Several sites have managed to get a hold of the iPad for a hands on review; check out their thoughts here.

Engadget:
* It's not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand.
* The screen is stunning, and it's 1024 x 768. Feels just like a huge iPhone in your hands.
* The speed of the CPU is something to be marveled at. It is blazingly fast from what we can tell. Webpages loaded up super fast, and scrolling was without a hiccup. Moving into and out of apps was a breeze. Everything flew.
* There's no multitasking at all. It's a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you're working in Pages... you can figure it out. It's a real setback for this device.
* The ebook implementation is about as close as you can get to reading without a stack of bound paper in your hand. The visual stuff really helps flesh out the experience. It may be just for show, but it counts here.
* No camera. None, nada. Zip. No video conferencing here folks. Hell, it doesn't have an SMS app!
* It's running iPhone OS 3.2.
* The keyboard is good, not great. Not quite as responsive as it looked in the demos.

Gizmodo:
Apple didn't really sell this point, but it's the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you'd hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.


Slashgear:
In many ways it it feels like an oversized iPhone, and unfortunately some of the iPhone’s flaws have been carried over. The biggest – and most frustrating, given the turn of speed the iPad is obviously capable of – is the complete absence of multitasking. There’s also no Flash support in the browser, a crime given how well it displays webpages. Over the WiFi connection here, SlashGear loaded up snappily and just as you’d expect from a desktop browser, bar any animations, but at least it flips between landscape and portrait orientations with no lag.

Multitouch gestures are just as intuitive here as they are on an iPhone, and the keyboard is usable in both orientations. We’re not convinced by the tactile feedback of typing for longer periods on glass, but then there’s the keyboard dock or hooking up a Bluetooth keyboard if you need to do that.


Ars Technica:
* There is no camera on the iPad
* There's no way to lock the screen into landscape or portrait mode. Some apps lock the screen (like on the iPhone) but there's no universal way to lock the screen as you might on a Kindle or Nook.
* The landscape and portrait switching works in all 4 orientations, so you could read upside down if you liked.
* There's a sleep/wake button on the top, just like an iPhone. Also, there is a headphone jack and a speaker on the top (and one speaker on the bottom).
* There is a volume rocker switch on the side, just like the iPhone. You can also silent the device.
* No brightness controls outside of the system preferences, just like on the iPhone.
* You can use any bluetooth keyboard you want, instead of Apple's keyboard dock. You could use the case/stand with your existing bluetooth keyboard.
* You cannot use a bluetooth mouse, however.
* The screen resolution is 1024x768 (4:3)
* It can play 720p movies from iTunes
* The case itself is some crazy soft rubbery microfiber material that no Apple rep could or would identify.
* The case/stand is $39
* The case is very flat and solid like a Kindle case, but you can use it to prop the iPad up into a triangle so you can watch movies or use it like a laptop.
* The keyboard dock is $69 and the normal dock is $39.
* The browser is like Safari on the iPhone but it have toolbar favorites like on the Mac
* It's much easier to click and navigate on the iPad than on an iPhone, just by virtue of it being larger.
* Size/weight is very comparable to a Kindle DX, which is twice as heavy as a Kindle 2

DVICE:
Handling the iPad for the first time is quite an experience. Maybe I'm too caught up in they hype field of Steve Jobs's keynote, but as soon as I was holding the sleek tablet in my hands, I've never felt a greater wave of "I want this." The weight feels just right, slightly more than a Kindle, and the big screen is simply inviting. "Touch me," it says, just by existing.

As Jobs mentioned, since I know how to use an iPhone, playing with the iPad was simple. Pressing the home screen takes you to your home screen, and sliding your finger to the right calls up the Spotlight search engine. Apps launch by touching them, expanding from their icons. Things like Maps, Calendar and iTunes work just like you'd expect them to… except faster. Apps launch quickly, the screen responds instantly when you touch something, and there are no annoying delays when you key something in. That 1GHz A4 processor really works.

New York Times:
Today Apple finally unveiled its tablet computer, the iPad. Thus concludes Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, despite any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.

Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”

That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, best-sellerdom, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.

iLounge: