Have never owned an Apple product, mostly because I began using computers in a business environment long before Apple was any factor at all for business applications.
But I’m surprised to read here that IPads do not allow use of a mouse or keyboard. A few months back I bought a cheap Android based tablet just to see what practical use I might make of it. I can attach a wireless mouse and keyboard to it (a generic one I already had).
Another big negative as I understand is that IPads do not come with Adobe Flash Player, which is used for many sites I visit. Also, Adobe stopped supporting Android last year (my cheap Android has the last Flash Player version for Android devices). I plan to buy a better quality tablet later this year, and for the reasons discussed it will probably be a Windows based tablet.
Yet you have been told wrong by people who don't use iPads. There are quite a few Bluetooth keyboards, including full size and ergonomic keyboards that work fine with iPads. There are even drivers for mouses, but no one does much with them.. . . and there are a selection of FLASH enabled browsers such as Puffin, Skyfire, and Terra, although I have found FLASH functionality to be less than necessary. In addition, one can have full functionality of ALL of your Windows applications from your iPad simply by connecting to your home computer and controlling it with your iPad from anywhere you have a broadband connection. . . mirroring your desktop or any of your Windows applications on your iPad screens (including videos) in real time.. . Or even displaying them on a flat screen TV through AirPlay.
The reason Adobe FLASH is not supported on iOS or Android devices and Adobe dropped development for it on portable handheld devices is that FLASH is a noted resource hog that eats battery life and Adobe could not solve the issue without rewriting it from the ground up. . . which would require recoding everything on the web that utilized Flash. HTML5 was already rapidly replacing Flash functionality on the web and Adobe could not justify the investment in re-engineering Flash when it would result in obsoleting existing code. That would just force more developers into the HTML5 camp even faster.
Oh please. There are plenty of WIFI keyboards for the iPAD.
But I prefer just the virtual keyboard on the iPAD itself.
“But I’m surprised to read here that IPads do not allow use of a mouse or keyboard.”
That would be surprising, as in fact you CAN use a keyboard with no problem. Right now it’s touch only as opposed to using a mouse.
I’m in the market for a pressure-sensitive stylus, there are several on the market and are getting excellent reviews for drawing and note taking.
“Another big negative as I understand is that IPads do not come with Adobe Flash Player, which is used for many sites I visit. Also, Adobe stopped supporting Android last year (my cheap Android has the last Flash Player version for Android devices).”
Flash is on the way out, that’s why it’s no longer being supported on Android (which was originally supposed to be a big deal in competing with iOS).
Almost all Flash content will be moved to HTML5 instead, which will work great on iOS.
I think you're misreading something. The iPad (and the iPhone, for that matter) can use any standard bluetooth keyboard. There's no mouse support, because the interface doesn't have a pointer. A mouse would be ... wait for it ... pointless.
That said, I would like mouse support for VNC, RDC or Cisco apps, which let you remotely connect to a desktop (or a virtual) PC. There are tons of those apps, and while they're not a substitute for sitting in front of a full workstation, they do open up a lot more possibilities.
Another big negative as I understand is that IPads do not come with Adobe Flash Player, which is used for many sites I visit
Most of those sites probably have an iPad-friendly version by now. Mobile Flash was a dog, which Steve Jobs was one of the first to point out and Adobe itself finally admitted; it is a bloated monstrosity that's usable on the desktop only because there's a lot of processor speed and memory to throw at it. In a resource-scarce mobile environment, it was never a good fit, and it was brutal on battery life. Adobe has moved on to its AIR app development environment and tools to produce HTML5 pages.