i-dont-Pad

Yesterday, I watched Steve Jobs create the now familiar Reality Distortion Field when he took the stage to announce the "iPad". And as expected from Steve, words like Amazing, Fantastic, Revolutionary came thick and fast as the new sleek iPad was unveiled.

It's a really nice looking gadget. 9+ inches of screen real estate, up to 64GB of flash space, Wifi/3G, etc. And to start at $500.

And all thro the presentation, I was thinking to myself…all of this I can do on my 2G iphone! Everything except the iWorks part (which I really don't want to do on my phone). And it became a YAWN device for the moment. For the following reasons:

1. $500 for something that I absolutely don't need and that really does not add any real value.

2. I'm getting started with eBooks, having bought a couple of them from the Amazon store (Kindle edition), but I read them on my iPhone with the free Kindle app. So all I end up paying for is the book…which is 30% of the printed book cost. So that works for me.

3. One more device to carry around. I'm always going to carry my iPhone (I sometimes forget my wallet, but never my iPhone) and I'm going to need my laptop to do stuff the iPad will probably never. Case in point: Aperture! My photograph manipulation software that I need to sync my Nikon to when I'm going crazy with the shutter. So the iPad will be just another device that I will end up carrying with me and will only make my already heavy bag heavier by a kilo (it's only a kilo, so what?), not to mention the accessories that will eventually come with this device.

4. The number of books available for the Kindle is far greater than the ones for the iPad. Of course, you can say that's because there is no iPad today! But in 3 months time, when it is available, I believe the Kindle will still have a decent lead on the books available as compared to the iPad. And since I can buy the Kindle edition books and read them on my iPhone, I don't need to spend $500 for this.

5. I keep coming back to this $500 part, cause it's easy to misrepresent. For 500 bucks, you get the Wifi only 16GB version of the iPad. If you want the 64GB 3G enabled one, it's going to cost me $829! Now that's a lot of money to spend on something that I'm not sure I will use to the fullest today.

6. I wish Apple had put a tiny iSight camera on top of the iPad. Now that would have been a really cool thing to do. Then you could have used the iPad to do video conferencing on so many different platforms. Now you can chat with your friends on Google or Yahoo, but if you need to switch from chat to video, it's not a click away…it's a full device away.

I'm a huge Apple fan and usually love all the things they do. I like the iPad a lot as well, just don' t think it does much for me just yet. What I do believe is that it will probably bomb away the Kindle market and a large part of the Netbook market. It also might be a nice thing to give to kids, rather than a whole computer, but I did not hear too many things from Steve about Parental Controls on this device and so am not sure they thought about this market slice.

I'm hoping that as it happened with the iPhone (cost reduction by $100 within a few weeks of launch), Apple will lower the price for the 3G 64GB variant. Cause that's when I will seriously consider buying this thing. Until then, it's nice to look at, but that's all it is!