I think an SD slot would be more useful to more people than USB. A dedicated USB port on this kind of product seems rather pointless to me except in very niche circumstances. A standard USB *HOST* port, because that's what's being asked for, is also thicker than the iPad itself.

But aside from the port - because it can be solved with an adapter, what products are then going to be connected to it? Those will require software and I'm pretty confident that what exists in the OS is rather minimal in that regard.

I could not be happier that Apple had a hand in helping to rid the world of Flash. Their choice was most definitely not philosophical.

Thankfully for Apple, none of the points mentioned above have slowed down their sales and aren't likely to in the future. A few have a chance of being rectified, but some will never be.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot I would also like to see changed or added to the iPad for personal reasons, but I don't pretend that any of them would help Apple's market position or their sales. Just stuff that I would find useful to satisfy my own needs/desires, including a file browser which was the first point above. Better inter-application file/data sharing well, including the ability for apps to hand out access to a file store, the same way the system prompts for access to system services. Before tackling any of the points above there are also so many changes/fixes needed in Apple's own software, which I find severely lacking in so many ways.

All of this is more general iOS than iPad-specific though. But Android products wouldn't satisfy any of my desires because the experience is so sub-par that I'd toss the device in the bin within minutes. All Android hardware is also sub-par, be it phones or tablets that they'd almost be binned even before turning them on. I suspect Apple sells so many iPads because most consumers out there share, at least partially, my opinion on this matter. I've never seen an Android tablet in the wild outside of a store display. Until Windows 8 products come out, there's really no one else in this game at all and I'd say that analyst-estimated market share figures are quite off the mark in the favor of Google.

The new iPad, curiously, has exactly the same clock speed as iPad 2, 1GHz. Just published today via some benchmarks from Vietnam. It's also got 1GB of memory. And everyone knows about the screen, for which a matching resolution elsewhere will require a 27" display. I can't state how significant a technology milestone the screen is.

I only have one iPad in the house right now and it's pretty much my 2.5 year old daughter's computer. Well suited for that. I still don't need or find terribly useful a tablet for my own personal daily use. Not unless, as I've said before, it's one of many dedicated vertical applications for which I'd need a dozen or so iPads.