Heh, you know, I just spent a whole two dollars on Wolfram Alpha for my iPad just so I can laugh at you.

Obviously it would have been even funnier to buy CP/M for my iPad instead, but I can't. Because it's available for free.

Not quite sure that analogy works, because they have vendor subsidies helping to keep the price down.
And of course, as usual, it needs saying that Apple don't care that Android has more market share. Firstly because they are making most of the money in the market, and secondly because they cannot increase their market share anyway, because their product is selling as fast as they can make it.

As for your specific requirements, Steve Jobs agrees with you. He's made it very clear: there are some people who do not want a curated experience on their phone, and those people should get an Android device instead. (He would caution you to be careful, because not all Android phones are as open as you think, but he completely gets that iOS devices are not for you.)

Legally difficult: a) they have licensed ActiveSync, they don't give it away, so there are contracts in place. And b) probably breaks competition laws to exclude Android by name.

Also competitively risky: smartphones have become a huge hit in the enterprise not because sysadmins like them (we like Blackberry much more because of BES) but despite our protests. If I go to my boss and say "I want to deploy Exchange 16. BTW, it'll break your iPhone and iPad" then I'm gonna get sent away with a flea in my ear.

Oh, and of course, you do realise that Android has awful, awful Activesync support? They only started supporting enough of the existing security features in 2.3 for me to let people connect them to my Exchange server.

What do you sell to the people wanting iPhones? Android devices? Or do they leave and go to a store that stocks iPhones? This fascinates me, because I suspect it may be a significant distortion to the US smartphone but I can't figure out how big. If you manage to sell them on Android, then now that Verizon has iPhone and T-Mobile is shortly going to go away, you'd expect to see a drop. Except Android devices having lower ticket prices might keep them in the game. Or maybe the "normals" do something else we geeks can't understand...

(I'm assuming you're based in the US, of course, apologies in advance if I'm wrong, but since you're AC and won;t get notified of this reply my question is largely hypothetical anyhoo.)

No they couldn't. SDLP got 3 seats; Alliance 1; Green 1. Still only 320. They'd have to bring in the Scottish Nationalists as well to get to 326 and an absolute majority.

And that of course is the absolute minimum working majority. One MP refuses to do what the whips tell her and they loose.

Exactly the point about having a local MP. My MP is a good constituency MP and was squeaky clean in the expenses; this was a very important factor in deciding my vote. (As was, to be fair, the fact that her main opponent had a good record of local civic duty. Almost a pity to have to choose.)

There were plenty of MPs at this last election who didn't steal quite enough taxpayers money to be deselected by the party but did enough to get kicked out of parliament.

Two words. Palm Foleo.

Easily.
"Hello, is that the Web development team? This is the CEO. I'm browsing our site on my new iPad, and it's broken. Fix it."

Well, the thing is that while dedicated GPS devices are better at navigation, an iPhone is more general purpose, doing lots of things apart from navigation. For example, I have an app that uses the GPS while I'm out for a walk to track how far I've gone and how many calories I've burned.

The issue that if you're navigating you need local maps was fixed long ago; all the navigation apps you buy do this. The builtin maps app doesn't of course, but it's not really for navigation; it just has that included as a "might as well put this in". It's for location aware searching.

If my beloved TomTom fell under a bus... I'd probably replace with TomTom for iPhone, Maybe not as good, but as with cameras, the best GPS is the one you have with you, and I've always got my phone with me.

I don't think you should call ChromeOS real Linux. I mean, I know it is Linux, but since you can't install ANYTHING on it...

(And yes, I know that if you install ChromiumOS yourself you can get to a shell, and you can install software on it, and Hexxeh is really, really clever and I have no doubt he will figure out a way to get an app launcher in there somehow, but I can't see hardware companies preferring that to installing genuine ChromeOS and getting all that lovely Google branding.)

As a happy Sony user, let me explain the limited zoom thing. Not really their fault: since PDFs are typically designed for turning into paper, they have a lot of white space around the text, so often if they display it full screen the text gets too small.

(it does show the PDF very well, BTW, so if it doesn't have big margins you're fine. And see below.)

Now, they can't easily zoom in to cut out the margins because that needs horsepower the devices don't have, to figure out where the margins are (especially with page numbers).

So what they do instead is, if you hit the zoom button while in a PDF, is extract the text from the PDF and display that instead. Which works, but they can't reflow it easily, again because PDF is designed for text.

(This is below: There's a third alternative in Calibre (open source software for converting/loading books on the device, ugly as sin but a million times better than what gets bundled with the reader) which is to use the PC's horsepower to trim off the margins before syncing it. Calibre plays nice with Stanza on iPhone too, so I reckon geeks switching to iPad from an existing ebook reader are going to keep using it no matter how fancy iBookStore is!)

So where I have a choice, I always get books in EPub, which refactors and flows and zooms beautifully, but just dropping a PDF file onto the SD card in my PRS-505 works. It's not as nice, but it works.

There's a 2a, which is moving the controls further apart so you hit them cleanly, and a 2b, which is reducing the number of controls so you have room for them after you've done 2 and 2a.

And as Ultrabot says, 3) add multi-touch style controls as needed, such as flicking or swiping or pinching.

And I guess 4) reduce UI latency, because not having an app instantly respond feels much more broken when you're actually touching the UI for some reason.

And 5) reduce dependency on accurate selection. It took apple so long to do Cut+Paste for a reason - accurate selection in a touch UI is difficult.

Oh, I guess there's a 5a) of changing the UI to accomodate multiple item selection, which you tend to have to do with a seperate checklist mode.

And 6) ensure you can get to all the UI without right-click/middle-click

An exercise for those complaining about lack of a camera in the iPad.

Get something the size and shape of one - a pad of paper or a (closed!) netbook is close enough. Hold it like an iPad for a few minutes; do the sort of things you'd expect to do. Touch the surface, do a pinch to zoom, set it on your knees to type,

Now stop and think about where a camera would be in all of that. What was it pointing at? The ceiling? Up your nose?

Ah, you say, I'd hold it up in front of my face for doing a video call. OK, try that. Feel your arms getting heavier? But maybe it's a short call. OK, the camera's pointing at your face, right? Now turn it to landscape. Camera's pointing at your ear now, isn't it?

And boy, those manufacturers loooove netbooks, don't they, with their race to the bottom prices and the way they cut into their consumer laptop market.

I'm repeating myself from below, but if the form factor takes off, it'll be BECAUSE of iPad, not DESPITE it. Tablets have been around for almost a decade without anyone buying them.