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Comment by dieterrams | Hacker News Reader

The iPad caused companies like HP to rethink their tablet strategy, which set them back in terms of release date and OS of choice.

In general, I think it's unlikely Windows 7 will gain much adoption as a tablet OS, since it's not designed for touch. Some evolution of Windows Phone 7 is more likely.

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The operating system has turned out to be so irrelevant for a pad. I love my iPad, but all I want from it is to surf and play movies. The shoe-horned iPhone os is crap (not as appropriate as it is on the phone and certainly not the full OSX experience).

I think crap is stretching it a bit, but I do think the iOS 4 release on iPad will be a very important update.

It is only opinion. But no user visible file system, can't share documents between apps, no ability to have different users or even different set of Safari bookmarks on the same iPad, no ability to wirelessly sync, stupid screen of icons launch metaphor and more. Understand, I own one and love it (I think the pad form-factor is in fact game changing)- but the iPad is really a strange device.

I agree it's basically shoehorned. Springboard in particular isn't optimized for the form factor. But iOS makes for a very energy efficient OS with excellent touch UI conventions and a great app ecosystem. That alone makes it the best tablet UI to date. I think they'll make better use of the form factor over time.

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