Customers at the University Village Apple Store got their first look at Apple's new device. Photo by Angelo Carosio | The Spectator

After several months of waiting and years of speculation, it’s finally arrived. The Apple iPad has been called a “revolutionary” “”polarizing” “magical” and “useless” device by various reviewers, but today the public finally got to lay their fingers on the glass and try it for themselves.

Lines slowly grew outside the University Village Apple Store before the 9 a.m. opening, but there was no shortage of iPads for people who didn’t pre-order the device. Jason Chan, an employee at the store, said that even though they had sold over 500 already, there was more than enough iPads to go around well after noon. Employees were cheering as people left the store with their new toys, and overall the environment was festive and exciting.

The table of demo iPads was bustling with people anxious to get their hands on the device, and there were lines behind every unit. The rest of the store was comparatively dead–it was surprising to see how many people just wanted to try the thing out.

“We’re encouraging people to give it a shot to see if they like it before they decide to buy one,” Chen said. “It’s really cool, a lot of people just want to come in, play with it, just see what it’s about.”

Holding an iPad in my hands was a distinct experience. It’s different than anything you’ve held before, the bright display and amazing thin-ness combine to make it seem like you’re holding nothing but pure screen. It may be “pretty much just a big iPod touch,” but the size (Over three times the screen real-estate) turns it in to a completely different machine entirely. Web pages don’t require you to scroll around to see everything, you can view both a list of your emails and the emails themselves on one screen, and the iTunes and Remote applications blow the ones on the iPhone out of the water.

The iPad has a large, 10-inch screen and runs the same OS as the iPhone and iPod touch. Photo by Angelo Carosio | The Spectator

The iPad makes for a perfect couch, bed, and casual browsing computer. While I didn’t get the chance to sit down with it, trying it in a variety of different scenarios (on a table, on a dock, holding it completely) made me realize that there doesn’t seem to be a wrong way to hold this thing. While holding it made it a bit awkward to type on, with it on a table on on your lap the keyboard seemed accurate and much easier to use than it’s iPhone counterpart, mostly due to the extra space.

“This is a completely new way to browse the web,” said one customer while browsing NYTimes.com on a demo iPad. “It’s just amazing.”

The next step for Apple after such a successful product release will be to ensure the quality of apps on the iPad app store live up to the quality of the device. Such a large screen will give developers much more to work with, and it seems that the store is already seeing innovative, useful apps that might not have been possible with the iPhone. Apple’s already created an iPad version of it’s iWork software, which allows for document creation, and new apps from giants like Netflix, ABC and Amazon ensure that the iTunes store isn’t going to be the only place you can go for content.

It’s hard to say whether or not this device will gain traction as fast as the iPhone and iPod lines did after their initial releases, but if the scene today was any indicator, it seems very possible. The price helps too: the iPad starts at $500, which is half the price of their entry-level laptop. For people who mostly use their computers for surfing, watching and playing games, that price seems pretty attractive.

The rumors surrounding an Apple tablet running some form of Mac OS have been around since shortly after the iPhone was released. There have been many a press conference where geeks held their breath hoping for that “one more thing” to be announced at the end, only to have their hopes and dreams shattered when the only noteworthy product release was slightly redesigned iPods. The speculation is immense: some bloggers are saying it’s going to have a new version of iPhone OS on it, essentially making it a huge iPod Touch, or, as a source close to Apple put it, an “iPhone on steroids.” Others are claiming it will run a full-fledged version of Snow Leopard, like a normal Mac computer with new touch controls. Nobody really knows anything for sure.

The real question that the idea of an Apple tablet brings up is the who factor. Who is Apple going to cater this device to? If the market they’re looking for is the e-reader market, and they’re trying to go toe-to-toe with devices like the Kindle, a modified iPhone OS would work great. But the price would have to be low for any legitimate competition, and that’s something we all know Apple isn’t very good at. If it’s aimed at creative professionals like artists, photographers and filmmakers, it would almost have to run a full copy of OSX. I’d like to see them try to market a device to professional artists without Illustrator and Photoshop or to filmmakers without Final Cut. It just wouldn’t work.

As it stands right now, it seems like Apple isn’t really doing anything groundbreaking here, but rather doing what they’ve done in the past: taken emerging tech and made it easy to use for the masses. They did it with smartphones and the iPhone, with MP3 players  and the iPod, and with old-school command-line computers and the Mac. There are plenty of tablet PCs out running Windows right now, but none of them are impressive, none of them do anything too exciting out of the touch or pen input that people are buying them for. For Apple to be successful here, they have to provide something new and exciting to get everyone’s attention, as well as the ability for the kind of people who usually buy tablet PCs to do what they’ve been doing for years on the friendlier Mac OS.

Since this device has been kept under wraps so well, the only thing that exists is rumors and guessing. There are rumors that magazine publisher Conde Nast is making tablet-formatted versions of its magazines for use on the tablet, which would point to a more iPod or iPhone like gadget with an emphasis on content consumption. There are also rumors that it will cost around $1000, which seems like a bit much to pay for a device aimed at reading magazines and e-books. Again, nobody really knows anything.

This tablet announcement is perhaps the most significant Apple announcement since the iPhone. We pretty much knew almost everything about the iPhone before it came out (including the completely obvious name), because a smartphone is a little bit easier of a thing to pin down. The idea of a “tablet” Mac could mean a whole load of things, and really the only thing to do is wait patiently until the 27th. Plenty of blogs will be posting up-to-the-minute reports of the announcement, and I know I’ll be glued to my screen for the duration.

Apple introduced a new model of iPod Shuffle on Wednesday

It’s the way of technology that over time gadgets will become smaller. The first iPod was a hunky beast of a device, too big for most people’s pockets. The iPod mini became the iPod nano generations 1, 2, and 3 while getting smaller every time, and the pregnancy test / tampon-esque first gen iPod shuffle became the button sized second generation. Apple’s designers have been at it again, and the result is a device that’s going to be harder for its users to keep track of than a lighter.

The previous generation iPod shuffle was already small enough. As an added bonus, the space that Apple sacrificed for this new model means that the device no longer has any buttons. No buttons on the device itself, nowhere, nada. Instead, they boast that the earbuds that come with the shuffle have the necessary controls on them, and that one of those controls makes a computerized voice speak the currently playing song title and artist to you.

Wait, what?

The iPod has returned to the long-form factor. At least it doesn't look like a tampon anymore.

I don’t know about you guys, but the stock earbuds that come with iPods have gotten almost zero time in my ears. The things are tinny, lack any sufficient amount of bass, and are generally uncomfortable and prone to falling out at the slightest hint of pressure on the cord. Apple is now saying that, at least for now, these earbuds are the only way people can enjoy music on the new iPod shuffle? Give me a break.In addition, despite Apple generally doing a good job with text-to-speech, I’m sure quite a few musical artists have names that this thing isn’t going to be able to pronounce correctly. Björk, MSTRKRFT, and Röyksopp come to mind as a few artists that text-to-speech would butcher, and song titles like “Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur” by Sigur Ros even I don’t know how to pronounce. Hearing Fred or a comparable Apple-branded voice attempt to say those titles would probably make the band die a little bit inside.

I’ll give Apple some credit here: it’s a pretty impressive feat to cram a 4gb MP3 player and text-to-speech software into such a small package, but the question really comes down to this: is it necessary? I wasn’t hearing anyone complaining that the previous iPod shuffle was too big–in fact the opposite was true, and people usually said that it was too small to keep track of easily.

Gadget blog Gizmodo seems to agree on this one, and has also added that Apple let them know that they will be selling an adapter that lets you use third-party headphones with the device. Great, I’ll add it to my list of $20 Apple dongles that let me do 1 thing that I should have been able to do in the first place.

Memo to Apple: form is not more important than functionality. Your customers appreciate the aesthetics of your devices, but when you start sacrificing serious features like basic controls just so you can shave a couple square centimeters off of your device, it’s taking things a little bit too far.