Indeed I believe we are just seeing the start of a new era of innovation in terms of new formats for portable devices. Android is maturing just as the manufacturers are starting to get their stuff together in terms of playing with new ideas. I think the future is going to be very interesting. I wonder if Apple and MS will be able to keep up?

I think you are right that this is going to be a fight, it's going to be a huge fight. There are many large and profitable organisations with a lot at stake here. I would not be surprised if this makes that **aa battles of today look tame in comparison.

These devices, as they become cheaper and better, have absolutely massive potential for humanity. But todays world is increasingly $'s focused instead of benefits focused. I would like to see humanity win but I fear the corporations (in the short term at least) will be too powerful.

http://www.creativitygames.net/creative-thinking/449-the-threat-of-3d-printing

Surely there would be a database somewhere of court cases and who was involved in them, either as witnesses, plaintiff or defendant. Even if it is only for court cases in America. Surely the system should automatically scan anyone called up to be a witness and show any prior cases for all to see?

If in fact Apple does release a smaller iPad then I think this will actually be quite significant with respect to MS and Win8. Given the popularity of other smaller tablets released recently such as the Kindle and the Nexus it shows that the market is moving (or rather expanding) to accommodate this new form factor. But it doesn't look to me like Win8 will play nice at this scale (just my opinion, I could be wrong). So just as MS finally get's something possibly credible onto the market the market has shifted to something else.

So it could be that Apple still doesn't believe the smaller form factor is better than the 10" size but is happy to play along as it would quite aggravate MS.
Regarding Jobs' comments regarding the 7" screens, I believe he may have been right at the time but our UI design skills for tablets have improved now which may mitigate those points. The industry moves so quickly that a lot of comments many people make are true at the time given what was viable then but become less relevant as we learn more.

This is just a ploy to help get more copies of Win8 sold. Shortly after it gets approved they'll get others to push for a huge tablet rollout in schools. MS will then go in with a deal they can't refuse for Win8 tablets. The bonus is they will then have to buy more Office licenses and quite a few more Win servers to manage them.

So. An easy way to get an increase in sales in the short term and secure Win8 market share in the long term.

While schools are playing with tablets as small individual projects MS has no chance but once it becomes a large scale deployment that goes out to tender MS can muscle their way in and force everything to be MS. That's effectively the way it worked here in NSW Australia for the 1 laptop per child project. MS made a killing on it and turned every high school student above yr 9 into a walking advertisement for Win 7.

Kinda similar to when FF started gaining market share. MS was very vocal in stating that people didn't want tabs, that tabs were a fad, that they were useless. Then when people didn't believe them they eventually added tabs to IE.

Wonder if similar will happen here?

They clearly don't have much faith in their faith if they fear that something as simple as thinking would put it in danger.

Here's my theory.

This is the advertised price that nobody will pay. Instead they will go to manufacturers and say

"Hey, those are nice Android tablets you're making there. How's about you stop making them completely and we'll give you WinRT for a much more competitive price?"

Isn't this the same strategy they used quite successfully to keep manufacturers from making Linux machines?

I have developed an on-line todo list manager http://todolistme.net/ and have experienced similar issues. I was able to get it working nicely in all browsers except IE. It may be that my web development fu is not up to scratch but I did put a fair bit of time into trying to get it to work in IE and had no luck. All my tweaking just resulted in weird error messages that I could not decipher (Even with the help of Google). So I just gave up.

It's not a huge success of Facebook proportions yet but it is growing nicely in popularity so the lack of IE doesn't really bother me at this point.

It seems to me that for content only pages IE is perfectly fine but as we move more and more into web apps it's struggling to keep up. But I don't have extensive experience in this area so I'm happy to be proven wrong.

And a lot of computers hosting illegal content would also be deemed illegal. And the RIAA, MPAA would come in and say "Don't worry, we'll help you take down all those dirty dirty illegal computers, just grant us more laws in our favor and we'll gladly take on the task."

It's all part of their plan you see.

And before you know it, the only legal computers will be those blessed by the **AA and hard wired to be under their constant surveillance.

How do we know they didn't just pirate the qubit?

I wonder how much of this was a planned marketing stunt.

"Take the phone for free. It has a minor glitch but we guarantee it will be fixed in a few days and be as good as new."

How many people I wonder will just see that it is FREE and rush to buy it accordingly. Artificially inflating WP sales figures and making it look like it's gaining traction.