What I would have loved was DRM-free ebooks from the iPad. The Kindle is a great device but the Amazon sales model is problematic; there’s no technical reason someone can’t sell you content in mobipocket format for your Kindle (just as I download such things from various ebook sites) and I long for the day this happens.

Also, I suspect the Kindle app will still work and you can have Kindle books without the Kindle (single-use device really). More than books, I think the iPad would be better than the Kindle for magazines. Wish Nat.Geo, Wired, and Dwell make iPad-friendly versions. I would readily subscribe to them in lieu of their paper versions.

John is right, it is a media consumption device more than a computer but then that was always the intention, I suppose. You can never have a device that has changed the face of anything on the day of its launch. Heck, even the Internet didn’t do that. It has to evolve and be developed by the crowds. If not the iPad then something else will be.

My reaction to it was “Oh… that’s all… a giant iPod Touch?” and I can’t imagine running out and buying one. But, as I’ve heard more about it, I’ve started to appreciate the process that Apple’s product designers seem to take – which is to identify a set of needs/desires and build a device for them, and be pretty ruthless about not messing with those things in order to add on yet another feature. The “productivity” stuff seems slightly tacked on to me, probably more to answer a potential objection to spending $500 on it (“well… I could take write things and do spreadsheets on it!” But you probably never will).

I don’t know anyone who works in that part of Apple, but I would bet real money that they use a pretty rigorous product management process that includes developing user personas and mapping product requirements to them. It plays out in a lot of their marketing materials, which – when you cut past the high aesthetic and production values – really impress me because they reveal a stunning focus on user requirements, something which very few tech companies really achieve. As a peer of the people creating them, I am consistently impressed, and not because they’re pretty. (And generally when people object to them, it becomes clear that they are not the user persona that Apple had in mind.) These may sound like obvious things to do, but in 20 years of tech marketing, I have learned that they require incredible discipline that usually isn’t there. So kudos to them, even though I may never buy an iPad.

(It’s for this same reason that I found the ebook aspects of it the most underwhelming; forgetting DRM issues for a moment, Amazon got this very, very right with the Kindle – they designed it for people who love books. Apple seems to have designed the ebook functions of iPad for people who are much more casual in their relationship to words and reading. Which is, I admit, probably a much larger group.)

It’s a media consumption device, not a computer, and therefore won’t replace your computer. That said, it looks like a nice way to consume content on a couch or an easy chair.

So it doesn’t really pass my test I was joking about (“will it do more than let you update Facebook from the toilet?”) but it certainly looks like a really nice way to update Facebook from the toilet. I suspect that in a few years many people will be using devices like this. When they are not using their computers.

When tech journalists start talking about “changing the face of computing,” I roll my eyes. Most people are not interest in computing, any more than their car ownership means they are interested in internal combustion. It’s a means to an end. The only change is the increasing penetration of networked devices into every aspect of life, and that’s a long process, not a day, and it is well underway.