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There has been a lot written and said about the iPad in the last few days, most of it by techno geeks, and much of it negative. Many people expected a laptop in a tablet form factor and set about listing all the things their laptop had that the iPad didn’t: a camera, USB ports, a big hard drive and the ability to run multiple applications at once. But I suspect geeks are missing the point that this device is not aimed at them and that that despite these apparent short comings, the iPad could be a winner.

Jeff Croft has some interesting thoughts on how the device could be used and what is really missing:

There is no excuse for this thing not to have multi-user support. This could have been the world’s greatest coffee table device, if it only had support for multiple users. Think about it: the thing sits on the coffee table. Daddy logs in. He checks his e-mail and his sports scores. He logs out and puts it down. Little Timmy logs in. He IMs a friend and plays a game. He logs out and sets it down. Mom logs in. She get a recipe from her bookmarked Martha Stewart page and forwards some totally-not-funny cat video to her best friend. And so forth. This is the new PC. But it requires multi user support. If I can’t log in and have my own bookmarks, my own email accounts, my own IM lists, and my own Twitter feed, it’s useless as a family PC.

While it may currently be useless as a family device because of the lack of multi-user support – this feature can’t be far off.

Jeff (and others) make an interesting price comparison with the Kindle – the cheapest model is also only slightly more expensive than a high end digital picture frame.

Chris Thorpe notes the impact the wii had on digital inclusion:

When the Wii launched it revolutionised not just gaming, but who plays and who buys. … The real world is all about gestures. We turn a page. We swish a piece of paper out of the way to see what is below. We press a button and the kettle boils.

The first main problem [non-technical users] have technically is that computers look complex. They have lots of things you plug into other things. Every thing has an arcane name, very few of these names really relate to their function. Each of these things causes something to happen but not in an obvious touch the thing and something happens to it way. It’s always at one removed. When you add in connecting the overarching thing to the internet then it becomes an activity of worry and confusion.

Then you look at the iPhone and iPad. It really is all-in-one. Sure it lacks USB ports, but actually lots of people don’t need them to much. It comes with a mechanism of internet access built in and the 3G one is essentially a “charge it up and play” inclusion device.

Mark Sigal at O’Rielly looks at some important numbers:

• 125 million accounts with credit cards on iTunes – all these people are already setup to buy content for the iPad
• 75 million people with iPhones and iPod touches – all these people are already familiar with the interface and limitations of the device
• 140 million apps on the app store that will run unmodified on the iPad – all people already have on their iPod/iPhone can be transfered seemlessly onto the iPad. Not to mention their music, their photos, etc..

John Gruber talks about the new chip:

Lastly, there’s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”.

It is fast, fast, fast. The hardware really does feel like a big iPhone — and a big original iPhone at that, with the aluminum back. (I have never liked the plastic 3G/S iPhones as much as the original in terms of how it feels in my hand.) I expected the screen size to be the biggest differentiating factor in how the iPad feels compared to an iPhone, but I think the speed difference is just as big a factor. Web pages render so fast it was hard to believe. After using the iPhone so much for two and a half years, I’ve become accustomed to web pages rendering (relative to the Mac) slowly. On the iPad, they seem to render nearly instantly. (802.11n Wi-Fi helps too.)

The Maps app is crazy fast. Apps launch fast. Scrolling is fast. The Photos app is fast.

…

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world.

So we have a device that is cheap, easy to use, easy to migrate to, super fast and fun. It’s hard to see this as a desktop or laptop replacement, but it’s pretty easy to see it succeeding as a coffee table or bed side table device.