The catalyst for e-books - Apple iPad (Source: Wired.com)

Apple’s at it again. After much speculation and the usual hype leading up to an Apple product launch, the iPad is finally here.

Unlike the immediate universal acclaim received by its predecessors the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s first foray into the realm of e-readers and tablets has merited quite the ambivalent response.

A number of people have asked me my thoughts on the iPad and what it may portend for the future of tech devices. In this post I weigh in on this curious, over-sized iPod and speculate who may be buying this sleek device that’s been gifted with a rather unfortunate name.

First, this thing is dead sexy. It gets my latent geek juices flowing. Hand it to Apple, they understand aesthetics and how important they are in purchasing decisions. They single-handedly emboldened an entire indie-hipster sub-genre best dubbed ‘geek chic.’ You can find these individuals at your local independent coffee house shotgunning espressos between penning brilliance in their Moleskine notebook and executing rapid-fire hotkey shortcuts on their MacBook.

My gut instinct on Apple’s latest endeavor is that, like its incipient moves into producing digital media players (iPod) and phones (iPhone), they’re going to open up the floor to other companies by showing them that, yes, you too can make money off these sorts of products. Numerous MP3 players and other devices preceded the iPod, but Apple cultivated attention by making the device attractive and integrating it with iTunes. And with the iPhone, Apple won the popularity contest by taking productivity apps out of the realm of Blackberries and putting them into the hands of casual users.

Now is this thing perfect? Far from it. The e-Book crowd won’t likely make the switch given the high price point ($499) and use of LCD rather than e-Ink technology. No one will be discarding their laptops any time soon, and certainly not their iPhones.

So who the heck is this thing for?

My guess: old people, the non-tech savvy, and interestingly enough, college students.

This would explain the rather tepid response of the tech world. It simply doesn’t appeal to them because it just adds another rather useless product category that serves only to duplicate the functions of a phone or notebook computer. However, for someone unfamiliar with these devices, it’s far easier to pick up a tablet and just point to where you’d like to go than haggle with a system boot or having the wherewithal to acclimatize to a device like the iPhone.

Steve Jobs confirmed my hunch when, during the press launch, he alluded to how easy it would be to “pick up the iPad in the kitchen,” access the web and order movie tickets. Sorry, but I try to spend as little time in the kitchen as possible, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, the graduate student. Speaking of which…

The benefit for college students is a little different. Students and scholars alike work almost exclusively from the PDF format. Readings are uploaded to library electronic reserves and nearly every peer-reviewed journal available is downloadable via PDF. Both my girlfriend and I put all the available eReaders on the market through a rigorous PDF trial and they all failed.

Miserably. To date, our only option has been to overheat our laser printer and get our readings bound by angry FedEx Kinko’s employees.

My hunch is that the iPad will fill this PDF gap given its ability to act as a surrogate laptop and a pseudo e-Reader through Apple’s new service, iBooks. If someone can capitalize on this market and ease the back pain of college students and in the process unload books, course packs, and hastily stapled printouts from messenger bags, they will make a killing.

So there you have it. The Apple iPad. For certain user groups it seems to have real appeal, but for others who work remotely from their laptops, it may just be redundant.

Then again, if they had called it the iSlate, I may have pre-ordered one based solely on the name. Oh well.