The hottest debate going at the moment is whether or not the iPad is a laptop or netbook replacement. The conversation has focused on the quality of the virtual keyboard, the power of the processor, the storage capacity, and the simplified UI. But we now have a definitive opinion on the topic — Apple’s. Hinted at in the technical specifications now confirmed in Leander’s unboxing, the iPad won’t even turn on unless it has been synced through iTunes.

I sincerely hope this changes. You’re not going to attract an army of non-computer savvy users to a revolutionarily simplified platform if they have to own a regular computer, too. It’s time to cut the umbilical cord, Apple. Let the iPad exist unto itself. If you never connect it to a computer, it should still work brilliantly. If you want to connect it to a computer to transfer files, so be it. But the Mac didn’t need to sync to an Apple II. The first PowerBook didn’t have to dock into a Quadra to turn on. You’ve made a serious new computing platform for the rest of us. Don’t treat it like it’s just an iPhone, dependent on a big brother computer to be truly useful.

Here are CoM’s obligatory iPad unboxing pix. The biggest surprise is the lack of a cleaning cloth (the iPad is already sticky with greasy little prints). There’s also the austere minimalism of the box’s contents. There’s hardly anything in it.

If you’re looking to score an iPad this AM, it may be wise to check the shopping site Milo.com before heading out.

The site has a page listing the availability of iPads at Apple’s retail stores and Best Buy.

The system hooks into the internal stocking systems at Best Buy and thousands of other retail stores (not sure how it has data from Apple).

Milo.com, tracks the real-time in-store availability of Best Buy products, and almost 50,000 other retail stores nationwide. No more driving to or calling all of the Best Buy stores in a hundred mile radius to locate what you are looking for. Early adopters in hot iPad pursuit can simply enter their location and type “iPad” on the Milo.com Web site or from their mobile phones and Milo.com will find the nearest Best Buy location with it in stock.

Here’s the 15th guy in line at San Fancisco’s Best Buy on Harrison Street (the one sitting down). Everyone behind him — and there’s about half-a-dozen — better have both fingers crossed. There’s reportedly only 15 iPads at each Best Buy (but the limit is one-per-customer). Doors open any minute now. Good luck guys!

UPDATE: @Brent Jones in the comments says Best Buy seems to have plenty of iPads. “A Best Buy in St. Louis had at least 30 or 40 on hand. People walking up after the 10 a.m. opening had no problem getting one.”

Woah, look at the giant line this morning in Pittsburgh! Is that Anderson Cooper?

CC-licensed photo by Rob Beschizza (of BB Gadgets).

Anyone having a UPS anxiety attack? Hitting refresh every 30 seconds and still not seeing those magic words: “out for delivery.”

Our friend Leigh in Texas says he still hasn’t received his iPad, and it’s after 10AM. He’s standing by the window, acting like a “nervous mother.”

Are you freaking out? Please tell us what’s going on in your neck of the woods.

iFixit sent three staffers to the east coast to score an iPad as early as possible, CEO Kyle Wiens told me yesterday. Looks like it worked and they are busy tearing it apart. They are posting the dissasembly as they go — you can watch the action as it happens. It’s the perfect distraction while standing in line for an iPad.

Some highlights:
* This machine is absolutely gorgeous inside. There’s clear symmetry that is there for aesthetics alone.
* The rear case is CNC machined from a solid block of aluminum, using the same process as the MacBook Pro.
* Apple has used more epoxy to secure chips to the board than we’ve seen before. This indicates that it is designed to be even more rugged than their laptops.
* The battery isn’t soldiered onto the motherboard. That means replacing the battery *is* feasible for users who do not want to give up their precious for a week. (And then get back someone else’s iPad!)
* This unit is different from the FCC photos. Toshiba DOES NOT have the flash memory in the production units! Instead, Samsung has secured a major win.

Update: Wiens’ local paper has a story about what iFixit is up to this morning and how they document the teardowns.

Woz was camped out all night at the Valley Fair Apple store in Santa Clara, Calif. He seems to somehow have gotten his iPad early, because it’s still a couple of hours before 9AM on the west coast. But here he is holding it with a big sh*t-eating grin on his face.

His verdict:

“iPad delight…wow this is better than I ever imagined!”

Via 9to5Mac.

Not wishing to get left behind amid all the iPad fussing, Google has announced an experimental web UI for iPad and other tablet devices.

Taking cues from Apple’s own Mail for iPad, the webapp puts an inbox down the left side and displays messages on the right.

In the same post, Google’s Punit Soni reminds us that no matter how bad the Apple-Google relationship has been painted by the press, things are obviously going well enough for a number of Google products to be included by default on iPads out-of-the-box, namely: Google search inside Safari, YouTube, and Maps.

That doesn’t sound like two companies at war to me.

Here are some fancy photos of the iPad overnight at Apple’s 5th Avenue store in Manhattan, courtesy of our friend Richard Gutjahr, who is currently first in line for an iPad.

Check out Richard’s campout blog here (BTW: it’s in German, but there’s a Google translate button).

If you’re going down to the Apple Store to buy an iPad on Saturday morning, here’s what to expect:

• At 7AM, all Apple’s ~14,000 retail staff will be in an all-hands meeting. They will be trained on all features of the iPad and each staffer will get face time with the device.
• The stores will set up two waiting lines: one for reserved iPad buyers, the other for walk-ins.
• There will be a strict two-iPads-per-person limit.
• All store staff will work until 10 a.m. to deal with the first rush of buyers.
• There is expected to be another rush 3 p.m., when left-over reserved iPads (if any) will be turned over to walk-in customers.
• Apple has likely shipped enough iPads to fulfill all the reserve orders at each store. It has also likely shipped ~100 iPads for walk-ins. Larger flagship stores will likely have larger supplies.
• Best Buy stores will have just 15 iPads each: five of each memory configuration.

Via ifoAppleStore.com.

Even though Amazon’s hardware Kindle reader will be toast at 9AM Saturday morning, Amazon has just released its Kindle app for the iPad.

The app is free and available for download from the App Store.

Professional line sitter Greg Packer has been bumped from the front of the iPad line at the 5th Avenue Apple Store.

Packer didn’t reserve his iPad, so he’s dropped behind German blogger Richard Gutjahr, who did reserve an iPad.

“Apparently nobody before me in the original line had a reservation,” Gutjahr just emailed me from his iPhone. “Crazy.”

As we reported yesterday, Packer began his campout to be first in line for an iPad on Thursday. Packer is a professional line sitter who has gained considerable media attention for being first in line for scores of events, including the original iPhone and Ground Zero.

Gutjahr says Packer is angry about getting bumped. “He seems to be really mad,” Gutjahr wrote. “Funny thing: the media still thinks he’d be the number one who gets the iPad. But he needs to wait until the reserved line is done. And that one is lead by me. Who would have thought this?”

Gutjahr says there are about 20 people in line so far at the flagship Manhattan store. He and the others in line plan to camp out all night until the iPad goes on sale at 9AM. Gutjarh is blogging the event.

Crowds are expected to be light because Apple offered pre-orders and reservations. Most people will receive their iPads by UPS tomorrow or will pick up reserved iPads at Apple stores in the morning.

Still, the absence of a big crowd at the Cube-shaped store — normally a huge tourist attraction — is giving Gutjahr pause. “Hope its not a flop,” he wrote.

iFixit, perhaps the premier gadget tear-down shop on the web today, dissected photos Friday of a pre-production iPad provided by Apple to the FCC, which inexplicably leaked the photos somehow, despite Apple’s desire that they be kept under wraps until August.

With standard caveats about the photos being lower-resolution quality than those iFixit will publish Saturday during its own teardown of a commercially available unit, the company uncovered a few interesting tidbits shedding light on Apple’s suppliers, manufacturing processes and thinking behind the design of the highly anticipated device.

From the iFixit review of the FCC photos:

* It looks like there is a LOT of epoxy holding these chips down to the board. More than we’ve seen before— Apple is really serious about durability on this thing.

* Apple didn’t solder the battery! The iPad uses the same battery attachment system as the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

* Notably lacking from the RF/data cable is anything GPS related.

* Dual speakers provide stereo sound. Two small sealed channels direct sound toward three audio ports carved into the bottom edge of the iPad.

There’s more at the ongoing iFixit review, as well as plenty of info on the iPad hosted by the FCC. And of course, stay tuned for the deluge of information and opinion about Apple’s newest revolutionary device set to wash over the shores of Cyberia just a few hours from now.

More pics after the jump.

Back in December, we reported on the Mag+ prototype for an electronic magazine, developed by the R&D team at Bonnier with help from London design team BERG.

Today, Mag+ becomes reality with the release of Popular Science+, a version of the, um, popular science magazine that’s been built exclusively for iPad. And it looks amazing.

Here’s a video walk-through from BERG’s Jack Schulze:

Compare and contrast with the original video mockup from a few months ago:

The BERG team have done a great job of turning their concept into a real product. They’ve done something else, though: Mag+ is a template, a platform for e-magazine publishing. Having got this trial version of Popular Science out, Bonnier can apply the same technology to their other titles, as well as move it to other mobile platforms like Android.

A pair of alpha nerds, BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow and Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani, have just published strong anti-iPad pieces. Neither is buying the iPad, for different reasons.

Doctorow is firmly against the iPad because it’s too commercial and locked down. He wants an open device he can hack. And Trapani thinks the Mark II iPad will be so much better than the first, only an idiot is will buy the first version:

Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing): Doctorow has a host of reasons he’s not buying the iPad, among them: it’s the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution,” you can’t share media with others, the device itself is glued closed and it hastens the Wal-Martization of software. “… there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”

Gina Trapani (Lifehacker): Trapani predicts the price will halve in short order, and that next year’s model will be much better. “First-generation Apple products are for suckers. Only lemmings with no self-control and excessive disposable income buy first generation Apple products, especially in a new gadget category.”

CoM’s take: I don’t change the oil in my truck and I don’t want to change the batteries in an iPad. It’s open where it counts: access to the web. And I bought the first iPhone, the first iPod, the first Airport and plenty of first-generation Macs. Haven’t regretted buying any of them (except the first Time Capsule, which just died).

Doctorow has a Sad Mac tattoo, btw.

It’s April 3rd weekend, which means a good number of you will be trying out some of the first iPad games to hit the App Store. I, living in Germany, am not be so lucky: my own iPad won’t be delivered until some still unknown date in the farther-flung days of April. Instead, I’m still stuck gaming on my iPhone, but luckily, I’ve got one of the best and hardest-core games on the App Store to entertain me this weekend: Sword of Fargoal.

If you missed Stephen Colbert on the telly last night, here he is showing off his iPad. He opens the show holding the iPad as he sits at his desk. “Thank you for joining US,” he says, as he winks at his new iPad and then puts it away. Then he says: “Of course, the big story for tonight is — I have an iPad.”

Big smug smile.

And yeah, Comedy Central isn’t iPad-friendly. It’s conspicuously absent from Apple’s list of ‘iPad ready” websites.

The iPad may not ship until Saturday, but here on the deal desk we celebrate with the first price drop on an iPad app: Touch Hockey Extreme FS5. Also on tap today is a new batch of App Store freebies, including Batter Up Baseball. Finally, you can get your server’s up-to-date with a deal on the server version of Mac OS X 10.6.

As always, details on these and many other items are available from CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, starting right after the jump.

A day before Apple officially launches sales of the iPad, a new report predicts the Cupertino, Calif. company could sell 7 million of the tablet devices in 2010 and see demand double and triple over the next two years. Although the 7 million figure is just the latest to surpass Wall Street expectations, researchers Friday termed the number “conservative.”

The researchers at iSuppli expect 14.4 million iPads will sell in 2011 and 20.1 million in 2012. Although initial sales will again be driven by first-adopters, researchers see future demand propelled by a growing base of applications, greater features and potentially lower prices.

If you need to write to a mounted volume over SMB, you might want to hold off on updating to OS X 10.6.3 if you haven’t done so already: Apple support forum users are reporting major problems in multiple threads that SMB is borked.

Reader Eric Dube writes:

[T]here seems to be a systemic issue with the latest 10.6.3 update from Apple breaking write access to SMB shares for many users. The problem occurs when you try to copy a file with extended file attributes to the SMB share – files without extended attributes can be copied. I can honestly say the problem breaks connectivity to every one of my SMB shares that I’ve tried and need to access on a daily basis. So far there’s no word from Apple (numerous people including myself have reported the issue though) or any known workaround that works (other than copying the files from a terminal prompt instead of the finder.)…

At this point, I’m already considering backing out the update and going back to 10.6.2 since that works just fine. It appears to be a wide-spread problem, so it might be worth looking into to warn users about.

It certainly seems to be a wide-spread issue, although not one that affects me personally. Have any of you guys noticed this problem since updating to 10.6.3? Let us know in the comments, especially if you found a solution that has worked for you in getting around the issue.

Apple has released its iBooks application for download, ahead of Saturday’s official launch of the Cupertino, Calif. company’s iPad tablet device. The application, which allows iPad users to read e-books as well as purchase titles from the iBookstore, can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store.

To get iPad owners started, Apple will include the children’s favorite Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne.

Her at CoM, we’ve sent trackback hugs to our good friend Richard Gutjahr before for his fine, funny Apple Tablet inspired mock movie poster Photoshops. But as clever as Richard’s last round of mock-up posters were, the iPad still hadn’t been officially announced, and he didn’t even know what the Apple tablet was going to look like yet. His latest posters are all the funnier for being tablet accurate.

We’ve got a couple more after the jump, but be sure to hit up Richard’s site for the whole collection.

Could the iPad be the best thing to happen to Amazon? Although a debate has raged over what impact Apple’s tablet device could have on the Seattle-based e-book leader, Amazon could actually benefit from the iPad, a Friday report suggests. Despite a wide-held opinion that the iPad is a more flexible platform, Amazon could sell more e-books to iPad owners than Apple.

“If you’re an iPad buyer, chances are about 90 percent that you’re also a book buyer on Amazon,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey told the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Apple’s launch of the iPod or iPhone, where the Cupertino, Calif. company started with iTunes and the App Store pre-installed, iPad buyers can choose whether to install Apple’s iBooks or another e-book app, such as Amazon’s Kindle app.

[polldaddy poll=”2995715″] When the much-awaited Apple tablet device was christened the iPad in January, many people hated the name.

CoM readers were underwhelmed by the choice of iPad, 51% of the 1,380 readers who answered our poll on Jan. 27 gave the moniker a “meh” while just 17% said the name “rocks.”

For English speakers, the sanitary product association was immediate and launched a thousand jokes — including some printed for posterity on underwear,  for many non-English speakers, it was just one awkward vowel away from iPod.

Has time — and the fact that the device is almost in stores — made any difference?

Let us know in the comments.