So there it is. The Apple iPad. The slightly dodgy name aside, what did you think?

This is what the Irish Times would look like on the iPad, on the Extra Extra app.

The device is already getting mixed reports. Apple has managed to split people into two camps: the people who think it’s the best device to hit the web, and those who think it’s slightly disappointing. After yesterday’s event, here’s the main points so far.

The good: 

Screen: The iPad has 9.7-inch touch screen. It looks great, and shows just what you can do with multitouch on a large screen. Media looks great on it, and scrolling on a screen like that makes it look like fun.

Design: Thin, light, looks a lot like a giant iPhone. The Dom Joly reference has been made a few times though.

Apps: Getting access to the App Store is a good move. Some, like Extra Extra shown above, will be free for existing users to download again (EE uses a universal binary) .

Battery life: Looks impressive enough, although whether it lives up to the 10 hour claim is another thing. Still, an improvement on a lot of laptops out there.

The bad: 

Capacity limit: 64GB capacity for the largest iPad. Guess we won’t be seeing a larger capacity iPod touch for a while then. 64GB may be ok for a smartphone, but most standard laptops have left this sort of capacitybehind a long time ago. And while the iPad is not a laptop (before the comments start), if you want to put media on it, you’re going to eat through that fairly quickly. Which brings us to…

No USB: This means you can’t hook up an external drive to store movies, photos or music on. You can’t even get your images on to the iPad without an extra kit (price unknown) or by syncing it with a laptop. Hmm.

No Flash support: Yes, I know Flash is a pain. Yes, I know it causes crashes. But at the end of the day, cutting out support for Flash means a lot of websites are inaccessible. Until that changes, it’s a bit of a flaw for a web-browsing device.

No multitasking yet: One of the iPhone’s problems, the iPad doesn’t allow multitasking yet either. It run’s on the same operating system though, so it shouldn’t be a surprise. Something Apple need to address, especially given the functions of the iPad. You should be able to drag things between applications without having to reopen them.

The iPad also failed to include the rumoured camera, and you pay extra – $130 – for the 3G enabled version.

Version 2 or 3 might be worth hanging on for.