UPDATE:  I’ve been playing with iOS4 for a good four hours now and here are a few things I’ve noticed:  Scrolling apps from page to page seems smoother.  Safari handles tabs much better now – closing a child tab often caused the parent tab to reload (this always happened on Gizmodo for example).  This has been fixed!  There are minor graphical changes everywhere…  Apps will have to be updated in order to take advantage of multitasking – at the moment only Apple provided apps are capable of this feature (Calculator, Safari, iCal, Settings, Mail, Game Center).

Techno-Elitist

I have to admit that I found Cory Doctorow’s anti-iPad post at Boing Boing quite bizarre and techno-elitist. He seems to dislike both how easy the iPad is to use as well how efficiently it’s physical parts are put together (glue as opposed to screws).

His argument that the iPad is “Infantalizing [sic] hardware” is particularly short-sighted. I view the iPad as a sort of satellite of my  main workstation. With such a device, good user interface design should free the user from the sort of things that make a full blown computer more cumbersome, albeit more powerful. When you’re relaxing on the couch with a cup of coffee, or on a road trip to San Fran, and all you want to do is read Wikipedia, peruse your comic library, or catch up on the latest news, your iPad is probably a good delivery method.

Furthermore, what’s more important? Simple and easy-to-use access to the world’s information database, or you’re ability to disassemble the device your using to read it? The answer is obvious. The benefits of miniaturized (system on a chip) ICs, vertical circuit fabrication, and the power efficiency they bring far, far outweigh the the benefits of being able to disassemble such a device. And I would argue that the physical device itself is far less important in the grand scheme of things compared to the almost infinite software possibilities.

And of course, as a professional Unix admin, I know that options exists for people who want to tinker at a very low level (Linux + cheap commodity hardware). We shouldn’t think of the iPad as a replacement, but rather just another option.

The easiest way to set these as your phone’s wallpaper is to surf to this page on your phone, then tap and hold on the poster image. iPhone will give you an option to “save image”. After that, open the settings app, select “wallpaper” then “camera roll” and select the image you just saved.

UPDATE – Oct 31, 2009: I added another 5 thanks to a commenter. See Dan’s comment bellow for a link to Flickr for more. Thank you Dan!

Retro Disney Poster, Alice in Wonderland