Apple's tablet device - the iPad - was officially unveiled yesterday and it looks nice. I'm not sure if it is game-changing nice, but it looks to have addressed at least some of the concerns I've had with tablet options in the past.

In my post about my origami experience I mentioned the issues with:

• Screen resolution - the iPad have gone with 1024 x 768 which could be a nice sweet-spot.
• Screen size - almost 10" is right where I'd mentioned the possible tablet sweet-spot might be
• Battery life - a month of standby and 10 hours of use time on the iPad - nice
• Speed - the iPad has a 1Ghz processor but looks to perform well in the demo, so it's not just about clock-speed
• OS - my origami device ran XP, which wasn't great. Windows 7 would be better, and I'm sure the iPhone OS will also be an improvement

In my post about my Dell XT tablet running Windows 7, I mentioned these areas for improvement:

• Desire for built-in Internet access - I could have gotten my XT with mobile-carrier access but didn't. If I bought an iPad, I'd opt for that feature
• Make it lighter - I'd suggested around 1.5 pounds, which is right where the iPad landed. I think that would be comfortable to use
• Have an e-ink option - One of the iPad features touted is book reading on it. I don't see mention of e-ink, so I think it's a normal backlit display. I'm not sure if that would irritate the eyes if used as a long-term reading device or not.
• Make it thin, but sturdy - How's one-half inch sound? That's the iPad depth, and it sounds ideal to me.
• Make the touch screen reliable - I've never seen nor heard about issues with the iPhone or iTouch touch-screen so I don't think this is going to be an issue on the new iPad device.

I'm not going to run out and buy one, but it does look nice. A remaining question - not specific to the iPad but all tablet devices - is how will it be transported. My Dell XT is carried around in a notebook bag - it's too big for anything else. Even my Samsung Q1, which was much smaller, was an odd size - too big for anything but a large purse. How comfortable are people going to be carrying this thing around with them? Or is the expectation that this is merely a home-based device that people won't carry around?

I recently updated the N-Trig DuoSense drivers for Windows 7 on my Dell XT tablet pc. There doesn't seem to be much that I'm running that supports multi-touch. Internet Explorer does - I can use two fingers to zoom in/out on web pages. That's neat I guess but pretty boring since the Apple i-Whatever products have supported this for so long.

Besides supporting multi-touch though, it has improved some other functionality of the touch screen. One big improvement for me has been dragging my finger easily to scroll through long pages or to different parts of an image/file/document. This is a very smooth operation now and I find it quite useful. Previously a quick swipe would jump an entire page up or down, or with some effort you could scroll. Now it's nice and easy.

One negative thing though is that the overall experience is a bit less responsive initially. Perhaps it's trying to decide whether it's being touched by a finger or the pen - I'm not sure, but it does seem to have a little more lag than before. I've also noticed that it's just developed the situation where it has some "gaps" in my pen writing. So, I can write "Brad" in cursive but it might occasionally miss the first line, making the B look more like a 3 and messing up the entire recognition. This is VERY annoying and I've actually toyed with the idea of uninstalling the new drivers because of this issue alone. I use my tablet A LOT so having issues with the writing recognition is a big for me. I'm not sure if the neat-factor outweighs the occasional usability issue.

I suppose I'll wait a bit longer to decide. Meanwhile, does anyone have other multi-touch applications to suggest I try out?