Anyone betting on the Kindle while betting against the iPad is going to find themselves deep in the proverbial hole. Double-time.

I'd love for the iPad to cost $5 and come with a free bag of chips (or crisps in the UK). Maybe then I'd actually get one. But that's not going to happen. But if you think a normal person is going to pay $250 for a device that has 16 shades of gray and can only read books from a single store (and really that's absolutely all it can do), you're out of your freaking mind. There will be more iPad devices in the market within the first month or two than there are Kindles. Give it a few months and there will be more iPads than all dedicated eBook readers from all sources combined. It's going to happen quickly.

The best selling eReader out there is probably the low-rent model they had at Costco over the holiday season. No one was buying the Kindle when it first came out and less people are buying it today with the Nook looking so much more attractive and other products looking so much cheaper. Not to say that any of these devices is selling stupendously.

A browser-only device would be a failure. No one wants a single-server device. I'm sure Apple could have pulled it off to some degree, but it's not what the general public would prefer. If you can relate that type of device to the iPad you're very far off the mark. The JooJoo type of device isn't what's going to make this form factor be taken seriously. The JooJoo isn't likely to see the light of day to even try.

Optometrists should be thankful of the iPad. They're going to have a lot more customers in the future. People don't give a rat's ass that something is potentially bad for them when it has other aspects that draw them in strongly.

re: NYT article re-run:

Tony, if it had also said in that article that African Americans weren't as smart as other Americans, would it still have been OK for the NYT to run it simply because it wasn't one of their in-house staffers that wrote it? That POS article is full of conjecture and misrepresentation of fact - some of it perhaps done purposefully. I'm trying to give its author some credit, but perhaps they are in fact just a dullard.