Well, the experiment at the coffee shop went exactly as I expected. No once cared, and I suspect a few may have bristled with annoyance: I have heard of nothing but the damned iPad for the last three days; do I now have to suffer the presence of the thing and its acolytes as well? Fine; I understood. I sat back and decided to read a book. Alas, the only book I had was Winnie-the-Pooh, which comes preloaded on the iPad. That's veer sweet and cute and we all love Pooh, but I dont't have a lot of unanswered questions about life in the 100 Acre Wood at this point. But it was either Pooh or download something old and free, and hence thick and dull, so I read the Pooh, nodding now and then to make it look as if I was reading Seutonius' Lives of the Caesars. (Which is free at the iBook store. Guess they settled the royalty issue.) On a serious note - and yes, that previous paragraph was a real laff rio, wasn't it? - I think some people's underwhelmedness has to do with the iPhone, which was a Miracle when was first announced. The pinch-and-zoom, the touch navigation - they were new for most, and now they're normal. But if they'd released the Pad first, then shrunk it to make the iPhone, people would have been unimpressed. Smaller is the usual progression. Making it larger doesn't seem like any great feat. But it's not an iPhone. For one thing, it has no camera, and that deficiency is starting annoy me so much I'm considering selling it, and going back to books taped to Polaroid cameras.