We hope that you’ve read both part one and part two so you understand the current software and hardware that will be available in the iPad. In this final installment of the iPad trilogy, we’ll take everything we’ve learned from those articles and define how revolutionary the iPad will truly be.

We learned about some pretty incredible revisions of software for the iPad as Steve made the announcement. The fact that Apple finally put iWork (Keynote, Pages and Numbers) on the Cocoa Touch platform is great for people looking to use the device for business. The iBooks application will definitely begin to dominate the eReader market. Mobile Safari will truly take over as iPad users’ browser of choice. The Calendar and Address Book apps are beautiful: it looks like Apple invested a lot of time into their development. We also can’t forget that we’ll have the advantage of the App Store with the iPad, while other devices have little to no software expandability.

Even though the iPad software is somewhat expandable (it’s still limited by the app approval process), it doesn’t have a whole lot to offer in hardware features. We’re seeing too many accessories to even take them seriously: the fact that Apple has more than 5 accessories tells you that something is a little off. Using the dock connector as the sole connection is very limiting… I would have loved to use video out and plug in an external device like a camera or USB jump drive at the same time. Currently, it appears that — even with the USB port accessory — we won’t be able to use external USB devices, with the exception of cameras. The video out only converts to component, composite or VGA: aren’t we living in the digital age? Couldn’t we have DVI, HDMI or even MiniDisplay Port? Okay fine, the port situation is bad; what about the rest of the hardware? We don’t know as much information as we’d like because there aren’t many iPads in the wild just yet… but we know that it has “custom-built” SOC that uses a Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a Mali GPU. We also know that it will only have 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities: will still find this strange due to the new chip capabilities Toshiba announced in early December.

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