So after years of rumors, Apple has finally done it, the iPad is out.

First impressions from the Keynote is that once again, Apple has released an amazingly sleek piece of technology with terrific ergonomics and subtle beauty.

But what is the iPad? In the PC world, a tablet is a PC with a touch screen and as such runs the standard OS and applications exactly like a desktop or laptop computer would. In their “Think Different” strategy, Apple have of course created something different and decided to use the iPhone OS rather than Mac OS.

As such, the iPad is not so much a tablet computer but mainly a larger iPhone. When parading my iPhone, most people say “nice piece of kit but slightly to big for a phone”, I always replied “well it is a smartphone…”. Secretly, I wished that Apple did come up with a smaller version of the iPhone that would fit in a pocket and had hopes of an iPhone nano back in the days. Now I got used to the size and most people did as well. With the iPad, I am not quite certain what the audience is. It is to big to be a phone obviously, and not flexible enough to be a computer… Is it just a better designed and more desirable Kindle? Maybe, time will tell…

Of course, iWork for iPad gives it some use as a temporary laptop replacement while sitting on a sofa but the iPad will never replace my MacBook in my computer bag. It will be hard for me to justify this one

The bigger news was in my opinion the launch of the Apple CPU for mobile devices (again not laptops). The CPU seems to be extremely performant and I am already looking forward to the iPhone 4GS.

In other news, while people are drooling on the iPad, some of us were slightly disappointed not to hear about iPhone OS 4.0 and maybe even new laptops making use of the latest Intel portable CPUs. Where was the usual “One more thing…”?