iPad – The Killer APPliance

I started my professional career working for the ex-IBM company in India. I still remember the IBM 1401’s that used ‘punch cards’ as input for data. Then came the personal computers which were faster in speed and smaller in size. Laptops followed soon after. They were even faster, smaller and less expensive. The future now belongs to iPads. The iPad will kill today's computers, just like the latter killed computers running with punch cards and autocoder (command lines).

When the iPad was launched early this year, I was not sure I was going to buy one. On vacation in UK, I happened to play with one @ the newly opened Apple Centre in Covent Garden. 15 minutes later I was $600 poorer. 15 days down the road, I feel a lot richer!

The iPad gives people the tools to complete the tasks they want to accomplish, whatever they are.

To enjoy and create content. To play. To communicate. To work.

By being invisible and letting the applications do the work in the most simple way possible, the power of the computer is at last, available for everyone. No previous working knowledge of computers is required. From a 5 year old baby to the 90 year old grandma, people will be able to just do things they always dreamed of doing.

Another reason supporting the fact that the iPad is the future, is the statistics relating to iPhones.  The iPad’s initial target audience is iPhone and iPod touch users. Because they are already very comfortable with the way you need to interact with this device. Apple has shipped over 75 million iPhones, and the iPhone OS continues to dominate mobile web traffic. The App Store has served 3 billion downloads and claimed 99.4 percent of the mobile software market. Content developers need to see these kinds of numbers to have faith in investing in a new platform.  At this rate, we’re all heading with Apple into the future of computing, and it’s looking quite bright.

The killer APPliance has got the entire IT industry building the next generation ‘killer APPs’ to support the future of computing. My personal favorite is the Flipboard that aggregates content from Twitter and Facebook to create your personalized social magazine, all in a jiffy!

Flipboard has been making waves lately partially because of how well it fits with the iPad's touch interface and how closely it really does resemble an interactive magazine, but also because of the way it collects all of the articles, blog posts, images, and videos that your social network is discussing. The future is here and it is interesting.

Send your comments to sharad@cyber-gear.com. Visit www.sharadagarwal.com for extra reading.