In the 24 hours that elapsed after Steve Jobs made the iPad announcement, we collected almost half a million tweets about the iPad. Using TweetFeel’s proprietary sentiment engine, we scored a sample of about 40,000 tweets. Then, we dove right in to take a much closer look at a subset. Here’s what we discovered.

Overall sentiment sat at around 60% positive. Generally, people have positive opinions about the iPad.  But, among the 40% of tweets that didn’t talk about the iPad in a positive light, the majority of tweets were related to the name and it’s associated feminine hygiene references. In addition, people felt that the lack of Flash, multi-tasking, and a camera were huge drawbacks. The most common negative opinion was that the iPad is just a big huge iPhone – so what!

On the other hand, the positive tweets mostly reflected generic comments such as “It’s awesome” and  “I want one”.  In other words, people don’t really know what it is or what it does, but boy do they ever want one.

In 2001, the iPod kind of got the same kind of chatter so only time will tell now!