Its a laptop, its a netbook, its a phone… no, Its iPad!

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Ever since Steve Jobs revealed Apple’s latest marvel to the world, I have been in love with the device. And to be honest, I haven’t been discreet about it.

Except for a very few, most of my friends have been directly or indirectly trying to convince me that I do not need it. People have a strange way of trying to convince others – asking rhetorical questions. Like:

– Why do you need it? You already have an iPhone.
– What is it about it that you liked?
– Why do you need another gadget? It won’t even fit in your pocket.

Steve Jobs once said – “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. He also started the keynote by clearly saying that we currently have smartphones & laptops as two primary mobile devices in the world. Is there room for a 3rd kind of device? He then stated that netbooks and ebook readers have tried to go into that area but have not succeeded substantially. This led Apple to think that if they were to create such a device, it should be great at doing certain things, otherwise, it doesn’t need to exist. Hence the iPad.

People have to understand that the iPad is not a substitute for any of the devices that they currently use. Its a new kind of device altogether which fits perfectly in Apple’s huge iTunes ecosystem. And it should not be compared with any of the devices with respect to its existence. Imagine you have been using Yahoo! mail all this time and Google suddenly comes up with Gmail offering 1000 times storage and a revolutionary interface. Wouldn’t you want to use that? Or would you still stick to your old webmail and keep asking rhetorical questions to anyone who suggests you to use Gmail? I already have a Yahoo mail account which I love; Why should I shift to Gmail? If you are the latter, the iPad is probably not for you.

The idea is to get the metaphor in the above example. The iPad is a revolutionary new device which does email, photos, web, ebooks in a much better way we probably haven’t imagined yet. Why do you need it? You need it for the same reason you need a HDTV and a home theater setup to watch movies. You can always watch movies on your desktop or laptop. The reason why you would want an iPad is same as why you would want to watch movies on your home theater setup – Its just better. Now you can still argue that you can do all the said things that the iPad does pretty well on your laptop and convince yourself that you do not need one. Be our guest.

I haven’t used the iPad. So can I really claim that the experience is going to be so much better and revolutionary on the iPad? Yes. Because I have used the iPhone. Every feature that Jobs demonstrated in the historical January 2007 keynote was just awesome on the iPhone when I bought it later that year. Usually companies exaggerate things during the demo to woo customers. But Apple actually develops the tech and then shows it on the actual device. And Apple did not create the iPhone keeping in mind what the then smartphone users wanted. They created the iPhone with their vision of a smart phone. Similar is the case with the iPad. And as many people still do not align to their vision for the iPhone, we cannot expect iPad to get a 100% acceptance vote.

That being said, according to some, the iPad still lacks a lot of things. However, their definition of lacking is based on their alleged expectations out of the device. Since the iPad had, what can only be called the hype of the century, everyone had their vision of what the device would be like, its specs and what it will be able to do. I am sorry but the world does not work that way. If you bought a dishwasher and complain that it doesn’t do your laundry, you probably need to see a psychiatrist.

As stated earlier, Apple did not create the iPad to replace any existing device. They built it from scratch with their vision of how a tablet device should look and feel and how people should surf the web, view photos, or read ebooks. This vision is in line with their vision of the smart phone, which led to the creation of the iPhone. And so far, they seem to be doing good.

And after watching this video, I am pretty much sold to the idea of using iPad as my primary web, photos, email and ebooks reader. Are you?