IPad Will Be Available In The U.S. Starting On April 3

Not saying this is deliberate, but I wonder if there's an advantage to launching a new device around tax season in the USA.<p>If you're crunching numbers and discover you're getting a few hundred back, are you more inclined to spend it on something like this if the hype syncs up with the money?

Now if they would only release some updated MacBook Pros. The current line is really outdated specwise.

It will be interesting to see whether the publishing industry, and particularly Old Media, will be able to leverage the Ipad and start making some money on their content.

Looks like pre-ordering starts March 12 - <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ipad-available-in-us-on-april-3-86560327.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ipad-available-in-us...</a>

And many other countries in late April:<p>"iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year."

And they've pushed back the UK release a whole month, to late April!<p>This is ridiculous. Now British iPad developers be a whole month behind most of their customer base (the US is the biggest market even for most UK developers)! Can't Apple at least find a way to get iPads into the hands of the many <i>developers</i> over here, even if regular users wouldn't be supported?<p>We're being held back weeks for no good reason and will have to organize getting them sent via intermediaries or hop on a plane to pick some up.. which is a crazy, unnecessary waste of money. As such, we'll miss out on being early on the iPad App Store which is a massive disadvantage. Poorly played, Apple.

Finally, we can get past the hype and let the device speak for itself.

I think this PR is a fake. It doesn't read quite right.<p>EDIT: well, looks like my bullshit calibration was off this morning. I still cannot believe they threw "magical and revolutionary" into the first sentence instead of into Steve's pullquote.

"iPad a Kindle killer", as the article states? I don't think so. Nothing beats e-Ink for readability in the bright sunlight outside. LCD's are hardly readable under such conditions, especially if they have a shiny finish. [well, maybe a book or a newspaper beats an eBook reader ;-)]

Yay.

Yes! Super excited to get my pre-order in