iPad or Flash?

So the iPad can be preordered now. I somehow lost my initial enthusiasm, so my personal feeling is the preorders are not building as fast as expected. But this is just personal. In fact folks may be racing out since the gates opened last week...

So why the loss of excitement? Well... honestly my feeling is the device is not 100% perfect.

First thinking of buying the iPad at the very first possible moment, I started thinking about it is as of a purely Web tablet. Thus no need for local storage (especially not for the overpriced 64GB of flash). My iPad content will be in the Cloud. Or on my laptop.

This is the second point. The iPad will never replace my laptop. It is designed to be a slave accessory. Synced via iTunes to the master. It has no I/O ports, so I will not be using it to collect my digital pictures directly from a camera either. So to carry the iPad with me on the road I would need to carry BOTH my notebook and the iPad, which would be an utterly stupid setup (I try travel light, but still feel I tug along with me too many gadgets).

So the iPad will stay at home, on a sofa or in a kitchen. That is why I tend to lean towards the WiFi-only version (neither 3G nor GPS is needed at home).

Then I started thinking about the sofa computing. What do I do there? Well... mostly browsing light, casual content. And that includes Flash. All those hundreds of crap "funny" links and attachments people forward each other using email and various other social services. Hey, wait! Did I say "Flash"? Flash is evil... ruled out of the iPad. So no sofa computing either?

In the end it looks like it is going to finally find a resting place in a kitchen. AllRecipes.COM alone is enough to justify at least one iPad per household. The second one may ultimately go to the bathroom, especially when M-Edge will arm it with its custom, floating, waterproof case (a killer accessory for the iPad in my opinion).

And that is about it. So I have a place for two basic models in my house (kitchen and bathroom). Should I then go and spend my frequent flier miles to get on a morning transatlantic flight to New York on Saturday, April 3rd, to pick up the preordered ones and get back home? I still have not pulled the trigger... and chances are I will be waiting for the HP Slate, that potentially can fully replace my traditional laptop. Otherwise I may select to spend $300 or less for one of those "50-or-more" tablets coming to the market before the end of the year (as promised recently by ARM).