Let's face it. This week's column is useless, completely and absolutely useless. Seriously. Did you miss anything this week, anything at all? Weren't you here every day, gobbling up the latest tablet rumors -- what would it be called, would it do this, would it do that?

And then, January 27th arrived, and from 10 am EST, you were here on the hour, hitting refresh every five minutes. Then the aftermath. What else would be revealed, what other new trickles of news would slip out?

Well, just in case you were buried under a rock or just secured parole yesterday, here's the roundup of the week the iPad made.

Features:

- 7 Everyday Places the iPad Will Make Better - Number one with a bullet? Making number two. That's right, the iPad will probably necessitate more handwipes than any other product you've ever owned because you won't even be able to take your paws off of it long enough for a trip to the potty. And that's where they'll find you, hours later. There are other places too, but who are we trying to kid here?

- 7 Essential Features Left Off of the iPad - Of course we're never satisfied. We want a product that not only does everything the iPad does, but makes us breakfast, gets us dressed, and tucks us in at night. Okay, maybe not all that, but here's a few things we would have liked to see in the iPad or maybe in future versions.

- 5 Names That Would Have Fared Better Than the iPad - If you're like us, Apple-branded tampon-related jokes have grown majorly boring by this point. Here's five names that might have gotten different mocking jokes made about them.

- 5 Things Apple Should Have Announced in Addition to the iPad - What? No "one more thing"? But...but...but... it's a tradition that apparently got dumped this year. We admit it. We're greedy. Our dream day involves one magical Apple release announcement after another. Le sigh. Oh well, at least we can dream. Here's a few things we would have liked to be our "one more thing" last Wednesday.


Reviews:

- Hands-On with the iPad: First Look and Exclusive Video - Okay, so it's not really a review, but the Features section above was getting a little crowded. Besides, we know what you really want. To know how it was to get our hands on the iPad and gum it up with our greasy fingers. Well, have at it, complete with video.

- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - While all the talk is 3D gaming and the awesome graphics therein, GTA: Chinatown goes back to 2D roots and manages to pull off something brilliant. In fact, we'd rank this one up there with one of the best games we've played. The pull back on graphics ability meant the game played without a hitch, fast and down and dirty. We loved it.

- Pentax Optio P80 - We got our hands on hardware that wasn't the iPad last week, you know. Digital cameras are ubiquitous these days, and they're all feature rich. We expect good things from Pentax and they delivered a mostly solid camera, with a few minor issues that kept this from being our rock solid number one choice.

- MacHighway Easy - You've wanted a MobileMe account, but at $99 per year, it's just a little bit rough on your bank account these days. MacHighway Easy offers an alternative at a lower cost. Sure, it's got some ease of use like its name suggests, but we'd like to see a bit more fleshed out in the documentation. It doesn't beat MobileMe for syncing, but at less than half the price, it might be what most lower end users are looking for.


News:

Something happened in the news recently, we just can't figure out what it was...

Oh all right, we're fooling. It was the week of the iPad and we're just gonna stick with that for the remainder, all right? You wanna know what else happened in the world? Try CNN.com.

The former developer of the Facebook app calls the iPad everything he's been wishing for; bet he wishes he hadn't quit developing apps for the iPhone OS now, huh?... why don't we have a look at that keynote again and relive the excitement of watching the iPad finally get unleashed...we love the idea of iWork on the iPad; some people say it'll end up on the iPhone too, but it seems strange to imagine putting together a Keynote of our own on that now-teensy-seeming screen...although some of us would definitely like to see iBooks show up on our iPhones pretty soon and have been getting frustrated with the iTunes store asking us lately if we actually meant "iBoobs"...not as frustrated as people in Australia are likely to be...we're not the only ones with frustrations about names, though; as predicted Fujitsu is none too pleased that Apple wants to crush them out of using the name iPad which they've only been using for the last eight years and all...speaking of companies, how'd you like that announcement that AT&T would be the mobile carrier for iPad goodness? We think the sound we heard might have been a roomful of buttocks clenching collectively; hopefully the carrier's plans to dump around $2 billion into their network makes everyone's lives easier....publishers were certainly pumped with anticipation that the iPad would save their dying business model; book publishers certainly are looking at another Kindle sized shot in the arm, but what about magazine publishers? We certainly had expected to see them turn up on the iPad...not that a certain Google exec expects much of a salvation from Apple's latest gizmo. Guess we'll have to wait and see....speaking of waiting and seeing, reports are coming in that iPhone OS 3.2 has video support after all, even if there was no camera on the model we saw on Wednesday...and lastly, WHAT? no Flash on the iPad even with its souped-up processor? We wants our Flash and here's the proof.