From Pogue's review, echoed in several of the reviews I read:

...did you read the reviews, or just skim for all the negative stuff you could possibly find?

Well, it also makes using all the Shanzhai iPads easier ;)

My iPod touch (3rd gen, OS 3.1.3) lacks the option for a custom alarm.

However (in my particular case) because I play music at night, playing more music from my iPod as an alarm would likely be ineffective. Instead, I've got mine set to "emergency alarm"...since it loops for about 5 minutes (or more?) at max volume in the morning, it's basically impossible to ignore :)

Which business would that happen to be? Because in Apple's business, if you look at the strictly business side of things (revenue, profit, sales volume, etc.) I don't think you could ever call it "really stupid".

Hmm, I think this comparison of netbooks wants to disagree with your claims.

As listed in the table, most netbooks have substantially less than 10 hours of battery life, (indeed, only three entries out of 35 with published battery life estimates have an operational life of more than 10 hours), have a screen resolution of 1024x600 (which is *less* than the iPad's 1024x768), and, excluding the less-than-5" netbooks, weigh substantially more than the iPad's 1.5lb. Most are running 1.0 to 1.6GHz Intel Atoms, which aren't directly comparable with a 1 GHz ARM chip, so I can't comment on the "50% faster".

The iPad also doesn't use handwriting recognition for English (it's a standard QWERTY touchscreen keyboard), and you have the option of using a wireless Bluetooth (full) keyboard as well (this option doesn't even require any additional hardware beyond the keyboard).

So, I'd have to say that on several fronts, your argument about netbooks fails. Care to demonstrate what your "average" netbook looks like? Perhaps you'd also like to tell me how much it weighs, and what its actual battery life is like?

It (presumably) does for Chinese, since the iPhone does ;)

Particle physicists have their own terminology for things. The inverse femtobarn is a particular unit of measurement related to data collection on collisions.

1) no USB transfer of music files: this one's a bummer, but you can definitely work around it by using a 3rd-party sync
2) must use iTunes: see 1) (for example, foo_dop with foobar2000 on Windows is quite competent)
3) you can use the On-The-Go playlist for somewhat limited functionality. Furthermore, smart playlists continue to update on the phone (for example, a ratings-based playlist will be altered if you change the rating on a song). For example, I usually play music out of a highly-rated list, and if I suddenly decide I no longer like a song, I can simply reduce its rating and it will drop out of the playlist.
4) I've only seen it lose its place in the playlist after it is synced to iTunes, because the music (iPod) app is restarted.
5) I don't use Bluetooth audio playback, so I can't comment (though I like how the buttons on the new earbuds work)

Well, unless Ubisoft decides to use a real standard, like SSL, and hardcodes the certificate in the binary.

If you manage to spoof a hardcoded certificate, that would imply that you've found the private key (or some way around it), and severely compromised SSL...it's probably just easier to patch the certificate than to break SSL.

There's a lot of real problems in mathematics, but the complex problems are just more interesting ;)

The app uses the iPhone's phone functionality to place calls.

Basically, when you make a call through their interface, they find a free number owned by Google Voice, then send that number to the browser. Using the iPhone's voice connection, that number is dialed, which on Google's end connects you to your destination.

This *does* require a cellular connection, which you simply can't get on an iPod touch.

At the very least, Flash prompts for permission before accessing them (well, usually).

HTML5's local storage feature means that this app, if written correctly (which I suspect is the case), can be used offline without a data connection at all.

For example, see Neven Mrgan's GlyphBoard; this is a web app which you can add to your home screen and use offline. The iPhone's new online user manual is another example of a fully offline web app.

iPhone gives you the option of using Yahoo as the default search engine, too. If Apple makes a deal with Bing, it's likely that the option to use Google will still be there, but it won't be the default for new devices.

There's a "Get Album Artwork" option built-in to iTunes, and there are also 3rd party plugins that will update tags on your music from pretty much any music service.

The "Get Album Artwork" has never worked well for me, but that's probably because 95% of my library isn't available through the iTunes store.