It's fun, but not useful. If you have a smartphone and a laptop then you have no need for a tablet as it fills both roles, badly.
That's because it's not a traditional "tablet" but instead a "web pad." And it IS useful, in the same way that mp3 players and similar portable media players are. It's basically a media consumption (including web pages) device that can do a bit more in terms of (somewhat kludgy) input, with a screen that's a better size for viewing things like text than your average smartphone/PMP.
Proper tablets are a class of their own, and have a ton of utility for their intended usage scenarios. IMO if it doesn't have inking ability with handwriting recognition/storage (among with some more nebulous criteria), it's not really a proper modern tablet, and doesn't really fulfill the uses a "tablet computer" excels at. I think the IPad is incredibly overpriced for what it's good for (maybe not quite so badly for aesthetics... most of it is trading on branding though, I think), personally, but that doesn't mean it has no utility. Of course it also doesn't mean it fits into the "proper" tablet computer segment, really. It's sort of an odd in-between device, to me.
You can take my mechanical keyboards, but you'll have to pry my tablet from my cold dead hands =^,^= There are certain situations where you want the power of a laptop, but the kludgy opened form factor is just *so* fail. I've been waiting for something like the IPad to create a consumer drive for the tablet/pad
form factor for years, I'm really hoping it will drive down the cost on real tablets too, at least down closer to where similarly specced laptops are. It's stayed fairly strong as a niche product for quite some time, especially in the healthcare field, but the prices have been respectively high.
Anywho, did you win your auction, Phaedrus? Are you ready to spill about why you think these cherries are special? ^,^
