Watched some of the live stream from Engadget on the iPad announcement today. It was, as expected, a tablet shaped like a big iPod. It comes with wireless and it can hook up to a 3G network if you buy the big one. Notably, for me, were the things it didn’t do:

• No camera (!)
• Poor battery life
• Limited storage
• Multitasking?
• iPhone OS

It’s kind of neat, but honestly, I can’t see myself using this thing very much. It seems tailor made for air travel, when you want to watch a movie on a decent screen or maybe type up some notes. Pretty-much exactly what Andy Ihnatko wrote for the Sun-Times. I travel a fair bit, but certainly not enough to warrant adding yet another gadget to my collection. It won’t replace my Kindle with its awesome battery life and relaxing screen.

As a gaming device, it may become compelling at some point, but as the iPhone has proven, accelerometers are great for one type of game: Doodle Jump. Virtual controllers through touch are not a great control mechanism.

The lack of any mention of multitasking is even more worrisome, making this not very good for communications. I can’t run an IRC client and a messenger client in the background while surfing the web (on Safari, of course, there will be no Firefox for this due to their restrictive rules). Sure, there may be push notification, but that means leaving whatever I’m doing and launching the app before I can respond, possibly losing context. No video camera means no video chat.

In short, it’s a big iPod. I’ll wait and see how it does over the next year, but won’t rush out to buy one.