[protomyth]

I wish they would release an intelligent dock that had some storage or USB connectors for a printer and external hard drive. That would be a neat for iPad syncing. Adding an HDMI so you could park the dock next to a TV and control it with and iPad would really be nice.

Alternately, syncing with a Time Capsule would be good too.

[elai]

Add ports and a keyboard and it will be perfect! Make it a clamshell style so fingerprints wont get on the screen, and protect it when your not using it.

[danilocampos]

So... Eliminate its differentiating characteristics and turn it into something that resembles the competing netbooks and sub <$500 notebooks whose lunch Apple is devouring, according to Best Buy's figures?

[artmageddon]

Tactile feedback is pretty important to some people. I haven't tried an iPad yet but when it comes to emails on the iPhone, I would sometimes kill for the ability to just type the way I could on a real keyboard. An iPad with a keyboard hookup is still an iPad.

[danilocampos]

Yeah, but they have that. You can buy the keyboard dock or hook up a bluetooth keyboard. Or hookup a USB keyboard using the camera connector.

[elai]

I was being sarcastic...

[protomyth]

The point is not wanting a portable of any sort and just wanting a place to set the iPad so it can sync and exchange what media you have on it.

[jsz0]

Most of this stuff is being done over wifi. AirPrint, AirPlay, cloud storage like iDisk, Dropbox, AirSharing, etc. I use an application called Serve-To-Me which does real time video transcoding so I can access my entire video library on the iPad or iPhone. For music I use Subsonic and the Z-Subsonic client. I don't even bother syncing anything locally at this point.

[rimantas]

  USB connectors for a printer and external hard drive

iOS 4.2 offers printing over Wi-Fi.

[protomyth]

Most low-end printers are not wi-fi enabled. I am assuming that people not buying a computer are probably going to buy a cheap printer.

[rimantas]

Some already own a printer (and another computer), so sharing can be enable via that machine, instead of talking directly to printer.

[protomyth]

If they already own a computer, then they don't need an alternate way to sync. (see ajleary's post that started this thread)