iPad: The New Mac With the Unfortunate Name

It was a speech that will be remembered not just for its content, but for the anticipation leading up to it.

As the speech time drew closer Wednesday, the questions were many: Could he demonstrate that he was still a strong leader? Could he meet the high -- some say impossible -- expectations that had been laid out for him? Could he satisfy the people who put him on top, while not alienating the rest of the country?

Wait -- Obama's first State of the Union address? No -- Steve Jobs' unveiling of Apple's brand new tablet computer, the unfortunately named iPad, which, not surprisingly, has set off a wave of snickering I've not heard since the "changing bodies" video played in seventh-grade health class.

iTampon -- or the "iPon," as NPR's Shereen Meraji dubbed it (a slightly more elegant semantic construction) -- was a trending topic on Twitter by early Wednesday afternoon and remains there today. Meanwhile, Jezebel's Latoya Peterson thoughtfully collected some of the period jokes that popped up on the Internet Wednesday, including one legitimately funny reference to the 64-gig iPad as the "heavy flow model" and a slightly more cerebral musing over whether the iPad -- which boasts an innovative news reading application from the New York Times -- was meant as a way to handle the news' 24-hour cycle.

An iPad by any other name will compute just as fast, no? Well, yes. But, as much speculation as there was about what features would be included on Apple's first tablet computer (think iPhone, only big), the name was just as big a question. The Slate and the Tablet, were popular suggestions, as were suggestions incorporating Apple's slighly annoying "i" nomenclature (the iSlate, or iTablet). iPad's name may leave people laughing, but whether its features will also get them buying, too, remains to be seen.