The iPad was announced on January 26th. Pundits, developers, haters and fanboys have been arguing either for or against it since. I’ve been reading a lot, and I do mean a lot of info in both directions. What follows are my opinions.
Many people have mentioned that Flash brings rich media experiences to the web that can’t be produced with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They’re right, they can’t. On the other hand, the controls on the touch devices can’t interact well with those sites anyway. You need a keyboard and mouse to properly utilize that content. So those sites would be useless on almost any tablet.
For me, and others like me, rich media isn’t what I use the web for, I use it for information. I don’t need a rich experience to find out how something works or how to do something. I need text, images and/or video and these are all things an iPad could do well.
The iPad is not a revolution, technologically speaking. Like all Apple products, however, it is an evolution of a lot of technologies. It is a revolution in how we think about computing.
We’ve had tablets before. They’ve always tried to shoehorn an existing desktop/laptop OS,designed for keyboard and mouse input, onto a device designed for input with a stylus or fingers. Inherently, these devices were doomed to failure. They were trying to be a laptop when that isn’t what they were.
The iPad is likely to succeed because it’s not trying to be a laptop. It can’t multitask, which makes it more stable. It’s apps are vetted, which makes it more stable. It doesn’t run Flash, which makes it more… you get the idea. It’s aiming to be a device which allows people to do the things most people do; browse the web, send email, track their calendar and watch videos. It also allows them to read books and do basic productivity.
I can already think of dozens of uses for this device, on and off set, in my industry. I can think of another dozen or so around the house. That’s one guy in one field. Imagine what others will dream up.
If you think about it, there are 300,000,000+ people in the United States alone. If only 1% want and buy an iPad, and only buy the 16GB WiFi model, thats $1.5 billion dollars. That’s in the U.S. alone. By any measure, I’d call that a success.