Everybody is outraged with the lack of camera. Is it really that important? I see myself using this device for watching video and casual surfing on the couch - no need for a camera for that.
<i>The fact that it takes up to 80 percent of the CPU in a quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro to render a 400x300 Flash game just boggles my mind</i><p>The reason is because Adobe developers don't use hardware 3d graphics acceleration. They do everything in the processor because they don't know how to write code that works on multiple types of hardware or maybe they are too lazy or cheap, I don't know.<p>The effect is that <i>ALL</i> of their apps run dreadfully slow on all platforms because every single calculation has to go through the CPU.<p>This is just one of the many reasons Adobe software is some of the worst on the market.
The article incorrectly claims the device doesn't have a microphone. The author added some weasel words "I don't think there's a microphone" to hedge something that would have taken a few seconds to fact-check on any of the liveblog sites that ran yesterday.<p>Having seen that, it was hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
I know it's far-fetched since there is no flash, but is there a java support? Would be nice to trade with an in-browser java app on this device.<p>One could argue that browser is multitasking environment - so you could have gmail/gtalk in one tab and other web apps in others. But, with no flash and/or java support there is still a wide empty area to fill in.<p>Let alone my fantasies about a modbook like device (wacom!) - I'd just be happy if iPad supported flash and arbitrary PDF files. Heck, even just arbitrary PDF's would be nice damnit.
Even with the 3G model the GPS chip isn't a "true" GPS chip. It's Assisted-GPS, and probably pretty unreliable without a 3G connection, just like the iPhone.
I think that the awkwardness of using this as a camera, coupled with security policies against cameras in many companies, makes a camera a "why bother?" item. So they add support for an add-on, and especially for plugging in a SD card or camera for image management, which by contrast will be very popular.
They complain about lack of video, but I have to imagine that holding up this object to take pictures or record video would be quite awkward. It is a large object. It would look kind of funny - in the way that large cellphones from 1998 look kind of funny today.