Somehow, everyone knew that the iPad was going to be a hit even before Apple launched it. What we didn’t know was that it would sell like hotcakes, to the tune of two million iPads since its launch on April 3rd. Actually, with the way things went the past two months, it’s probably safe to say that the iPad actually outsold hotcakes. While we can’t present hard data to back that up, we’ve never seen people complaining about not getting their hotcakes or wondering about when they can buy their hotcakes in a particular country.
Also, Apple just began shipping internationally to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend, and should continue the iPad World Domination tour when they ship to nine more countries next month, and to more countries before the year ends. Crazy, right? It’s been so successful that they’ve apparently started introducing the iPad to galaxies far, far away.
After unveiling the Eee Pads at Computex, Asus brought out another touch-based slate device called the Eee Tablet. It’s a different kind of animal compared to the Eee Pads though: this is more of a complimentary mobile accessory that’ll let you read text, scribble notes, and draw rather precise sketches on its 8-inch (1024 x 768) grayscale display. To sum it up, the Eee Pads are basically slim Tablet PCs, while the Eee Tablet is more like a digital sketch pad.
MSI also unveiled their versions of the digital pad during Computex, with the Wind Pad 100 and 110. Both feature 10-inch capacitive touch screens, but will come with totally different mobile platforms.
Asus has finally taken off the wraps on what looks like the iPad’s most serious competitor (to date) during Computex in Taiwan. Technically, the Eee Pad is more similar to a light, modern, touch-only tablet PC with the Intel-and-Windows platform than Apple’s more basic consumer-friendly device, but the design definitely makes it ripe to go head-to-head with the iPad. It shouldn’t be a secret that this thing is gunning for the iPad’s market.
In case you were wondering what all the hype surrounding Nokia’s N8 was all about, here’s a video overview (the first of three, apparently) demonstrating what you can do with it. The video gives us our first look of the Symbian^3 OS, featuring a slick, customizable interface that’s chock-full of widgety eye-candy.
