I agree. How many devices do we really need? I am one of the few in the MCDM program that uses a basic flip phone with no data plan. I’ve got a netbook for carrying around with me and a more powerful computer to use at home, and I just don’t see the need for more than that. It already feels like too much. Devices like the iPad may satisfy a niche audience, but I fail to see any use for it in my daily life.

However, my hyphotesis, is that none of the people writing this pro reviews is part of Apple’s target for the iPad. iPad has entered the market to create a new category of user.

iPad will play a similar role to the one Wii played for Nintendo in the video games market. Obviously, if you had given a Wii to gamer, the review would have been awful. But who was Nintendo targeting with Wii? No-gamers, people who thought PS and Xbox controllers were for astronauts. In the case of iPad, Apple will aim to attract a wider audience to their brand. This based on two key benefits: (i) intuitive use and (ii) versatility.

These two benefits will make iPad and its future generations, a home device, similar to what a TV-set was back in the 60s. My prediction is that soon, there will be many iPads, iPod Touches and iPhones per household. Grandma will use it as a cooking book and scrapbook. Mom will use it to read her favorite book and stay in touch with work, as well as her photo albums. Dad will use it as the newspaper and to watch movies. Toddlers will use it to read their books and to play memory games. Teens will use it for school and keep in touch with their friends. The sky is the limit. The beauty of the iPad technology is in its simplicity.

Contrary to what tech savvy consumers, and I include myself in this category, believe, sometime “less is more”.

Margery mentions the bibliophile audience of Kindle users. I also found on the Kindle forums that the bulk of Kindle owners were very happy, thank you very much, with the Kindle’s singular function as an e-reader. Reading content on the Kindle, as an experience, is comparable to reading a physical book, which is a plus in user experience. When considering the Kindle from another point of view, which is as a light, portable Linux-powered device with a nice hunk of memory, and an all-you-can-eat data connection plan, one can understand the excitement of application developers when Amazon announced the imminent release of the Kindle Development Kit (KDK), grayscale-only graphics notwithstanding. Add to that the news over the past month that Amazon is continuing investment in touch-screen hardware and color e-ink technologies, and you can foresee a strategic vision that has been in place for a while. I fully expect v.3 of Kindle to expand the capabilities that already exist with this device, while remaining, at its heart, an e-reader. The iPad just feels like an answer to a question that was answered elsewhere……there were, if you remember, MP3 players around for quite awhile before the iPod arrived.

I also have to side with Laila and Jon on this: if I watch a movie, I watch to see it on a big screen with “real” audio, not on a small screen in my lap with earbuds….

I’d think my mother would be delighted to have a iPad and feel like she’s finally involved in the new technological world.

That said, the iPhone was more limited until Apple opened up app development to outside parties, and before that people were skeptical that the iPhone would do as well as it has — that was certainly aided by the price drop as well as the app store. I’m going to hang back and see what happens with the iPad in the next year or two before pronouncing it completely useless.

- The desktop plugin, on all architectures, has a history of security problems. This requires frequent updates, and Adobe has not always played well with the Mac platform on this front.
- The Flash plugin is notoriously buggy, and is responsible for a staggering number of Firefox crashes on both Macs and PCs. Apple likely does not want its flagship products associated with this instability.
- It consumes a lot of processor power, which is at a premium on mobile devices — and thus battery power. As other posters have noted, this is already a concern.

While there are now a few mobile architectures where Flash is now supported, the rest of those problems remain. Additionally, some people have theorized that Apple is waiting for widespread adoption of HTML 5 as a replacement.

The iPad’s limitations and independent functions seem to be another piece of evidence to support Jonathan Zittrain’s argument against “tethered devices.”