighting to break out of the pack of late starters, it would help to be called something that doesn't feel dated and forgettable from the get-go. I mean, can you imagine: "Yeah, I know everybody's using an iPad, but I've heard really good things about the, um, what was it, Sony Vaio T Series. They've even got an app store. I think."