Can iPad My Bottom Line With This?

Just who, and what, is Apple’s snazzy new iPad for anyway?

by:

Chris Winters

I've been thinking about the iPad ... a lot ... in the past 24 hours, and I can't decide whether I need one or just want one to whip out in public and impress people.

Seriously. That may be all there is to it.

What's it for?

Well, let's talk about what it's not for.

It's not a Kindle Killer. I'm pretty sure of that. (Nor was this. Or this. Or this. Please folks, is Kindle ready to be killed already?)

Yes, iPad has a color screen. Yes, you can read Amazon e-books on it. Yes, it looks cool. But, while Apple has boosted battery perfomance to a remarkable 10 hours for the iPad, that pales in comparison with the Kindle's ability to stay up and running for days at a time between recharges. It's only a matter of time before a full-color Kindle comes out.

And Apple lately has a thing for glossy screens. Maybe most people don't care, but there's a vocal minority out there that prefer matte screens for reading. A matte-screened iPad might pose some real competition to the Kindle. We may be a long way away from that, however, unless one of those yet-to-be-launched upper-end models has a matte screen. But it takes Apple a while to recognize its missteps. Remember that Apple kept its little round iMac mouse on the market for far too long. Long enough for someone to make a bunch of money selling plastic mouse elongators.

(It's worth noting, however, that Bezos & Co. clearly took a lesson on product design from Apple, subsuming the device's functions into the overall user experience (in this case, that experience is called "reading," not "using an electronic device to read a book." If only another local tech giant can learn the same lesson...)

So it's not an e-reader.

I'm not so sure it's a news reader, despite what the esteemed Bill Richards thinks about it. Yes, it's now possible to read the New York Times in all its broadsheet glory on the device (well, 9.7 diagonal inches of glory), as opposed to the tiny iPhone screens we were reading it on earlier. Or ... the 24-inch matte flat-screen monitors we have at home or at work, where we do most of our online reading. The iPad won't save newspapers. It's simply another internet device that newspapers will