I don't understand why this article is on the front page given the headline. This was as much an iPad as a Commodore 64 is a zBox 4 supercomputer. The SIMpad 4

I don't understand why this article is on the front page given the headline. This was as much an iPad as a Commodore 64 is a zBox 4 supercomputer. The SIMpad 4 (referenced in the article) was invented by Keith and Koep of Siemens AG, not Microsoft and ran WinCE 3.0 and WinCE 4.0, but could run Linux. It was designed as a portable Internet browser, not as a media consumption device (the StrongARM processor used was the same as that used in the early iPaqs that I used to work on with Familiar Linux and wasn't anywhere near powerful enough to do things like hardcore media playing beyond MP3s and low-res Mpegs). Incidentally, as someone that used OPIE I can tell you it was a sack of the proverbial and nowhere near the experience of the iPad. It was very much experimental in terms of user paradigms that didn't always work and certainly weren't suitable for normal non-techie users. To be fair, much of the same charges could've been made against the appropriately named WinCE at the time.