iPad Impressions

The Jesus Tablet has finally arrived and it's a big iPhone with a clunky name - the iPad. This is supposed to be the device that saves publishing by convincing us to stop accessing the Internet with our PCs for free and start buying the content for the iPad, instead. It isn't going to happen.

Gizmodo has a list of things that suck with the iPad. I'm going to concentrate on a few important ones.

First, its web browser is crippled. It doesn't run Flash. That means that Youtube needs a special app to work and pages with embedded Youtube videos will not work.

Like the iPhone, it will only do one thing at a time. You can browse or your can check email but don't try to do both.

There's no camera so you cannot do a video chat with anyone either.

People are expecting the iPad to take over ebooks the way that the iPod took over music. It will not. It is too big and too expensive.

I don't expect it to cut into the Netbook market much either. It is lighter but it is missing a lot of functionality and it costs more. I'm using a laptop on my lap right now. The form factor is pretty good. I can type without it falling off of my lap and I don't have to hold it in place to see the screen.

Apple had great success with music and phones but they entered these markets with revolutionary products. Prior to the iPod, MP3 players had very limited memory and hard-to-use controls. Apple was the first to offer a music player that could hold an entire collection instead of a couple of CDs.

The iPhone was the first phone with a big touch screen. Every phone before it had a keypad that took up a lot of space.

The iPad does not offer new functionality. There are other tablets on the market that do more. For the starting price of an iPad, you can get a good notebook with ten times the storage and a full version of Windows 7. For less than the price of an iPad you can get a netbook with a fairly large hard drive, similar screen size and good battery life.

I don't doubt that Apple will sell a lot of iPads - at least a million by the end of the year. But I don't think that it will dominate any markets the way that the iPod and iPhone have done.