iPad Keynote in less than 180 Seconds: Incredible, Beautiful, Amazing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZS8HqOGTbA

Interactivity, the size of the QT plugin - it was huge to download it in the 56k days, the downsizing of the Macromedia Shockwave plugin - which was half as small and getting smaller, among other reasons, Quicktime while great, the QTVR and other things were quite bloated and larger than other offerings at the time.

It's still about 10mb for a download - which is nothing now with our broadband speeds - but it's still bigger than Flash which is at 1.8mb or so for the MS IE install.

LiveStage... wow. That's taking me way back.

Ok, I'm getting an iPad. Mostly because it's a big ol' 10" screen iPhone 3GS.

Why? Because on my iPhone 3GS I can do the following:

1) Remote into home Mac via VNC FAST! ANd it works really well.

2) Stream AVI files from my home Mac to my iPhone over 3G/wi-fi flawlessly. (yeah, I'm in an excellent 3G coverage area). I just downloaded AirVideo to my iPhone and installed the AirVideo Server and in less than 5 minutes I was good to go. One minor router tweak and I could access it anywhere.

3) Stream all my audio files over 3G/wi-fi flawlessly. Pretty much the same method as stated in the AIrVideo point above.

4) Browse the web, FAST! No stutter, almost no wait times.

5) Exchange push email for work and my Gmail accounts.

6) VPN easily into client sites and our own colo and use SSH (Linux servers), or RDP (Windows servers/desktops), or VNC (Apple servers/desktops) to fix problems from just about anywhere.

I couldn't do any of that as easily on my N800 as I could on the iPhone 3GS.
I don't care about "multitasking", I care about "concentrating".
But hey, tell you what. I'll go head-to-head in the "fastest to VNC back to their home PC" with any N900 user. With all applications closed and sitting at home screens, put both phones in pants pockets and then yell "go!" and see which one is at the on-screen login prompt of a remote server via VNC first.
My 3GS will win every time.
I've played around with the N900 and it didn't seem as polished as the iPhone 3GS. I've owned an N800 and went away for an entire YEAR and a few weeks ago came back to it to see if it improved but it hasn't. Nokia abandoned it in favor of the N900, just like they did with the N770 and now the N810.
Beauty of it all is that every single app I've purchased or downloaded for free for my iPhone 3GS will work on the iPad right out of the box.
And FAST! With no lag. The N800 was "tap. wait. tap. wait." and I got tired of that real quick as it was wasting my valuable time.

Sorry gang, but Nokia burned me with the N95-1 and the N800. I don't want another Nokia product since it seems to quickly become unsupported in a year or two whereas with Apple they're still supporting the 1st gen iPhones and iPod Touches, even though they're slower and more underpowered when compared to the new line of Apple mobile devices.

Another thing most Nokia fans forget is that Nokia has pretty much abandoned the U.S. market. That's fine and all, and you can argue all day long how "great" it is that Nokia is selling phones in increasing numbers in the 3rd world, but I can guarantee you that if I walk into a cafe in a 3rd world country with an N900 in one hand and an iPhone 3GS in the other, more people are going to want to look at the iPhone. Why?
Well, hype is a big part of it but more and more people are finding that the iPhone "just works" as others in here have already stated. And word-of-mouth on the iPhone just spreads faster than Nokia phones.

I'm also pretty damn tired of having to hack a device to get it to do what I want - looking at you, Internet Tablets N770/N800/N810 and the N900. I haven't had to jailbreak my iPhone to get it to do what I want. I jailbroke my old iPod Touch to check it out but it was meh to say the least. My best friend back at UNC has that Touch now and he uses it for almost everything via campus-wide wi-fi.

Now, look at the development environment. Tons of books and guides out there for developing for the iPhone. Where are the books and guides for developing for Maemo? I guess they're only selling those in Europe?
Apple has made it so easy to develop for the iPhone that 3 drunken rednecks from Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina can make an excellent, well-polished, multiplayer 3D tank game in a fraction of the time it would take a Maemo developer of equal skill.

I lived in Germany from '95 to '07 and used to think "man, Americans are *****s when it comes to phones, they don't have anything like the phones over here. Europe's got it going on in the cell biz."
Then the iPhone came out and stomped any chance Nokia had of making it in the U.S. flat. All my friends in Germany now have iPhones.
I used to disparage the iPhone as being underpowered right up until the release of the 3GS when Apple said "meh, go ahead and do turn-by-turn navigation" and "oh look, Slingplayer for iPhone" and that's when I got an iPhone 3GS because those were two critical apps for me that the N95 could do that before the 3GS an Apple iPhone couldn't do.
How many turn-by-turn nav apps are there for the iPhone compared to any Maemo device? At least 5+. And in less than 30 seconds I can be on my way with turn-by-turn navigation compared to the 45-60 seconds it took my N95 running Garmin.

Face it folks, a polished, fast, easy-to-use UI with a excellent app store selection is what people EXPECT from a smartphone nowadays.
And Nokia just doesn't have it. You can scream all you want about the N900 feature-set smashing the iPhone 3GS but at the end of the day it's all about SALES NUMBERS and RECURRING REVENUES and the N900 just doesn't have it in those two key areas that every phone manufacturer wants to have.
All the potential in the world doesn't mean a hill of beans come end-of-quarter-sales-call.

And for those of you laughing at how Apple's stock price fluctuated, then you don't know the golden rule of playing the markets: buy on the rumor, sell on the news.
I did and made just enough to cover buying an iPad 32GB w/3G in 90 days. First time playing that game and I considered myself lucky and will never do it again because I'll never be that lucky again.

But hey, enjoy your "open source" N900 development environment. I'll be over here watching my N800 crawl loading a website "with flash!" while playing a 3D online multiplayer first-person shooter on my iPhone.

Remember folks, just like not letting your friends drive drunk, devs don't let devs develop for Maemo platforms.

And I would just like to point out that it actually is not about what you, me, or anyone else likes or not, but about the old 'right tool for the job' argument - there is nothing out there that can even hold a candle to Flash. I would like there is (especially a bit more open than Flash, tho Flash is not as closed as its generally percieved), because the competition is always good, but there isn't. Flash has become an irreplaceable augmentation to the web of today and, whatever your personal taste is, you cannot deny that. Getting rid of Flash today is like getting back to the web of 2000 - certainly not a 'rich web experience', no matter what Jobsy would like us to think.

And what's worse - people want us to believe that HTML5 (and JavaScript) are going to kill it, which it won't but let's just ride that wave, without even realising that to do the things people do in Flash (at least what is possible with the HTML/CSS/JS combo) you would need to have twice as powerful machines than today - Flash would be a lightweight CPU and battery friendly contestant there! I'd actually like to see the day when HTML overtakes Flash (of course, it won't happen) - just to hear today's FUD, anti-Flash evangelists crying me a river how their beloved HTML is eating their battery.

What saddens me even more is the mere fact that if Apple caves in under the popular demand and allows Adobe to develop a Flash Player for iPad/iPhone/iPod - it will all of the sudden become a revolutionary technology, just like the MMS, copy/paste and actually installable applications - features I've had on my phone since cca 2003 - or someone cares to remember all those 'you don't need apps, you have the full web, that is the future' apologetic comments coming from the happy drinkers of Apple's Kool-Aid?

I'd actually like to see this (but I don't use VNC myself since that would mean keeping my desktop on [power isn't cheap]). Anyone wanna try? Though I imagine the N900 would be faster if someone just setup a script on their desktop to handle the connection process since you can use the terminal to setup a VNC connection, I know the iPhone has a few VNC apps and most of them save connections and all so you would just have to press the icon. And the VNCviewer on the N900 isn't exactly the fastest thing if it's anything like the one I had the n800.

But hey to each their own, you care about "concentrating", I care about multi-tasking.

We are really happy that you've found your perfect device and wish you all the best with it, seriously. Different people have different priorities, there is no 'best device', there is only 'a best device for you', and if iPhone fits your bill then all the better. I, tho, need something more, something that both, the N900 and the iPhone doesn't quite cut yet, but the N900 comes closest to that. To each his own...

The last sentance is a bit murky, tho? I am a dev, and I've been encouraging every dev I know to develop for the Linux platform - so far nobody complained, in fact plenty of us make quite a good living out of it.

Did someone post this kind of video already? If not.. Here you go.. There's a couple of more of this that you can find on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4

Those are kind of ruined for me since I understand German pretty well.
But it's funny if you mute it.
It's also kind of played out as a joke meme.

@iball: So, essentially, you've realized that the iPad will make a good remote terminal (your points 1, 2, 3 and 6)? Probably a correct assumption, I can't see why not.

I wonder though, why wait for the iPad if you want a remote control? Surely many available tablets/netbooks can already do what you want? Or did you not realize you want it before?

To me this sounds a little like "Oh, the iPad can stream videos, now finally I get to watch a movie... Oh, it can read books, at last I get to read a book..." Well, enjoy your newly discovered activities...

I'm not buying that and I was on QT before it gained any kind of internet presence. QT was available for windows for ever. Windows manufacturers simply refused to (or had license restrictions against) install QT by default on PC's as Flash is done.

I remember when flash came out. I jumped aboard and used it on my own website. Used it on a Multimedia project because I saw it as the poor man's Director. And you could call QT videos from Flash so I kept my videos in QT format. I would argue that the Sorenson Codec could have easily been THE standard for delivering web video. I used it a lot. In fact if I recall correctly Flash used to use a Sorenson 'squeeze" codec to deliver video. So really at a point QT and Flash were pretty much equal for the delivery of rich media content (livestage). But THE problem was that while you knew a Mac had QT, Windows was always "the problem". If I recall correctly as well, When MS was having legal issues with Apple, documentation was produced that showed that MS wanted Apple to "knife" QT on Windows.

So really I hold to my position that it wasn't so much the issue of downloading QT over a 56k modem (and really I know when I had said modem I downloaded FAR MORE than the file size of the QT installer.) but a collaborated effort to sideline QT as some proprietary Apple technology.