This article was published on 2001-03-23. However, it's interesting to see that they called it the "Digital iPAD". Wonder why it never took off? Why didn't they ever trademark the name?
Cute find, but the significance is not clear unless you note the articles published date. It took a little while to realise why LG was spruiking a tablet called an iPad.
I was using a similar SA1100 on the Zaurus 5000d (developer release, purchased at the Linux Expo 2001 in NYC) then the 5500 and finally on the Simpad SL4 where it drove a 800x600 screen (Both the Sharp Zaurus and the Siemens Simpad where using Qtopia, QT embedded)
Opera and Konqueror were both running fine. There was even a demo of a voice-controller Opera browser from IBM - also running fine.
OTOH, the RAM was the real problem. 32 Mb on the 5000d was really not enough. I managed to find a company doing BGA reflow to solder 128 Mb on my simpad SL4, which worked great after some minor kernel tweaks to enable it.
So the SA1100 was fine for web surfing, 64Mb was acceptable even if 128 was better.
A spokesman for LG at CeBIT said that the product may come with other connectivity solutions, however, including possibly a "PDA style slot" for mobile phones.
What a crappy website. I've tried 15 times to submit a reply to a comment on that article and each time I get 'Your comment does not pass our spam filter. Please try again.' with no indication of what part of the comment is lacking.
I notice that Gizmodo's already published a story based on this article: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/09/check-out-lgs-ipad-from-20...