You won't be able to add additional storage. In a its cheapest form, it has 16GB of storage. That cannot be expanded. Think how many pictures and music you currently have on your netbook or laptop.

It won't play music on the web. Last.FM, Facebook, YouTube, Hyves, MySpace and a myriad of other websites use Flash to let you listen to music. "The best way to experience the web" is as a deaf person.

You won't be able to connect to network or USB printers. This rules out the iPad as a business tool. Unless you absolutely never have to print anything out.

You won't be able to connect to external storage devices. You won't be able to connect to your Network Storage or other laptops - Windows, Mac or Linux.

It has no camera, so there won't be any videochat. Almost all current netbooks and laptops have a built-in webcam. And you won't be able to add an external webcam because, you guessed it, no USB support. There's also no mention of a microphone so even skyping won't work. Oh, and there's no USB support so no USB microphones either.

It won't play video on the web. Sure, it will have its built-in YouTube app, but since it doesn't have multitasking, that means you will have to stop browsing and watch the movie. When the movie is finished, you'll have to start the browser again. Manually. That's acceptable for a Smartphone, but not for a tablet. And you certainly won't be able to watch MySpace video. Or Vimeo. Or Blip.TV. All of which are very good and valid video sites with extremely good content.

There's no easy way to type text on the tablet. And you can't add a USB keyboard. Because it has no USB. So don't expect to type long mails to your mother - which you could just Skype if you had a webcam. Or even a built-in microphone.

For those of you who think the absence of Flash is good because "you browse with Flash turned off anyway". That is not entirely true for most. Most run with a Flash blocker which allows them to turn Flash ON every once in a while to experience additional content on a website. But you don't even have that choice. There is no Flash. And I highly doubt that it will have HTML5 video support.

So there. No iPad for me. I'll stick to my Acer Netbook for couch surfing.

Did we need another browser? What's up with Google supporting Firefox and then coming out with their own Open Source browser?

I took Google Chrome for a spin as a developer and found out some interesting things. Sure, Google Chrome has no developer toolbar at this moment, but who needs a developer toolbar with all the built-in goodies from Safari? (Thanks Lagaffe). Check out what Google Chrome has to offer for developers.

Until now, people had to rely on Firefox and Firebug to debug their web pages. IE has had a developer toolbar since not too long ago but, face it, nobody develops for IE anymore. We all build things according to standards and then check IE to see where they didn't apply the standards. Right? Well, not entirely. A lot of people still depend on IE as their sole window on the web. This article does not apply to them.

Google chrome may well be the best thing ever to happen in the last year for web developers. Loaded with Apple's Webkit, it has what is probably today's best rendering engine. Webkit/Safari is the only browser that's getting a 100% test result on ACID3. Granted, it's on a developer build and Chrome isn't currently profiting from that build and is stuck at 79% which is slightly better than Safari's current stable release test result.

But how does one take advantage of all the features Chrome has to offer?

DOM Tree Inspector

Upon right-clicking anywhere on the browser screen and selecting "inspect element", a new window opens and it shows you where in the dom tree you clicked. It takes this even further. You can simply hover over an element in the dom tree and that element will get highlighted in the actual webpage. (on a side note: As I'm typing this, I'm also taking advantage of another great Chrome feature: drag the edge of any textarea to enlarge that textarea. Really handy when blogging) You can expand and collapse parts of the DOM  tree. It does NOT react to changes in the DOM tree but it does reflect that actual current status of the DOM tree. Confused? When you open the console, you get the actual status of the DOM tree. If you have, for example, a photo gallery where people can drag their own pictures around and re-order the gallery, the console will not update to every change made to the gallery. If you however make changes, close the console and come back, it will reflect those changes. It's a bit of a workaround but it's really handy to check your AJAX and MOOtools based websites (until Dreamweaver CS4 hits the market).

The great news is that it will show you the domtree for dynamically generated content as well. If you have some Javascript lying around that dynamically displays pictures, fetches remote text and creates div's on the fly, you can use Google Chrome to keep track of all that and find that one div that doesn't get created correctly.

CSS Inspector

Google Chrome has what I find to be the best CSS inspection module available today. Firefox has a few nice ones but Chrome definitely takes the cake.

As you can see on the left, Chrome has a number of things to say on every element of you web page.

Just select an element in the DOM inspector and the corresponding style will show up. Not just THE corresponding style as the Firefox developer toolbar can, but it will show you everything you want to know.

Let's start with computed style. This are the current style modifiers applied to the selected object. This may not be what you thought it would look like. Instead, Google Chrome simply adds up all of your styles and shows you what is applied.

Beneath the Computed Style are the other style elements that are applied to the object. All the style elementes you find are what make up the computed style.

In this case, I have the #footer div highlighted. It gets the color from the #footer h2 declaration and the margins from a previous h2 declaration. What declaration? Simply click the link next to the style element and you'll be taken to the CSS that declared it.

Check out the styles that were struck out. That means you applied that style but the style got overridden somewhere else. Google Chrome makes solving these problems a breeze. If I check out the "color" part that got struck out, I can deduct that it got overridden by the color declaration in the #footer h2 element.

The properties at the bottom of the screen should be self-explanatory but I would like to draw your attention to the Metrics box. This box actually shows you how the selected object is drawn. The footer, in this case, is 760x22 pixels, has no padding, no border and a margin of 30. Actually, that is not correct. The footer has no padding declared, hence the dash.

Using this style console has saved a number of my days already by helping me pinpoint those typical problems you get when editing humongous stylesheets.

Javascript console

At the bottom of the console is a small button. Hover the button and it'll say "console". It's a Javascript console in which you can type actual Javascript. Not just the alert as I've demonstrated, but also calling functions in your webpage so you can debug them in the Javascript debugger (alt+`).

Resource console

Last is the resources console. You can access this by simply clicking the "Resources" button on top of the console window. It may happen to you that this window is empty. You can fill this by simply going to the webpage you wanted to check and reloading it. The resource console only shows the resources that are loaded when the console is active. The blue bar is the HTML page. The green bar is the CSS. The purple bar are "other" resources such as flash files or images. The orange bar represents Javascript files and the grey bar is the garbage can.

For each resource, you can see the start of the request, the time it took for the server to start returning data and the time it took to receive the data and render it on screen. It's not useful all the time but it can tell you which files are slow to load and might by holding up your web page. You can also use it to track server response times. Don't rely on this too much when dynamically loading information from the web page. Each additional load, through AJAX or simply loading in a new image will expand the "loading time" from your web page.

Conclusion

Aside from the wondrous interface and the incredible speed at which Chrome handles or helps to handle complicated pages (like the WordPress admin interface), Google Chrome is mana from the heavens for developers. It may take a few hours to get used to the new interface and to understand all the information you're getting but once you'll have mastered the information, you'll wonder how you ever managed without them.

Google Chrome already made me look good and other developers I talked to have also switched to Google Chrome - even if only for debugging the heavier parts of their website.

So, did we need another browser? I guess we did.

I like the way it feels and like most of how it handles - and how it worked right out of the bo ... Hold on, it didn't work right out of the box!

I spent the first few minutes trying to figure out how to get my SIM card into the iPhone. There were no apparent openings. In fact, it looked like it wasn't meant to be opened - ever. Of course, I was intrigued by the little slot on top of the iPhone that LOOKED like it could be pried open with a paperclip. It wasn't until 2 hours later that I noticed the illustration on the packaging the iPhone's documentation came in. And then I also noticed that the small bit of iron(y) that was stuck to the inside of the documentation's packaging was actually intended to open the SIM tray with. Ah well.

Anyway, once the SIM card was in I turned the iPhone on! Me and my wife huddled together to savour this moment. Meanwhile, House M.D. was talking down to someone on the television. I pushed the button on top of the iPhone and behold! Nothing much happened. I got the startup screen and nothing else happened.

It took me a while to realise that I needed to synch the iPhone rightaway. So I plugged the iPhone in the Powerbook, downloaded a new iPhone firmware and a new iTunes version and was all set - only 15 minutes later. ^sarcasm The iPhone started synching and I wasall set. Woohoo!

And so, to this day, I run around with the iPhone, showing it off to everyone I know and being generally happy with it. Except for a few things that bug me.

It bothers me that I have to slide to answer a call when I can simply press a "button" to end that same call. It bothers me that I can't simply delete a few text messages from a person but instead have to either throw out all of the text messages that person sent me or keep them all. It's ridiculous! Of course I want to keep the little confessions and indecencies my wife texts me - but I can do without the "Leek or cauliflower" messages.

And I could do with a slightly more enabled calendar. As it is right now, I can download the information from iCal - oh don't get me started on iCal which doesn't automatically refresh my Google Calendars - but I can't edit the information. I can't move or delete appointments that synched from iCal. I'm guessing MobileMe would solve that problem but I don't want MobileMe at 149 something a year when I only want to synch between my MBP and my iPhone. And suppose I didn't have iCal - then I still would've liked to import my Google Calendar.

And the iPhone doesn't have a Flash - although the 2MP camera is doing a rather decent job at taking indoor pictures but it sucks at taking pictures at night or in badly lit environments - like a club. So, while I'm the light of the party with my iPhone strobe app, I'm still left in the dark because all the pictures I take that night will be ... blurry at least.

And perhaps the biggest thing I miss is a "running applications", eh ... application. Something that will show me which applications are currently running. Like a cmd-tab or alt-tab function.

Despite all the little annoyances I wrote down above, it is still a great piece of technology. Best 19.96 EURO I ever spent.

Overall rating: 9!

PS: Adobe, HURRY UP getting that iPhone Flash version out there.

I always use strong passwords. A mix of symbols, numbers and letters ensure the safety of my account. I even have a human algorythm to create different passwords for each website. Unfortunately, for the algorythm to work, the password always requires symbols, numbers and letters.

Cue website that enforce password constraints. I don't know why websites insist on enforcing rules on passwords. If your user wants an easy password, then it's up to him. You can always tell him how low-security passwords pose a threat to his privacy, but in the end he will not care. If you enforce constraints, he will probably only write down the password on a sticky piece of paper and stick it to his office monitor.

Even worse is the scenario that I encounter quite frequently as of lately. Upon registration, I enter my password which, for didactical purposes, is doogietitia+0, and I get an error message which says the following.

As it pops up in more than 1 website, I'm sure that somewhere there's a free password checker that everyone is using and haven't checked properly. Websites that I remember to have this problem:

• ben.nl, a T-Mobile brand
• iscards.nl, a VISA card issuer

ISCards support was extremely frustrating. "Yes sir, we have had a few more complaints about this, but we can't do anything about it. We have reported it but it's not likely that it will be fixed soon". For F's sake, you're a financial institution and you have my credit card statements available online!