After going to the trouble of waking up at five to catch this new mystical tablet, I’m less than impressed. Steve thinks it will be the next big thing since netbooks and although a flurry of slate PC’s will emerge, there’s no way this thing can beat my netbook/mobile combo (or any decent e-reader for that matter).

The conference started at 5am in Sydney, where Steve Jobs opened by taking a few cheap shots at Nokia about their mobile income, claiming how they were the largest mobile devices company in the world (it’s awesome how statistics can be twisted, isn’t it). From there he talked about the history of Apple laptops and the iPhone, then stating that we needed a device in between (taking another cheap shot at netbooks along way- he may have been right in that respect).

After months of waiting, the collective groups of Mashable, Techcrunch and any other Apple fan blog in the world took a collective gasp as they got their first official glimpse at this new device. It was called the iPad and is basically a jumbo iPod. Then the selling starts and Steve Jobs had this remark about the Safari Web browser:

He then proceeds to sell the iPad a little more touting features like email, photos, web browsing (without flash), maps, music and video- all of which you can do on a normal laptop or mobile phone (or even netbook for that matter). After an 18 minute demonstration of what this can do, Steve goes back and explains the hardware behind it.

One of the things I noticed is how much they are pushing the IPS display. Until today I had never heard of such a term, and according to Wikipedia it basically allows for a greater viewing angle. Many people were expecting the iPad to contain an OLED screen which allows for richer blacks, eliminates the need for a backlight (saving your eyes from extinction) and thereby drawing less power, saving your battery. Introducing a new acronym allows clueless byers into thinking it’s better for them, while claiming that the Zune HD is inferior because of its OLED screen (which was so 2009).

It’s powered by a custom made 1 GHz processor by Apple itself. This is the first device that uses this custom processor, and I’m sure we’ll see more of them in future devices (I’m looking specifically at the iPhone and normal seized iPod Touch here). On top of this it has Wif (802.11n), Bluetooth, the standard proprietary 30-pin Apple connector, a speaker, microphone and can achieve 10 hours of battery life.

Being a Jumbo sized iPod, you would expect it to run iPod touch apps and it does, but only one at a time. Despite having a much faster processor, the iPad lacks any multitasking abilities at all. For now, your choice is scaling the application up to take the full size of the Window, or having a ginormous black border around the inside of the screen.

Apple also expects us to go reading with this device, with the newly launched iBookstore. In addition to this, Apple has signed up several major publishers and soon we’ll be able to download books for it. When you compare this hand in hand with the kindle, there’s no doubt that the iPad is capable of much more, but the Kindle easily defaults it with is e-ink screen. If I had to choose a device out of the two, I would have to say the Kindle, simply because my netbook easily handles everything else the iPad can do.

Finally, we get to the numerous docks you will soon be able to buy for the thing. This iPad only has one connector, which in turn connects to a variety of different docks. If you want to attach a keyboard to it, you better have a Bluetooth one; otherwise you’ll be shelling out for Apples Keyboard dock. There is no way you can expand on its memory, so that means no flash drives, no memory cards (although you can get a camera dock to plug in your camera) and certainly no portable hard drives.

While many expected it to be priced around the $999 (US) mark, the actual cost (for the base model) goes for $499. The Apple site doesn’t list any Australian prices yet, but I suspect that it will sell for around $800 dollars (again, only for the base model). This makes it more expensive then the cheaper end of netbooks, but less expensive than our some of the top of the line mini-notebooks.

Of course, it will no doubt sell moderately well but it won’t see the spectacular crowds that the iPhone has. The iPad does some things good, but does nothing well and that’s how it will fail.

Special thanks to engadget for their image based time line and images