Watch and drool.

A few of my own thoughts:

• FaceTime (the new video-calling feature) looks amazing. (And for best results, of course, be sure to get your whole family an iPhone and switch everyone over to AT&T.)
• I've already fallen in love with the beauty of the iPad display -- it's by far better than any monitor I've ever used (even the $900 LCD on my desk at home). That the iPhone's using the same technology makes me that much more interested in picking one up.
• Multitasking's long overdue -- we'll love that here at Rhapsody -- even if it does have a bit of a negative effect on battery life.
• The drag-and-drop-app-icons-to-create-app-folders feature -- also great, but made me chuckle: I immediately remembered sitting in a RealDVD product meeting, maybe a little over year ago, during which the topic was raised of how users might be allowed to create sets out of their individually saved DVDs. An "Edit" screen, containing a drop-down menu with which users could select an existing set or specify a new one, had been constructed by the PM, but it seemed exceedingly clunky to me. I suggested instead that we simply allow them to drag one video onto another and create sets implicitly -- click the cover of Disc 1 of X-Files Season 1, drag it onto Disc 2, drop, and boom, there's your new set -- precisely the same model Apple demonstrates in this video. Unsurprisingly, I was all but laughed out of the room. "Users will never be able to figure that out," the PM said. Uh-huh. Not that it matters anymore, but still. Yeah.
• Call me paranoid, but there's something about the steel frame serving as an antenna makes the brain cells behind my temples a little nervous.
• I want one. But I definitely do not want to switch to AT&T. Dammit.

More later. Curious as to whether we'll hear anything about Lala, too.

Via Engadget (and by way of graphic artist Christoph Niemann's Twitter stream), here's a glimpse of a new handheld device from Microsoft, codenamed Courier:

I have to say -- I'm already in love with this thing. Just the other day I was remarking to a friend that while all these online task-management apps certainly work, nothing truly beats the feeling of crossing a task off on a sheet of paper with a pencil. It's cool someone -- Microsoft, even! -- decided to modeled a device around that particular idea, and went several steps beyond at that. When I said the iPad was on to something, this is what I meant.

More details (and better photos) on Gizmodo.

A look at HP's upcoming Slate, via Wired GadgetLab:

Now, I'm an avid Flash-platform developer, so it should come as no surprise that Apple's refusal to support Flash on its iPhone and iPad platforms frustrates me; it's largely why I've never picked up an iPhone, one of several reasons I've chosen not to wade into the waters of iPhone development, and primarily why you won't catch me buying an iPad next month. This Slate device interests me, though. Sure, it's an iPad clone, but the iPad, a tablet PC, doesn't really seem all that revolutionary, either. And of course, it (the Slate) runs Flash and AIR, which is great. But I'm not here to evangelize the Slate. I'm saying that I think the Slate, and devices like it, will push Apple to support Flash much sooner than it would have had it not decided to build the iPad.

Tablet PCs like the Slate and the iPad are, it seems, a good deal more PC-like than phone-like; using one feels considerably more like using one's laptop than cell phone. So it's no great leap of the imagination to presume, then, that users will probably expect their tablets (Slates, iPads, whatever) to behave more like their PCs -- to do as much, or nearly so, as their laptops or netbooks do now -- than their cells. Slate users, for their part (the Slate runs Windows 7, incidentally) are bound to be more satisfied with their experience in this respect.

But iPad users, I'm guessing, are going to feel the absence of Flash much more acutely than iPhone users do today -- and I think that'll actually put pressure on Apple to support Flash on the iPad, lest it be forced to continually explain its (primarily financial, and I think customer-antagonistic) reasons for not supporting Flash in the first place. The iPad already looks like a crippled, if quite pretty, netbook. Denying its users the option to run Flash only serves to cripple it more.

So it seems there are three possible outcomes to all this: (1) that users don't care -- they're so enamored with their iPads and iPhones that the Flash exclusion just doesn't matter to them enough to keep them from handing over their cash; (2) that users get wise and simply stop buying iPads and iPhones in response to Apple's rejection of Flash; or (3) Apple grudgingly concedes and begins to support Flash, first on the iPad, and then, ultimately -- in a great big blowback of irony -- on the iPhone. I don't usually go in for technology predictions, because I tend to suck at them, but in this case, if the tablet phenomenon catches on (and I actually think it will, thanks largely to the Kindle and the iPad), I'd bet on the third scenario -- at least the iPad part of it. If folks start buying tablets in good numbers, I do think we'll see Flash on the iPad relatively soon.

Place your bets....