As neat as many of its features are, it is still missing a lot. As with anything made by Apple, the hype get to you. While the tablet form factor has been rattling around for a while, most recently as the HP tablet announced at CES, not much has come out of those announcements. The hardware behind the iPad seems beautiful, as you’d expect from Jobs and his team, and the prices are typical Apple as well, starting at $500 and topping out at $829.

Apple’s iPad is, in essence, a bigger version of the iPhone and shares some of the same drawbacks, such as a non-swappable battery, missing Adobe Flash support and the lack of multitasking in the operating system. You also have to wonder about the 1024×768 resolution -  an old-school 4:3 screen dimension, when an HD-friendly 1280×720 might have been a better choice. This is especially true if iPad users plan to view their favorite TV shows and movies.

For the corporate user, I wonder how the iPad fits in: there are no USB ports, no SD slot, the battery is the usual non-removable type from Apple. How is it possible that Apple would skip USB, SD and swappable battery for easy compatibility with today’s standards? Stunning.
It is already bad enough that we have to carry around a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done.

A truly useful device would be one that could let us leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. It would be nice to have a device that can at least, replace a couple of those and the iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, we are still stuck lugging two devices.

At the prices Apple is asking, many netbooks and notebooks are a better value — if you can stand the thought of dragging that twentieth-century keyboard around with you. A MacBook or good PC notebook can perform a wider variety of tasks and runs a much more capable set of software.

It’s still too costly, it’s still yet one more device, and it’s still missing too much for the corporate user. It’s not that the iPad is not impressive, because it is. There is no doubt that the iPad will find a market. I just don’t think it comes close to justifying the hype we’ve heard these past couple of days.

As it is, a few companies are already betting on this trend and are seriouly working on applications that will allow people to track our movements on the internet (for example,  Glympse, Loopt, Scoutic and Google Latitude) .

How would you like people to watch in real time as you circle around a block looking for a parking space, or stop at the liquor store instead of going to the gym. Oh, how about coming home and seeing a note on the door advising you to go back to the “meeting” you had at that strip club?

On the flip side, there are situations where this technology can save lives and get help to people in distress.

The good folks from the Open Source community have several tools available that you can use in building your own customized captive portal with your logo, business information and a little word of encouragement for your customers. One such tool is the FreeBSD based pfSense. It runs as a LiveCD and can be installed on an old Pentium II computer with as little as 1GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM.