Today Apple finally announced the tablet that we’ve been hearing rumors about for the past year. The rumors were so intense lately that they actually started to get annoying even to a big fanboy like myself. The event was pretty exciting. It was great seeing the incredible new UI design built specifically for the new iPad. Like any Apple event, there were some rumors that didn’t make the cut and left many people disappointed. This is obviously inevitable when something gets so much hype. This time I wasn’t too dissapointed but I was surprised at some of the things that didn’t make the cut. Since the internet will soon be flooded with iPad news, I decided to save you from more boring analysis and share with you a few quick thoughts that I have regarding the event. I broke the points up into 3 categories: The Good, The Bad, and The Other.

The Good

These are some of my favorite features and surprises from the event.

No contract for 3G Data. Awesome and totally unexpected.

Price. Never imagined them getting under $700. Crazy.

The UI looks blazing fast.

Full access to the App Store applications.

The Jony Ive video of the new tablet is awesome.

10 hrs battery. I was expecting 7 or 8 hours.

The Bad

Some of these are a bit disappointing. Others are really bad (but probably not deal-breakers).

AT&T is the 3G provider. How will their network ever handle this?

iPad? Lame name. Sounds too much like iPod.

Home screen is awkward and boring. Some of the fakes were better.

No multitasking.

No camera for video chats.

No USB port. Sure there are adapters, but meh.

Full software lock-in like the iPhone. All syncing has to go through iTunes.

The Other

A few other thoughts regarding the expectations for the event and things I’m looking forward to hearing more about:

Not a word about Verizon. I guess they are waiting until June.

Nothing about new MacBook Pros.

No iPhone OS 4.0. Although, they did announce iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta.

No Flash. Not surprising and reaffirms Apple’s stance on the matter. (Great post from @gruber about this.)

Twitter didn’t crash. Yay!

Jailbreaking. This could really unleash the full potential of the device.

Overall I’m pretty excited about the new iPad. I’m hesitant to be an early adopter due to the fact that I think this is just the beginning of significant innovations around touch tablets. However, I’ll probably end up picking up one of these WiFi+3G iPads once they are released. It just looks like an extremely fun device to have around and I’m sure there will be great use cases. Let me know what you think about the iPad in the comments!