As I was out of the game for a few days at the start of the week, I haven’t yet had a chance to look at anything to do with the Apple iPad. I’ve heard people talk about it, unless you have been living under a rock for the last week (and I pretty much nearly have) then you can’t miss all of the reaction to this new device……and I can honestly say that nothing I have heard has been positive in the slightest. This is a big change for an Apple device, which is usually met with the sort of mass hysteria you would expect would be reserved for the Second Coming.

Now as of yet, 2 days after the announcement (and with everyone talking about it, it feels like a week or so!) I have no idea about what the iPad is or what it does. Though my opinion is somewhat tainted by hearing all of this negative reaction, I am going to blog in real time my reactions as I visit some news sites and find out exactly what this new toy is all about.

Right, Yahoo News is the first port of call. My first reaction  is that its big….it looks, as people have said, like a large iPhone or iPod touch. The idea is for them to create a new “category”. Currently we have Smartphones, Netbooks and Laptops, with a little bit of a price gap between good netbooks and good laptops. This is where the iPad comes in it seems, defined as a “tablet”.

It sits perfectly in the middle – it is like a big iPhone, but you can’t make phone calls. The menu’s etc look like an iPhone, except bigger so it does not fit into your pocket. You can use all iPhone existing apps, however there is no multi-tasking yet so you can only use one app at a time.

One of the things that strikes me as being very strange is that in the USA there is a specified price for 2g and 3g iPads. This essentially means that you have to pay as much for a 3g iPad as a medium to decent laptop. THEN you’ll have to buy top-ups for data usage, though it will be unlocked for all networks on the 3g iPads.

Everything that you can do in an iPhone or iPod Touch you can do on an iPad, except it is bigger. I can see that anybody with no desire for an iPhone, or a portable music player, will be interested in one of these when they upgrade their laptops, and Steve Jobs himself has said that it will take a while before tablets catch on, as far away as 2015. At least he’s a realistic man.

As an iPhone user myself who also owns a laptop (a non-Apple laptop), I can honestly say I have no interest whatsoever in the iPad as anything it can do, my current devices do much better. I’m sure they’ll sell loads, and it will of course be seen as a fashion accessory because it is Apple, but I do not envisage this setting the world alight in the same way as the iPhone and iPod. Still, it shows some creativity and makes amazing business sense (literally CREATE yourself a new niche in the market) as Apple prove they are good at this time and time again.