The iPad – It Doesn’t Walk on Water…Yet

Apple's new iPad

The Apple iPad arrived Wednesday and elicited mostly positive reviews, but many were an interesting combination of dying-to-have-one but loathe-to-show-it.

I haven’t put my hands on one yet–and doubt I’d ever use it as a writing tool–but having read through most of the response online and in the tech press, my feeling is that, though it’s a delicious, innovative delight — and will only get more so as new features are added — the Messiah only comes once.

The collective voice of the industry raised hosannas one time to the advent of the iPod, then again a bit reluctantly to the iPhone, but you just can’t expect them to fall on their knees a third time.

The good news is that time is on the iPad’s side: the price, at around $500 up, is way lower than expected; and best of all, in my opinion, is that you can expect it to be, if not a Kindle killer, a Kindle shamer.

Why should that make me happy? I’ve aired my views on the Kindle here and here. But to reduce them to a phrase, I feel strongly, with Cory Doctorow, that the Kindle is a Big Brother machine (ironically, it was the “disappearing” of innocent Kindle owners’ copies of 1984, and Animal Farm, that so rudely exposed this bit of blithe corporate heedlessness.

Perhaps Amazon is trying to smooth over an ugly glimpse behind its Matrix by inching toward a more democratic approach to other file types, but I see it as only inches when the door should be thrown wide open.

In any case, though you won’t write your next novel on it, the iPad is an almost irresistible new entertainment station, portable, cool looking, lightweight, and omnibus. If asked for a logo phrase, I would say: “Take it anywhere, read, watch, listen to anything.”