The iPad won’t suck…
…but it will burn many hours of your work day talking about this enlarged iPod/iPhone. Everywhere I turn people are either making fun of it, dismissing it (passionately), or ready to pull out the credit card and buy one. What really gets me are this new group (to me) of people that think you need a half inch, desktop powerful, physical keyboard using device or it just isn’t good enough.
Here’s my position on the iPad the day after:
- It is a consumption device.
- It won’t burn your bits when you try and watch a movie on it.
- I sat in the coffee shop with morning with email, a web browser, and tweet deck open for 3 hrs—didn’t need my laptop for that.
- It isn’t expensive for the early adopters that will buy version 1
- It is a product release that had features dropped that didn’t meet the quality control requirements (think iPhone before the 3G)
- Developing apps for it will likely be awesome
- If I were a student, I would be beyond excited to have all my text books on that (hey higher ed, how many will be offering this to first years loaded with all their text books, notes, slides, podcasts, etc?)
I will admit my bias and say that a big iPod touch that can tether with my iPhone is all I really wanted. A full OS would have been nice but I am really excited to see how developers take advantage of the HTML 5 stuff that Safari supports.
Will it be for everyone? No. But I would bet their $50 billion company is safe for now.
