Don't believe the iPad hype

For $499, Apple blesses you with a dismal 16 gigabytes of flash memory storage, which is only enough for a handful of movies and photos. Even many of Apple’s iPod devices, which are intended just for music playback, boast just as much, if not more, storage space. Apple’s iPod Classic line, in fact, features 160 GB of room.

For the sake of comparison, the first netbook we found on Amazon – a $366 Eee PC – provides a 2.5″ 250 GB hard drive. What’s more, you’re free to expand the drive at any time if you fill it up. Just pop open the netbook and throw in a replacement drive…

To be clear: You will still need a computer, whether a laptop or desktop, to make the iPad fully functional. You can’t even print from the iPad, nor can you access the device’s file system or organize folders and files like you can on your Windows or Mac computer. While some, like Mossberg, are eager to portray the iPad as a stand-alone device, it simply isn’t going to work by itself for anyone with more than very basic computing needs.

And, though Mossberg raves about the “wicked fast custom processor” in the iPad, he forgets to mention that the processor is significantly slower than what’s available in even some of the cheapest netbooks. Apple is loading the iPad with its own 1 GHz A4 processor, which has a lower clock speed than that Eee PC (1.66 GHz) and is infinitely slower than what you can find in even the cheapest full-size laptops, which now ship with legitimately “wicked fast” Intel Core i7 processors.