Much of the early writing about the iPad has focused on its technical limitations. The negative reviews have largely been around the lines of “why bother, I’d rather keep using my laptop or iPhone”. But the iPad is innovative not so much for its technical features, it is in a sense just an overgrown iPod touch, but for what it represents as a new class of devices that fills, or more accurately creates, a new gap in the market. Does that make it a revolution? Probably short of that but certainly an historic evolutionary step.

For anyone with an iPhone they’ll immediately get what the iPad is about. You can surf the web, check email, view photos and video and download apps from iTunes from what is effectively a big, fat sexy touch screen four times the size of the iPhone’s one.

So from a technical point of view it is a bigger iPhone without the phone and camera, yet another PDA device, a stunted laptop, another way to connect to the Internet apart from your TV, games device, computer, phone and home storage device. Nothing that really excites on the surface. But then you think about how you’d use it and therein lies the evolution.

The iPad fills what was a growing chasm as the couch surfing instrument. We already know people tend to surf and watch TV at the same time, now they have the tool to do it. If you want to quickly look up something online whilst at home why turn on the computer or laptop with it’s noisy humming and heat generating hard disk? The iPad is light and portable and the touch screen much better for using from your lap than any laptop’s dongle mechanism. What about the TV as your web browser such as the Playstation 3? Eh! Never took off because surfing using a game controller or DVD remote sucks and you can’t then watch TV at the same time. Better to use those devices for their primary purpose. What about the iPhone’s screen? Great, but here’s what anyone with an iPhone already knows. No matter how great the workarounds, zooming and touch scrolling there is, it’s still too small to really surf a website and be totally happy about it which is why we in the industry have been creating mobile sites, something completely different to normal website for people on mobiles.

The iPad will be a new class of devices that sits on the coffee table, gets used for games, puzzles and accessing email and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, reading books and magazines and even doing homework. When friends come around it will be the new photo album. And it will portable such that when you go down to the local café, or commute to work, it will come also act the perfect social PDA device. Will it also be a camera and portable music device like the iPhone? Probably not, not its niche.

So what is at the heart of this evolution? Price, as it always is. The iPad is very affordable. But from a technology point of view, it’s two things, the screen and the size. The screen is is quite simply amazing touchy goodness and simply the best interface device for computers yet invented, and available at an affordable price. And what is important about that screen is not the hardware specs but actually the software that controls the interaction with it and makes it so intuitive. It’s what Apple does best being put to good use. Then secondly the size of the device. Just right. This predominantly achieved from the hard-state hard disk removing the hum and heat of what we’re used to from laptops. That technology is coming in laptops too now but the iPad puts it straight to good use.

In ten years time when the predominant way we travel around with our computers is a touch screen, tablet style device we’ll look back and remember the first one of these and say, yes it was the iPad. And when the publishing industry finally gives up on pulping forests and it is predominantly electronic downloading we’ll look back to the breakthrough device that commercially changed everything and say, yes it was the iPad. And when kids grow up and remember the “teenies” or whatever they’re going to call this decade, the picture that will form when asked to think about the Internet will likely be that device that sat around the house and could access the internet at will, which will be the iPad or one of its successors.

And in a commercial or school setting when we think about a computer that is portable but still able to do serious work from a user-friendly screen we’ll remember the iPad as the device that finally filled that awkward gap.

So as a device the iPad is brilliant evolution. However, it’s effects on the way we interact with the Internet, particularly as it relates to various industries and social behaviour may be remembered as revolutionary. Publishing, education, film and video distribution, games manufactures take particular note. Your worlds in particular just changed for good.

Thank you to our picture source: ThinkGeek