If you’ve not read it yet, go and check out Marco Arment’s A smartphone retrospective. His post from last week shows a bunch of 2007 smartphones, noting that they were cool but flawed, then says the iPhone happened. Despite all the protests about the iPhone’s lack of hardware keyboard, removable battery and expansion, pretty much all rival kit now apes Apple’s. Arment ends by showcasing a number of early 2010 netbooks, then says the iPad happened, and asks where the inexpensive computer space will be in a year.

Well, we’ve already seen various rumours and renders, and now, if Notebookitalia is to be believed, Toshiba’s about to enter the fray. There is, however, another aspect to the hardware shifts that Arment didn’t mention: the specs pissing contest. Most of Apple’s rivals aim to beat it in terms of specs rather than usability. They generally don’t aim for something that’s better for the general user, instead churning out hardware that offers more ‘stuff’.

If this really is to be Toshiba’s iPad ‘killer’, it’s certainly true to form. It’ll supposedly run Android (tick), look a bit like it was designed by Apple on an off day (tick), have more hardware buttons than really necessary (tick), and include a ton of ports, including USB and HDMI (tick). Judging by the images on Notebookitalia, this comes at a big price: form factor. It’s clear if this device makes it to market that it’ll be thicker than the iPad, but the edge with the ports also appears much thicker than its opposite side. This means Toshiba’s pad will have a natural landscape-only orientation, and will be horribly awkward in portrait mode. By contrast, the iPad generally doesn’t care which way up it is and apps encourage the user to turn the device to find a set-up that best suits them.

Still, if Toshiba’s model is released, I’m sure tech journos will claim it’s an iPad killer, because, once again, they’ll read the spec sheet, get terribly excited about things most users don’t care about, and forget that people—normal people—just want to get on and do stuff. Apple’s industrial design and usability will again be dismissed as gloss, right up until the moment its rivals catch up, whereupon those things will somehow become both exciting and essential.