The tablet computer debuted last week to fairly favorable reviews from, among others, The New York Times’s David Pogue, with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg calling it the first real competitor to Apple’s iPad.

“After almost one week on the market, it appears that the sell through of Motorola’s Xoom has been extremely light,” reports the firm, without specifying sources for the information. Detwiler attributes the apparent lackluster results to “its high price, lack of consumer applications and the anticipation for today’s expected Apple iPad 2 announcement” this afternoon.

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In both hardware and software, [the iPhone4] is a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS.

It has some downsides and limitations–most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S., which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor….But, overall, Apple has delivered a big, well-designed update that, in my view, keeps it in the lead in the smartphone wars….

The most important downside of the iPhone 4 is that, in the U.S., it’s shackled to AT&T, which not only still operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities, but now has abandoned unlimited, flat-rate data plans. Apple needs a second network.

Both Apple and AT&T told me they worked to make the iPhone 4 do a better job with AT&T’s network. For example, the phone itself is surrounded by a prominent stainless-steel trim piece that acts as a large antenna. And Apple said it also tuned the phone to try to grab whatever band on the network was less congested or less affected by interference–to stress the quality of a signal over its raw strength. AT&T said it, too, made some changes to its network with the new iPhone in mind.

But, in my tests, network reception was a mixed bag.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

[The iPhone 4] is not the first phone with both a front and back camera. It’s not even the first one to make video calls. But the iPhone 4 is the first phone to make good video calls, reliably, with no sign-up or setup, with a single tap. The picture and audio are rock solid, with very little delay, and it works the first time and every time….Now, the iPhone is no longer the undisputed king of app phones. In particular, the technically inclined may find greater flexibility and choice among its Android rivals, like the HTC Incredible and Evo. They’re more complicated, and their app store not as good, but they’re loaded with droolworthy features like turn-by-turn GPS instructions, speech recognition that saves you typing, removable batteries and a choice of cell networks. If what you care about, however, is size and shape, beauty and battery life, polish and pleasure, then the iPhone 4 is calling your name.

– David Pogue, New York Times

The new iPhone 4 I’ve been testing for about a week and a half–along with the major refresh of the mobile operating system software at the core of recent models–demonstrates once again why Apple’s handset is the one to beat, even as it faces fierce competition from phones based on Google’s Android platform, among others….Critics are left with reasons to whine. Apple’s public dissing of Adobe Flash means you’ll still come upon Web video sites that don’t make nice with the iPhone. I had a few dropped calls. The battery still isn’t user-replaceable, and there’s no slot for expanding memory.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

We’re not going to beat around the bush–in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package–fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is–we think it’s the cream of the current crop. We won’t argue that a lot of this is a matter of taste–some people will just prefer the way Android or Symbian works to the iPhone, and others will be on the lookout for a hardware keyboard or a particular asset that the iPhone 4 lacks–but in terms of the total picture, it’s tough to deny that Apple has moved one step past the competition with this phone.

– Josh Topolsky, Engadget

The fourth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device–not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad. Yes, the notable features with iPhone 4–both the device and the iOS4, which came out yesterday in advance of the iPhone itself–are mostly tweaks. But what tweaks they are: Apple’s focus on improvement is as much key to the quality of its products as innovation. But there’s one flaw it doesn’t improve: the poor quality of calls placed over AT&T, which remains the iPhone’s only U.S. carrier….AT&T still sucks, and the best engineering out of Cupertino won’t change that.

– Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing

Interestingly, a number of reviews make special mention of its speed (Walt Mossberg describes it as “wicked fast”), a battery life that exceeds Apple’s claims (David Pogue says the battery on his review device lasted 12 hours on a single charge–two hours more than Apple promised), and Apple’s hopes for 1,000 specially designed iPad apps to be available by launch this Saturday.

Below, excerpts from eight of those early reviews.

I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades. But first, it will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

No company can generate as much hype around a product launch as Apple. But that’s perfectly OK because no company is also nearly as successful at producing a new product that can justify almost any level of excitement that precedes it. They don’t do it with every product launch, but bloody hell: they’ve done it with the iPad….The most compelling sign that Apple got this right is the fact that despite the novelty of the iPad, the excitement slips away after about ten seconds and you’re completely focused on the task at hand…whether it’s reading a book, writing a report, or working on clearing your Inbox. Second most compelling: in situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and office menagerie. It’s not a replacement for my notebook, mind you. It feels more as if the iPad is filling a gap that’s existed for quite some time.

– Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times

The techies are right about another thing: the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it–books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience–and a deeply satisfying one. The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept?

– David Pogue, New York Times

Is the iPad a perfect product? No. And the omissions will give the anti-Apple crowd plenty of ammo. Why do I need this extra device that’s not a full-fledged laptop? Where’s the camera? What about Flash? Um, how about multitasking? These are all valid complaints, but one thing I can say about most Apple products, and certainly the iPad: There may be things it doesn’t do, but what it does do, it does remarkably well. Aside from the aforementioned limitations, there isn’t a lot else to gripe about. And to my great surprise, you can actually get real work done with the iPad.

– Tim Gideon, PCMag

Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it barely left my hands) on one charge. It fits well in my lap when eating, and it’s easy to wipe off stray noodles and arugula leaves and get right back to Twittering….I like it a lot. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible–to be revealed or not in the coming months–that will determine whether I love it.

– Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing

It turns out the iPad isn’t as much a laptop replacement as I thought (though it could easily be used as one). Instead, it’s an entirely new category of mobile device. For example, now when I want to surf the Web from the couch or back deck, the iPad is the device I choose. Starbucks? Same thing. Think of the iPad as a new arrow in your technology quiver, an arrow that will often be the best tool for a given task. I had high expectations for the iPad, and it has met or exceeded most of them.

– Bob LeVitus, Houston Chronicle

Apple’s engineers know something those other companies don’t: form has trumped function. You can load up a tablet with horsepower and extra features till it can do your taxes and lick the stamp, but if it’s not instantly obvious how to use those features without a manual–and if you don’t look good using them–nobody cares. The iPad isn’t wildly feature-rich. It doesn’t run Flash, and the only browser it runs is Safari. Like the iPhone, it can’t multitask, and it doesn’t appear to have a serious file-handling system. I’ve tried its much ballyhooed full-size virtual keyboard, and it feels like typing with frostbite. It doesn’t even have a damn camera. But you will care about it, because whoever designed its graceful lines and intuitive interface cared about you.

– Lev Grossman, Time

Inexplicably, BoomTown has been invited to Mexico to give a keynote speech for the Simposium Internacional de Sistemas Computacionales y Tecnologías de Información, or SISCTI 35.

That translates to the International Symposium of Computer Systems and Information Technology–or, more simply put, a bunch of nerds in Mexico who want to know all about the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

The Symposium is held at one of Mexico’s premier tech and business schools, Tecnológico de Monterrey, where I am set to fill a gathering of college students in on all the trends of Silicon Valley and in the digital space.

Last year’s speaker was David Pogue, the tech reviewer of the New York Times, who often breaks into elaborate song when speaking of gadgets. I will try to refrain and stick with my basic punditry and snarky pontificating.

You can check out SISCTI’s Facebook page here.

In any case, I will be out of pocket tomorrow and Friday traveling and visiting the school, so behave while I am gone.

It pictures a quartet of the tech media’s heavy hitters, all attending at the Apple (APPL) event in San Francisco today–including, from right to left, Walt Mossberg of ATD and The Wall Street Journal, Wired’s Steven Levy, Ed Baig of USA Today and the New York Times’s David Pogue.

They look almost harmless. Almost!

(Click on the image to make it larger.)

Overall, I believe Snow Leopard will help keep the Mac an appealing choice for computer buyers, and I can recommend it to existing Mac owners seeking more speed and disk space, or wanting to more easily use Exchange. But I don’t consider Snow Leopard a must-have upgrade for average consumers. It’s more of a nice-to-have upgrade. If you’re happy with Leopard, there’s no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

– Brian Lam, Gizmodo

Here’s the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it’s $30. $30! If you’re a Leopard user you have virtually no reason to skip over 10.6, unless you’ve somehow built a mission-critical production workflow around an InputManager hack (in which case, well, have fun with 10.5 for the rest of your life). Sure, maybe wait a few weeks for things like Growl and MenuMeters to be updated, and if your livelihood depends on QuickTime you might want to hold off, but for everyone else the sheer amount of little tweaks and added functionality in 10.6 more than justifies skipping that last round of drinks at the bar–hell, we’re guessing Exchange support alone has made the sale for a lot of people.

– Joshua Topolsky, Engadget

Snow Leopard is Apple’s lowest-priced OS update in eight years. Granted, it’s a collection of feature tweaks and upgrades, as well as under-the-hood modifications that might not pay off for users immediately. But the price of upgrading is so low that I’ve really got to recommend it for all but the most casual, low-impact Mac users. If you’ve got a 32-bit Intel Mac (that is, one powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of this upgrade will be a little less. But for most Mac users, especially the kind of person who reads a Web site devoted to the subject, the assorted benefits of Snow Leopard outweigh the price tag. I’d pay $30 just for the improved volume ejection, the ability to create services with Automator, and the improvements to the Dock and Exposé–though I admit I’d pay slightly more to not have the misguided QuickTime Player X as a part of the package. If you’re a user who connects to an Exchange server every day, upgrading to Snow Leopard really is a no-brainer. For everyone else, maybe it’s not quite a no-brainer-but it’s awfully close. Snow Leopard is a great value, and any serious Mac user should upgrade now.

– Jason Snell, Macworld

Impressive and important, it’s an update that will revitalize your existing Mac even though you’ll be stumped for a quick five-minute demo that convinces the people around you that much of anything has changed at all.

– Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times

In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

If you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you’ll keep experiencing those ‘oh, that’s nice’ moments for weeks to come. If you’re running something earlier, the decision isn’t as clear cut; you’ll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple’s creative-software suites–whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better–instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

– David Pogue, New York Times

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions. … The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

–Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal

The phone is so sleek and thin, it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese. The glass gets smudgy—a sleeve wipes it clean–but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it. … But the bigger achievement is the software. It’s fast, beautiful, menu free, and dead simple to operate. You can’t get lost, because the solitary physical button below the screen always opens the Home page, arrayed with icons for the iPhone’s 16 functions. … Apple says one battery charge is enough for 8 hours of calls, 7 hours of video or 24 hours of audio. My results weren’t quite as impressive: I got 5 hours of video and 23 hours of audio, probably because I didn’t turn off the phone, Wi-Fi and other features, as Apple did in its tests. In practice, you’ll probably wind up recharging about every other day. So yes, the iPhone is amazing. But no, it’s not perfect.”

–David Pogue, New York Times

If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone. (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge. … In a sense, the iPhone has already made its mark. Even those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products. But for all its virtues, the iPhone is still a risky venture because it’s yet to be proven that, despite the wow factor, millions of people are ready to pay several hundred dollars more than the going rate for phones—and in some cases, paying even more to bail out of their current mobile contracts.”

–Steven Levy, Newsweek

After months of hype, Apple has delivered a prodigy–a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset. Still, iPhone isn’t perfect, or even the most ideal smart phone for every user. It’s pricey. It lacks certain features found on some rival devices. AT&T’s coverage was spotty in some areas I tested it in. Your employer may prevent you from receiving corporate email on the device. … On the data side, [iPhone] works through AT&T’s Edge network, which is pokey compared with third-generation, or 3G, data networks used with other phones. At times, I fell off the Edge and lost coverage. Even at its best, Edge never felt close to the broadband-type speeds I experience on my home network. Assuming Apple gets around to supporting 3G in the future, you’d ultimately have to buy a new 3G-capable iPhone for improved network performance, not that Apple is ready to announce one.”

–Edward Baig, USA Today

No, Apple is most certainly not ready to announce a 3G-capable iPhone, as this call-and-response Q&A between Walt Mossberg and Steve Jobs demonstrates:

Walt: When will there be an iPhone that runs on the fastest, so-called “3G” networks?
Steve: Walt, you know we don’t talk about future products. Again, Wi-Fi is far faster than 3G networks.
Walt: Will you follow the pattern you set with the iPod and bring out less costly models? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.
Walt: This first model is missing some features some other smart phones have, like video recording, instant messaging and real-time GPS navigation. Do you plan to upgrade iPhones purchased now so they have these features? If so, when?
Steve: We don’t talk about future products.

Over at Valleywag, Nick Denton’s whipped up a helpful chart scoring the critical consensus on the device.