A look at the iPad's competition by operating system

The iPad.

It's not a Tablet PC, despite the exclusive version of iWork it will be getting, and it's not an E-reader despite the iBooks and Kindle reader software it will also feature. The device is really a jack-of-all-trades device meant to grow Apple's iTunes-based ecosystem, by providing another screen for applications developers to publish on.

But if you watched today's presentation from Apple, and you watched the company's iPad promotion video, you heard Apple executives use a term that we're quite familiar with already: "Internet Tablet."

We've heard the term applied to a number of devices from Nokia in the last few years, The N800, N810, and the Maemo-driven N900 which is actually more of a phone than a tablet. It's also been applied to the Archos 5 and Archos 7 portable media players, and the WiMAX-enabled Samsung Mondi.

These devices all have different core uses and work on different operating systems; so how does the iPad shape up against them?