When the iPad was first announced I wasn’t to thrilled with it. I’d been waiting for Apple to release a tablet product almost 4-5 years. When Steve Jobs pulled out the iPad with a iPhone OS like interface I cringed. I wasn’t impressed at all. I didn’t need an enlarged iPhone. I wanted a tablet running OS X with some tablet-like enhancements. This was far from it. It wasn’t all that attractive looking either. I disliked the large black border around the device and the square (instead of rectangular/widescreen) look to it wasn’t very appealing.

About a week ago, Apple finally released the product into the hands of the public and I’ve seen most if not all positive reviews for the device. I believe the only negative talk about the unit is that some of devices are having issues connecting to WiFi access points. Apple has already submitted a support article on this.

I’ve also been hearing various numbers on the sales of the iPad, and they do seem quite impressive. The same goes with the sales of the iBooks and iPad-specific applications. While I don’t intend to get one within the next 6 months or even 1 year I think I may continue keeping my eye on it, and hopefully my hands soon. I would love to see the second generation iPad be wide-screen and have the ability to run a more fully-featured operating system. At present I feel anything that could be done on the current iPad can also be done on my phone. It seems silly to drop a minimum of $500 on the current iPad.

If the pricing had been a bit better, I would almost say this would be great entry-level Mac product for people new to the world of Apple, but at $500, and without being fully-featured, it seems like going the route of the Mac mini would be a wiser choice. This is definitely not to say one should be using an iPad as a main computing device, but if they had taken the extra steps to put an OS X tablet variant on here, I for one would certainly start considering it. I would much rather carry around this sized device over my MacBook.

The Apple iPad in its current state is not for me. It definitely seems like many people are enjoying it though. I do feel quite let down by this release, but there’s always future revisions which may catch my attention. For now, I’ll stick with my iPhone and MacBook in terms of my portable Apple devices.