I'm what many might call an Android fanboy, but I have a hard time understanding these sorts of decisions made by companies. What iOS device owner is going to see that message and think "OMG I WANT A TOSH-TAB"?

To me it looks like an attempt at viral marketing. Their market? Android fans. How do you get Android fans to look at your page? By putting up a controversial page making fun of apple users.

I suspect that the kind of person who owns and iPad AND is offended by this is probably a market they are willing to write off in trade for huge publicity in Android circles - they might just be right.

I guess I'm having a hard time taking this thing that seriously compared to the Xoom. I mean, if Toshiba told me they were releasing full source at launch and include flashing utilities, I'd be ecstatic and would buy in a second. Like I said, I like Android and tinkering. I recognize that I'm a minority and I suspect Toshiba wants to move these puppies.

-1? Really? The hardware looks inferior to the Motorola Xoom. The Toshiba has that awkward chrome and has hardware buttons when Honeycomb is eliminating them or making them redundant. I guess others are just uh super into Toshiba?

I downvoted you because you jumped right in at the beginning of the thread and made a bunch of posts about the Xoom, all of which sounded more like excuses to mention it than like informative posts. Acting like a marketing bot is as bad as being a marketing bot in my book. If people are interested, they'll respond or upvote. If they ignore you, they're not interested. There's no need to repeat yourself all over the place. (However, if this stupid pagination thing keeps going, I will start to be more sympathetic to thread-spamming.)

So two constitutes a bunch now? Especially when one is in reply to the notion that "techies" are going to buy it when it has an inferior build, inferior specs and a bulkier size, and the other was a general comment at the top level of comments?

"all over the place is an exaggeration". Clearly I'm not a marketing bot, that's equally absurd.

I count three, with no information about the Xoom (before you got downvoted) except that it would "slaughter" the Toshiba and its UI was "better." I think the downvoting was consistent with HN standards. When a particular web site is under discussion and a guy posts a plug for a similar site, he doesn't get downvoted. Three in the same thread without an informative comparison, he gets downvoted.

The ad talks up Android and the HDMI, USB, and mini-USB connectors as features, so it is clearly aimed at techies, and since this is the first and only place I've seen it, I think they're hitting their target market. The folks who see it will be aware of the Apple/Flash drama and the Apple/Android rivalry, and in that context it's just a piece of in-your-face humor. Why would anyone feel insulted? If they feel so sensitive about their Apple devices, then they are unlikely to buy anything except an iPad anyway.