If you haven't yet read all about the iPad, check out Apple's iPad page. Other than perhaps the lack of a front-facing webcam, it's pretty close to what I expected. As a developer I'm very pleased that they made the SDK and iPad Simulator available for download today.Anyway rather than repeat all the usual hype and complaints out there, I'm just going to talk about what the iPad seems to be intended for product-wise and give my first impressions of the SDK.
First, this thing is intended to kill netbooks and the Kindle. It's a netbook and ereader killer or at least it's supposed to be. Right now some people carry a smartphone and a laptop around, then find they want to spend hours reading PDF files or ebooks. The laptop is too clumsy and drains batteries too fast. The smartphone is less clumsy and has perhaps better battery life, but is too small and painful to use for reading books. So they buy a dedicated ebook reader device with a reasonably large e-ink screen and very good battery life, but it doesn't do anything but read books, and now they're carrying around three devices.It's pretty much a given that you'll have to have a phone of some sort, so you're pretty much stuck with carrying a cell phone be it super tiny or smartphone-sized. The iPad's gambit is that it can replace some amount of the smartphone's smartness, the ereader's ereaderyness, and the netbook/laptop's desktop computerishness with one device that's able to fill all needs well enough for people traveling around, sitting in cafes, airports, or in class.
Will it succeed? I think that it mostly will for what most people would need a PDA, ereader, and netbook/laptop for, but it's going to have user interface awkwardness issues for a while.
The iPhone UI was designed very well for a little screen. The first thing I notice when playing with the iPad SDK is.... what the heck do I do with all this space now? If I take an iPhone application, port it to an iPad app, then try to rearrange the controls on a screen that seems almost 10 times as large now, I start to feel like someone took my house, increased it's square footage by an order of magnitude without increasing the number of rooms, but didn't give me any more furniture.
Of course, Apple is giving iPad developers more furniture and more ways (in the form of new view controllers) to divide up the suddenly much larger house into a larger number of smaller rooms, but at the moment the springboard (home screen) still looks sort of like a bathroom the size of a basketball court. The "room dividers" in the new SDK may remain a little awkward until the concept of adapting a specialized small-screen UI to a larger screen becomes more refined.So the iPad may start out as a bit of an awkwardly musclebound iPod Touch, but I doubt it will be more than a year before that awkwardness totally goes away and a new user interface paradigm that handles screens from book to phone size will truly be born. Overall I think that Apple is on the right track in trying to pull the iPhone UI "up" rather than pulling "down" the standard desktop windowing system UI (which hasn't changed much since Xerox came up with it over 30 years ago or something).
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