What appeals to me about a supersize iPod Touch - which is more or less what Apple brought into the world last week - are the possibilities of that lovely 9.7-inch touch screen.
The iPad at first blush seems ideal for the book-reading role Steve Jobs introduced through the iBooks program, which will connect to Apple's online bookstore. The five publishers that have signed on - Macmillan, HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Hachette - will be able to display their wares in full color on a medium that offers a reading experience closer to that of reading an actual book than any other ebook reader.
I can't help but wonder, though, whether we're coming to a fork in the road, a place where ebooks establish themselves as a separate category in need of a dedicated reader.
Even if I wanted a book to offer connections to everything available on the Internet, from YouTube videos to online gaming, my experience in reading countless books on digital devices is that backlit screens cause eye fatigue.
For its part, e-ink technology as found in Amazon's Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook is black and white and low definition, so that photographs and other images are rendered murkily at best. But because they're not backlit, Kindle and Nook make it possible to read for hours without eyestrain.
What to do? The next move is surelyAmazon's, which will have to counter with a color touch screen in some future iteration of the Kindle. But my guess is that we're more likely to see ebooks follow the route of e-ink as it develops into a more acceptable display than iPad, no matter how beautiful its rendering of text.
For quick reading and using the Net, the iPad should win countless admirers - I expect sales to be robust - but when the dust settles, serious readers who want to get lost in a long novel or study a major work of nonfiction need a display that's easy on the eyes.
Battery life is likewise an issue. Ten hours is excellent for a laptop, but the Kindle can operate for days and days, tapping its battery only when the screen is refreshed with a page-turn.
So here's the fork in the road: I can download beautifully formatted books with their original illustrations and see them in full-color on the iPad. Or I can download the same books on an e-ink device and view them in black and white on a darker screen, but with a technology that uses ambient light to allow long, focused reading. Will it be possible to achieve the iPad's display fidelity some day using color e-ink technologies? That has to be the hope of those who think backlit screens and lengthy texts make a poor match.
The iPad is beautiful, but it's not the optimum ebook device. But does it make a run at the other computing niche that Steve Jobs identified in his rollout of the product, the netbook? Apple is utterly dismissive of netbooks - Jobs regards them as underpowered - and the iPad, with a base model running $499 (lower than many had forecast) is introduced at a time when netbooks are becoming more expensive. With the introduction of iWorks for the iPad, Jobs offers the ability to edit spreadsheets and word processing documents as well as presentations, all with a robust Apple A4 processor to provide computing muscle.
But the onscreen keyboard that Jobs demonstrated, while suitable for writing quicke-mail messages, looks challenging for lengthy documents.
The iPad can be supplemented with a dedicated keyboard dock that supports the unit while you work, but now you're talking about lugging extra devices when you travel. That's not netbook competition.
No question the iPad is as lovely as we have long thought it would be, and the early adopters will snap these units up. But I don't see the niche that it fills, unless the gaming community latches on to that beautiful screen and robust processor. It could happen, even if many nongamers like me give this machine a miss.
Paul A. Gilster, the author of several books on technology, lives in Raleigh. Reach him at gilster@mindspring.com.
