The Apple iPad was officially announced today. With a 9.5" screen it's a little smaller than a netbook; so is Apple finally trying to tap into the netbook market, what with hackintoshes being so popular?

Well...no.

See when you look at the specs of the iPad one thing is abundantly clear - it's a giant iPod Touch. The maximum hard drive space you can have is 64GB. Hell, the standard for netbooks these days is 160GB, two and a half times that of the iPad and at under half the cost ($699 Wifi only model, $829 3G model).

I have no idea who Apple are trying to market this to. As a gaming device, you can buy both the PSP and the DS for the same price as one of these. As a music or video player, the iPod Touch is just as good (re: exactly the chuffing same) and as a web browser, a netbook has the benefit of having a full keyboard AND the ability to use every other bloody software available to Windows or Linux.

This looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Apple hit it big with the iPod and the iPhone, but this looks like it's going to be dead on arrival.

Well, you got that bit right.