Love,Lifestyle and Gadget

The digital tablet format is not new. It has been around for over a decade now. Like the iPod, which brought fresh impetus and became the new standard for digital music players, the iPad, too, which came on the market a few months ago, seems to have caught everyone's fancy.

Make no mistake, the iPad is certainly a cool product - an amazingly capable machine. In fact, if you are the sort of person who buys an expensive computer just to surf the Internet and occasionally check e-mails, it is the perfect device. Well, almost. That's because the iPad does not support Adobe's Flash software.

And while Apple's Chief Executive Steve Jobs has his reasons for not allowing Flash support on the iPad - not in the least because Flash is a resource-hungry software - it remains very popular with web developers looking to add interactive multimedia to their websites. The iPad does not have cameras or output cables such as an HDMI port to connect to high-definition televisions.

Yet, the iPad faces a slew of competitors - some releasing their tablet devices now and some over the next few months. Devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Dell Streak, both of which run Google's Android version