Some thoughts on Apple's iPad

Apple's newly announced iPad could very well turn out to be "a magical and revolutionary product," as Steve Jobs (pictured with the device) said. If it takes off, browsing the web, reading e-mail, enjoying videos, pictures and music, and reading e-books could be much more intuitive, convenient and fun. Conjecture about it being an iPhone/iPod Touch on steroids was essentially right. Here are some other observations after virtually attending Apple's press

conference (with a shout-out to Engadget for its outstanding live coverage).

Public displays: In seeking to bridge the gap between palm-sized devices and traditional laptops, I wonder if the iPad threatens to lessen the "personal" of personal technology because of its screen size. If you're watching a movie, reading email or viewing pictures on your iPad, whoever is near you can pretty much do the same because it's right there on your big, 9.7-inch screen for the world to see. To be sure, laptops pose this same problem. But the work being done on them involves largely text-based tasks, usually for the workplace. So people don't care. But the whole point of an iPad is to do more personally oriented tasks, and the device virtually screams for people to look at it -- whether you want them to do so or not..

iShrug: To make my point that people seem to want the iPad for fun and not productivity, consider Engadget's take on Apple's lengthy demo of how the iWork workplace-productivity suite was adapted for the device: "We don't know about you, but using iWork wasn't one of our fantasies when we thought about what an Apple tablet would be like. This is nice... but it's iWork."

Reading pixels: There's no doubt that the iPad's large screen and mobile nature are going to change the way we look at e-reading, whether its books downloaded from the iTunes Store (more money for Apple!) or newspapers and magazines. It was nice of Jobs to acknowledge Amazon's in-roads on e-books with its Kindle: "Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this... we're going to stand on their shoulders for this." What he didn't say, but everyone filled in: "And then jump up and down again and again until we crush Amazon into the ground."

App attack: I love the ability to be able to use current apps on the iPad. But as Engadget noted with the Facebook app, which it said looked silly on the screen even after up-scaling, some of them aren't going to convert well. I would expect that many developers will update their apps to look better on the larger iPad.

But gaming? I'm sorry, but I'm still not buying the iPad as a serious gaming device, just as Apple wants to label the iPhone and iPod Touch. Yes, gaming apps are huge on those devices. But we're talking mostly about casual time-wasters that people use to bide their time while waiting for a plane. Serious gaming, as we think of when talking about a console like the PlayStation 3 or even the Nintendo DS? I have doubts.

Oops: There was an Interesting blip during the demo. Jobs went to the New York Times' website, where a Flash feature wouldn't display on the iPad's screen because the plug-in was missing. Or is Flash not a feature of the iPad? If it is, how could such a carefully scripted event overlook such an obvious gaffe?

Handle with care: Until anyone finds out differently, woe to the users who drop their iPad, which by design will be handled -- and mishandled -- much more than a laptop but will usually require two hands to hold, unlike an iPhone. The repair market should be brisk.

Cost factor: Apple surely surprised many people with a starting price of $499 for the 16GB iPad. But that's exactly what it wanted. By allowing rumors of $1,000 to fly furiously, it makes the actual price have that much more of an impact. Surely, it fueled that speculation with carefully calculated leaks. But even if not, that's a nice price for a nifty toy. I have to say, though, that most people are going to want the highest-capacity, fullest-featured model, and that 64GB 3G model will be $829 -- pretty close to the rumored $1,000.

Yes, I want one. I don't know for what yet. But I'll think of something.

What do you think about the iPad, based on what we know so far?