So after months of feverish speculation, Steve Jobs has finally announced what we were all waiting for: the Apple tablet, to be called the iPad.

In my poll as to the expected release date, 28% voted for January and 48% voted for the first half of 2010. I guess both those groups are correct since it has been announced in January but won't be released until later in the year.

So what's good about the iPad? It's basically a big iPhone without the phone. It does all the other things the iPhone does: photos (although without it's own camera), movies, music, web surfing, email, calendars. And very importantly, it will run the iPhone apps from the App store without any modification, although developers can now take advantage of the larger screen.

In my opinion, the killer apps for the iPad are the iWork apps. While I can't imagine typing a long document on the on-screen keyboard, there is a keyboard dock accessory. Keynote will be fantastic since the iPad can connect directly to a projector. Numbers and Pages will make this a working computer, rather than just a portable communication device.

Sticking my neck way out here, I see the iPad as the beginning of the end for laptop computers. Steve Jobs sees it as filling a niche between the iPhone and a laptop, but if you have an iPad, what do you really need a laptop for?

And consider the price. A MacBook plus iWork costs $1078 at the US online Apple store. An iPad plus the 3 iWork apps will cost $528.97 as well as being smaller, lighter and easier to use.

I have 2 main questions which are due to my location in Australia. We have legislation forbidding the purchase of books from overseas publishers if they are competing with local publishers. This will probably make the new iBook store useless over here, at least at the start.

The second thing is to do with playing movies. In Australia, all internet accounts have monthly download limits beyond which you have to pay penalty rates or get slowed to dial-up speeds. This means that buying or renting movies from the iTunes store is not a viable option and instead we buy or rent DVDs for playing movies. Currently a MacBook makes a very good portable movie player. An iPad would be physically more convenient and I think the screen will be better, but how can I get a movie from a DVD to the iPad? I am hoping that there will be a disk-sharing facility like there is for the MacBook Air, but I am afraid that Apple thinks DVDs are extinct, so they will not even consider such a thing.

My last wild guess is that this is another blow to the PC manufacturers and to Microsoft. The iPhone has been adopted by millions of people, regardless of whether they use Macs or PCs. But the iPad will be creating and editing iWork documents. I wonder will the iPad versions have the ability to export files in MS Office format? If not, the iPad will be another incentive to switch.

And for all the millions who are not very computer literate but have learnt the very intuitive methods of using an iPhone, this gives them a laptop that they already know how to use.

Then there is the situation for developers. Thousands of people are making apps for the App store, and now these people will be extending their work to the iPad. But this development can only be done on a Mac. We now have a major operating system to compete with Windows and Mac OS X, but the new system requires the Mac. This has got to increase the flow of people to Mac.

Am I going to buy one? I need to wait and see whether it will allow me to play DVDs and whether I can buy books. But yes, I will get one at some stage.

I had a chance to play with a Magic Mouse at the local Apple store yesterday. First impressions were negative, but then I got more used to it and started to appreciate it.

It is very flat, so if you are like me and prefer a chunky mouse under your hand, you will find it a bit difficult to get used to. The mouse movement seems precise, without appearing noticeably better than other optical mice.

The mouse buttons are hidden under the smooth upper surface, but the clicks are much more obvious that in the old Mighty Mouse. You actually feel a distinct click when you press which is a big improvement.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but you may need to go into System Preferences and setup the mouse to allow right-clicking. For some unknown reason, this always used to be turned off by default. Hopefully this is no longer true.

I had wondered if the tracking sensors meant that the whole mouse could be used as a trackpad, but this is not the case. However scrolling is very nice. Just flick your finger and the window scrolls just like an iPhone scrolls i.e. starting off fast, then slowing as the momentum runs out. This works up, down or sideways.

I didn't get to test most of the multi-touch features. In Safari, a two-fingered sideways swipe is the same as clicking the forward & back buttons, but that's as far as I got.

As of today (29th October 2009), the Magic Mouse is still not available as a separate product, although it comes bundled with new Macs. The online Apple store lists 5-7 days delivery, so I expect they will be out soon.

I haven't decided yet whether I will buy one - I will probably wait until the next person I know gets a new Mac and make a more detailed assessment then.

Oh and by the way, the new 27" iMac is gorgeous!

The digital camera world has gone through a couple of development stages. At first, it was all a battle get more mega-pixels. But at about 3 megapixels, this increase flattened out, and the emphasis was on features. Since then we have had another leap to the 10 - 12 megapixel bracket and again, this seems to be holding for a while. Now we are seeing an increase in digital SLRs with their wider range of features and changeable lenses.

So what do we really need?

Before buying a new camera, I stopped to think about how I use the photos produced by a digital camera. With a film camera, you get the packet of prints or the box of slides back from the developer, and everyone has a look, then they all go back in the packet. With digital photos, they go onto the computer. They get made into screen savers, slide shows, emails and web pages. So we use our photos far more, but in a very different way.

Most usage of digital photos is on the computer screen, so any resolution that looks good on the screen is high enough. If you really need to print high quality photos, then that is when you need the extra megapixels.

I calculate my printing like this:
If I want a standard photo print, it measures 6 inches x 4 inches.
300 dpi gives me a good quality print out, so for 6 inches, at 300 dpi, I need 1800 pixels (6 x 300). The overall image needs to be 1800 x 1200 pixels which is just over 2 megapixels.
Applying the same calculations to a standard sheet of paper (US Letter or A4), I find I need 8 - 9 megapixels. Any resolution greater than that is more than I need for what I do.

In fact, my most frequent editing of photos is to shrink them to fit on to web pages or into emails. Luckily Apple Mail does this automatically for emails, but I have to do it myself for web pages.

The other major factor in using a digital camera is convenience. How many more photos will you take if you have a camera with you all the time? You have to make a decision to carry around an SLR, but the camera in your phone goes with you. Apparently 40% of new photos published on Flickr are taken on an iPhone. It's only 3 megapixels, but for sharing photos on a web site, this is good enough.

So I have my iPhone for spur-of-the moment pictures, and a compact 7.1 megapixel camera which is easy to carry around and goes with me when I expect to take photos.

I was shopping online yesterday and when it came time to enter my credit card number, the form had a stern warning - "No Spaces".

I have used many different forms online and many of them have these sort of limitation: credit card numbers, phone numbers, zip codes are the most frequently occurring.

So basically, the web site developers are putting the onus on to the customer, instead of on to the server's computers. How hard is it to remove spaces from a credit card number? Or to understand that not all countries have 5 digit zip codes?

Why do programmers ask people to do jobs that are better done by computers?
And why do they ask people questions that a computer program can find out for itself?

Lucky Australia :-)

I read a Smarthouse article complaining about this and about Microsoft's attitude to Australia in general.

On page 2 of the article, he quotes an ex-Microsoft executive saying "All their marketing is geared to the enterprise and small business markets". There is nothing wrong with that as an overall strategy, but as usual, Microsoft does everything in the way most designed to irritate it's customers.

Firstly, the world is now a small place. Here in Australia, we can read every detail about every new product whether it is made in Sydney, Cupertino, Redmond or Darkest Peru. To announce a new product with great fanfare and then to say that you are only going to release it in certain markets just doesn't work.

Microsoft already has the retailers in place selling it's existing products, so there is no infra-structure to set up, no deals to negotiate with phone carries or book publishers - just ship the thing.

The second thing is that if Microsoft really wants to concentrate on the enterprise and small business market, then they should stop futzing around trying to copy other companies' products and they produce something for that market. There is no need for them to spend billions trying to compete with the Sony Playstation, the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPod Touch. None of those products (with the possible exception of the iPhone) are geared to the enterprise or business markets, so why does Microsoft bother.

I am sure they have some very clever and innovative people working at Microsoft, but I don't think they get much of a voice. Basing new products on what the competitors produced a year before, is bound to fail in the long term.