epilogue

A lot has already been said about what the iPad has to offer. For starters, you can see the Apple event in San Francisco yesterday. The two most important categories of application that will benefit from the iPad are games and books. As far as the screen real-estate is concerned, games can now work with a lot more. What the new Apple A4 chip is capable of delivering is something that needs to be examined as more details emerge.

But as far as books ago, the device will be absolute killer. Wikipedia on the iPad is a great idea. Well, the device won’t save the New York Times. It will however, make books more richer. Think color photos, comics and embedded videos that Amazon’s Kindle can’t do currently. Couple it with the success of the AppStore, the iBookStore is yet another success just waiting to happen. Last year, I had predicted that Kindle’s death is certain. I got the dates for the iPad wrong, but the prediction about Kindle holds good.

What went unsaid in the Apple event however was the magazine and periodical story. One way to do it is to sell the magazine as an App, like the NYT currently sells its reader as an Adobe AIR application. The other way is to go the Zinio way. In short, buying Zinio out will be a great investment for Apple in the near and the long term. Well, either way paper as a way of publishing niche and special interest magazines is well on its way out.

That said, the iPad has more possibilities than that can be imagined in any high-value industry that involves filling out reports. Take the hospital for instance, nurses and doctors roaming around with iPads is a good idea (no pun intended). Ditto for shop-floors where an item has to go through multiple assembly stages before becoming a finished product like a car. Focused, Client-Server applications will get a new meaning. All the elements from a device, a great SDK, and an enthusiastic developer audience are there.

Well, the possibilities are infinite. All things given, there is no reason why things should not pan out this way. For Apple, vertical integration from silicon to software will get more profits. Other Apple devices like the iPod, iPhone and even the Mac may run on Apple chips in the future. I just wish that Apple could have thought of a better name for the iPad.

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