…also announces plus-sized iPod Touch and jokingly refers to it as the iPad.

Underwhelmed.

It’s an eBook reader that looks hard to hold. Also, no multitasking. Apple seems to be attempting to break into the gaming market here as well, but I’m not sure that I see myself playing my favorite video game via an interactive picture frame.

Oh, and I’m willing to risk being wrong about this… but no one wants to use iWork- even on a touch screen.

Methinks that the individual publication apps and video-based content will be the saving grace for this thing…

(A thumbs-up to Joshua Topolsky of Engadget for a great live blog of the announcement.)

I’ll make this short and sweet… the Seesmic team seems to TOTALLY get it. Highly visualized interface is the next step in the consumer media landscape, and Seesmic Look is a gorgeous introduction between the real-time web and the closet webofile locked away in the average consumer. Not for the social media guru, it’s functional…much more functional than the Twitter apps designed for Boxee, however doesn’t have the speedy knickknacks strewn about Tweetdeck.

Another kudos for first developing it for the Windows 7 crowd, which will likely consist of people upgrading from Windows XP and taking their first step into the live web experience. The whole development model looks very well thought-out.

The one fundamentally frightening issue is that apps such as Seesmic could mean that our PC-comforted parents might finally sign up for Twitter accounts. Following @jennajameson and hastags like #howwastedwasilastnight could become a relic of a freer, more frivolous era of social networking. Remember what your MySpace account looked like? Sigh.

Now that Conan looks to be getting his check and his network freedom, we can all get really excited about what the next iteration of his career will look like. I truly hope that it’s another late night talk show. There have been calls to bring him to the internet exclusively, but I can’t imagine that Conan’s handlers would allow that to happen when there are still eight figure deals to be had for him on television.

As a Late Night fan from the very beginning, lately I’ve been excited to see the original Conan attitude again. Not unlike the mid-90s Late Night, when O’Brien was constantly teetering on the verge of cancellation due to his inexperience, Conan’s red pompadour was a beacon of comedic brilliance last night as the carefree butt of his own jokes. O’Brien got his mojo back in a role that fits him perfectly: the readily pummeled victim of the identifiable corporate bully that has been NBC.

The next show will feature Conan as the dethroned king of Late Night. Not only does that give Conan a nemesis in NBC, but also that “not yet ready for the big leagues” attitude that works so well for him. That cocktail should make for a nightcap that might even have Letterman worried about Conan as competition (assuming he’s on at 11:35).

While I’ll miss the characters he’ll have to leave in the vaults of NBC, as well as the theme song, I can only be excited that the departure from The Tonight Show has popped Conan right back into his groove.

The New York Times plans to release a final decision soon about how it intends to charge people for a service that they can get nearly anywhere else for free. Again.

While solid editorial writing should come at a premium just like everything else, the power of great columnists can’t possibly be enough to push a readership that hasn’t had a newspaper subscription for years into paying for their news.

Given the massive amount of publishing display devices at CES this year, as well as Apple’s probable announcement of a tablet Mac next week, it seems to make more sense for the Times to suck up last quarters’ losses and hold off for six months to eye developing a compelling “virtual newspaper” cloud app based on API used by at least one of these new devices.

Magazines will most certainly take advantage of this technology… and I predict will fast become exclusive to the new medium (the transition will likely be quick… magazines putting out tablet editions would essentially have to publish two editions per issue if also putting out the traditional paper edition). It seems more plausible that Times readers would be more apt to subscribe to something that is tangible as an edition rather than a series of web pages. Consumers still know the web as a free source of information, no matter how expertly crafted.

Today, I hit a turning point. This was the first time in which having a Mac tablet would have been the most practical solution for me. And it all had to do with minimization.

I’m moving my office, which for anyone who has had the delight knows is a testament to doing as much work as possible with as few tools as necessary. Generally, my Macbook Pro takes care of pretty much anything I need to access, design, produce or add up when I’m on the go… but, as I found out today, I really need a good place to sit down and a decent amount of elbow room. It’s a testament to the contemporary work environment that high-level computing needs to be accessible while standing.

One might argue that an iPhone, Pre, Blackberry or any other high-end smartphone are essentially standing-room-only-environment office replacements… and that’s true as it relates to wireless communication.  But I interact with clients on a personal level with my machine- specifically with regard to sketching designs or creating documents in real-time. Even if an app existed for this and was available to any smartphone on the market, it would be impractical if not for the processing power required to run it, but  because of the size of the display.

I used to be opposed to the idea of Apple creating yet another notebook solution in what’s already a self-saturated market. The Macbook is fine, the Macbook Pro heavenly, the Macbook Air little more than an experiment, the iPhone a revolutionary and the iPod touch a little underwhelming without VoIP capability (coming soon). I always thought that a tablet would be better served as an accessory… a microcomputer that docks with a host and connects with it wirelessly for extra data. But after today’s experience, I have to admit I’m a little ashamed to have not considered an Apple tablet’s potentially tremendous impact upon industry as a stand-alone machine.

Think of your package delivery service guy’s little electronic signature machine, the clerk’s register at Macy’s or any cabbie’s meter and (separate) navigation system.  Think of how much the companies who have to purchase those proprietary devices must pay for them.  Now think about how easily all of those systems could be replaced with (and revolutionized by) an Apple tablet and the appropriate software. Now think of all the small businesses who can’t afford the aforementioned systems, buy currently have a spiffy little iMac running behind the counter as their company machine.

So, why haven’t they released such a thing? I mean… how difficult of a thing could it be to develop?

I think it’s all about per-unit cost.

A Mac tablet’s price point would need to be LOW. How low? Well, one would think that Apple believes that it would need to be less than $1,800- which is what the most comparable product, the Air, runs for with the solid-state hard disk (and there’s been no traditional Apple cost-lowering for it, which I take to mean that it’s always been a fixed-price item). And then there’s the touch screen, which I assume would easily push the basic model cost up to at least $2,000.

Now, Apple isn’t very shy about rolling out high-price tech. That’s because they know that their rabid fan base will consume new product wildly at the upstart, and then praise it in their metagospel afterward… relying on the trickle effect to create consumer interest, and then gradually lowering the price to attract the latecomers and skeptics.

But I don’t think that the consumer is the target for this one… I think it’s businesses. And I think they know that. That means that Apple has to get to the bottom line upon roll-out… and that means getting the introductory price down to it’s fighting weight.

So, does that mean that an Apple tablet could be the company’s first step into the world of the business machine?  Would they ever tread the stomping ground of their antithesis IBM? Well- if they don’t, Google will.

As odd as it might sound, our grandchildren (yes, twentysomethings… grandchildren) will in all likelihood be aware of absolutely everything that we do. Today’s media logs every aspect of the daily lives of everyone connected to is on such an intimate level that we will not only have record of our actions, but also very likely the rationale we used to initiate those actions.

We will be the first generation with a full psychological archeological record.

To me, this is absolutely fascinating… and also perhaps frightening in the now. Our society is so incredibly open to the rest of the world. I wonder if sharing our every thought to a global audience will amount to awareness or chaos.

They say that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it, but at what point does our capacity to report outweigh our future ability to absorb? A lot of us can’t even get through a concisely-produced History Channel documentary- so how are our ancestors supposed to be expected to troll through billions of tweets?

While we can’t blame ourselves for reporting the mundanity of our everyday lives any more than we can blame our dad for making that excruciating 2 hour home movie of the family decorating the Christmas tree, we should probably go out of our way to note the stuff that we think really matters.

That’s where I think popularity sites like digg and Facebook’s ‘Like’ button really come into play. The way we earmark our information, or our group consensus on our likes and dislikes, will inevitably be the way our generation presents itself to our children and beyond.