Well, the anxiety leading up to the Apple announcement is over, but now I'm sitting here trying to figure out what the new iPad is supposed to be and where I'm supposed to put it. Essentially the iPad is a 1-1/2 pound, 1/2 inch thick touch screen computer with a 9.7-inch screen. It comes with up to 64 Gbytes of memory, built-in Wi-Fi (some configuration of 802.11n), Bluetooth v 2.1 and soon thereafter a 3G interface for AT&T's overtaxed network. There's no hard keyboard, making it look like an e-book reader using a program Apple calls iBooks. It will also support Web browsing (using Safari), email, photos, videos, and iPod capability. It reportedly runs a version of Apple s iWorks including Keynote (i.e. "PowerPoint"), Numbers (i.e. "Excel"), and Pages (i.e. "Word").Now that we've got the basic components, the real guessing game begins: what are people going to use this for? The obvious answer is an e-book reader akin to the Kindle, but we've got a bunch of those. Will the other functions establish the iPad as a new type of electronic gadget people will want to own--and for what? The iPhone took the idea of the smartphone and launched it to a new level, but that was building on what had already become an established product model. Hundreds of millions of people were carrying cellphones when the iPhone appeared, but e-book readers have nowhere near that level of penetration.
At first glimpse, the iPad looks like an enlarged iPhone, but without the anchor feature--it doesn't make phone calls. Like the tablet computers that preceded it, the iPad appears to suffer from the dysfunctional Three-Bears problem (too big, too small, and too useless). Smartphones are small and people are used to carrying them. E-book readers call for a briefcase or large handbag. The kiss of death for the tablet might simply be that it's too much electronic stuff for people to be dragging around on a regular basis.
For the moment, I don t see myself tucking an iPad into my "man-bag" (no, I don't have one of those either). However, given Apple's track record in anticipating consumer preferences, you have to pay attention to anything they put their name on. In this case, they may have taken on a product concept that had failed before (for good reason) and will continue to fail despite their best efforts to the contrary.Like the tablet computers that preceded it, the iPad appears to suffer from the dysfunctional Three-Bears problem (too big, too small, and too useless).
