The iPad, why you will want one in 12 to 18 months.

There has been a lot of buzz before and after the formal introduction of the iPad. I am not going to repeat any of it here, I am just going to share my educated opinion as to why this device matters to you, me and everybody with a pulse. You simply may not know it yet.

The flop

The iPad is misunderestimated. It is misunderstood because the expectations were set too high by years of anticipation and when we realized this device does not walk on water, the bubble burst. It is underestimated for the same reason. Most of us missed the forest for the tree. Sure there is no camera on it but when laptops first come out, there was no camera on them either. Same for an SD card slot or many other features we expect from a state of the art device. Well, the iPad is not state of the art. The iPad goes beyond that but you need to read between the lines to see it. In many ways the father of the iPad is not the iPhone but the macBook Air (clue number one). More shortly.

The iPad is not revolutionary as a device though there are a number of electronic hardware features that are remarkable. The reason why the iPad is revolutionary and it goes beyond the state of the art is that it introduces us to a new computing paradigm. Blink and you missed it.

Let’s all agree, the iPad will not be nearly as successful as other recent innovative consumer products once it goes on sale. The early adopters and hard core fan will buy it but everybody else will sit on the bench, waiting. Why? Because most of us do not get it yet or if we do, we are waiting for the software to catch up (ah-ah! clue number two).

Changes in Internet consumption

The iPhone and its clones truly opened the door to the idea of consuming internet content anywhere and on the spot. A smart phone today is our remote control to our life, literally. In fact, as ridiculous as it may sound when my wife asks me early on a Sunday morning how will the weather be like, I grab my iPhone and check the weather channel app….Though I may be standing right in front of the window and all I have to do is look up. Don’t laugh, if you are reading this, chances are you did that too.

So what is it that my wonderful smart phone cannot do or does not do well enough and why? Well, just ask yourself, how do you check your email, read Twitter or do your online shopping when you are home? What about when you are in a hotel room on a business trip? At the Airport? That is right, the answer is laptop. Some may even say notebook but those are about to go extinct so let’s not bother. Why do we need a laptop? Because we want to consume content from the internet but the physical dimension of the smart phone is conducive only to those activities that are spare of the moment and do not require absorbing a lot of information. Anything more than that and we need more real estate.

So what’s wrong with a laptop? Let me give you a visual clue, have you ever tried to watch a movie on your laptop on an airplane? I will give you a moment to recall….

Something was in the way, was it not? It’s the keyboard. A relic of computer prehistory that, remarkably, few are spending time and money to evolve.

What else hurts us about laptops? Weight. Weight in laptop is due to soon to be extinct power adapters, storage devices and IO devices. For storage I am referring to the obsolete hard drives and DVD drives. For IO devices I am referring to SD ports, USB ports and what have you. Yes, I included HD, DVD and even USB in my endangered list; they will be gone soon enough. Apple even gave us a preview of that future that never was with the MacBook Air. This device already showed us what a laptop without an HD and a DVD would look and feel like and it was a leap forward from the bricks we all carry around. Too bad the MacBook Air is now on the endangered list too.

The MacBook Air was the result of a common pitfall of innovation. That is not listening to a voice from the past, the voice of Henry Ford who once said “If had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Apple built a faster horse with the MacBook Air.

Then realized there is a better way.

In fact, what happens when you take a laptop (pick your favorite screen size) and start removing HD, DVD, USB and the physical keyboard? You get a tablet.

Great so…why are we not all waiting in line to buy one? Software. We all have a number of utility applications on our laptops, things like a productivity suite or an accounting package to keep track of our checking account. If we use the laptop for work we may have more specialized packages germane to our profession (drawing suites, photograpy tools, programming languages and SDK etc.) These will not run on the iPad, yet, so we are not buying it, literally.

Hold that though.

What else? Files. Lots and lots of files, documents, photos, presentations etc. Some I want with me at all times and some I may not care. Either way it would be nice to have them backed up somewhere out there where I can always retrieve them.

Welcome to cloud computing for the rest of us

So what we have established is that in fact, keyboard aside, all drawbacks of a digital tablet have to do with the digital and not the physical. Let’s take care of the physical keyboard first, there are cases where we may need one and cases where we don’t. It is a non-issue though since we can always connect one to the tablet (the iPad does come with one as optional equipment). So the only thing preventing us from falling in love with the iPad concept is all in the digital realm. In English, it is all about software now.

Rise of the fallen

Fast forward 12 to 18 months now. All the software titles that you can run on your laptop are now available on a tablet (iPad or clones). Would you but a laptop? I would not. This is why the iPad concept is revolutionary. It will introduce us to this new paradigm of interacting with digital content and it will eliminate the physical annoyances of the status quo. So what should we look forward to? We should look forward to more and easier wireless connectivity, to more solid state storage that will allow us to carry more with fewer atoms dragging us down. We should also get used to the idea that our pet’s photos, tax return and music collection are all going to be in the cloud. Sure solid state storage is a wonderful step forward from rotating magnetic disks but that does not necessarily mean we must have every single byte we own with us all the times. The shift to cloud computing is a state of mind more than a technological revolution. The technology has been around for a while now, what is changing and need to continue to change is our attitude towards ownership. We need to evolve how we perceive physical ownership Vs. digital ownership and become comfortable, for example, with spending $15 to buy a movie that we will never hold in our hands but that we will be able to watch any time we like. Same with books, magazines and any other media that can be digitized and exchanged. The iPad will help with this mental cleansing process as well.

Oh and if anybody ask, I hate the name iPad too.

Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are solely my opinions and does not reflect Ricoh Innovations' position on this issue.