It was fascinating to hear how Steve Jobs was positioning both Apple as a manufacturer of mobile devices larger than Sony, Samsung and Nokia in that context, and then the iPad as a new category of product in opposition to the netbook.  It’s well worth listening to the keynote, and watching the slick demonstrations.  For me iPad follows two important paths.  The first is simple user experience and the second is Darwinian divergence in product categories.

On the first path, the iPad uses the iPhone operating system with a gorgeous looking 9.7 inch multi-touch screen, 16-64GB of storage, Wi-Fi, 3G, the standard iPod/iPhone 30 pin connector and not much else – go here for more explanation and tech details.  It’s a device very much oriented towards consuming content from the web, your photos, video and e-books.  I called up David Jennings who wrote the excellent Net, Blogs and Rock and Roll to ask him about the significance of the iPod when it first came out, and what he thought of the iPad.  He was quick to point out that the ergonomics of the iPod and iPad are different – you can walk down the street listening to music, but you aren’t going to be walking round much with your iPad.  However, we both reminisced about the point just over a decade ago when  portable mini disk players and the early MP3 players started.

There were plenty of devices from Sony, RIO and Creative, and they just started to get really useful when the capacity jumped in to Gigabytes and you could take a huge chunk of your song collection with you rather than having to make painful choices for each trip.  I remember buying Creative MP3 players for my nephews, but not thinking of one for myself because they seemed just too clunky and full of features.  Just at that time Apple comes out with the iPod and simplifies the player’s operating system to just the few things that are useful, and creates iTunes which was significantly easier to plug in to and use than the media players used by the rest of the market.  So it was combination of elegant design, simple user interface and timing on capacity (the first iPods had 5Gb) which helped iPod define the category and then take off to get the enormous market share they now have.  I jumped in at the third generation and have had an iPod strapped to my belt ever since.  David thinks he’ll get seduced in to an iPad, but probably not until the second iteration.

When I look at the simplicity of the book interface on the colour multi-touch screen, combined with  what they are doing with the iBooks store and adopting the EPUB standard, I’m convinced this will be the product  that takes the e-book/reader concept mainstream.  The simplicity of the limited set of functionality will appeal to the technologically challenged who think about  using a netbook or a laptop to consume the Internet on something much bigger than their mobile phone, but just don’t want the hassle and learning curve of getting to grips with a PC or a Mac.  My technophobe wife is already interested, so I think there is going to be a broad appeal amongst that new techno challenged demographic who want to mostly consume with a little creation, and don’t need all the power of a PC.