The iPad invasion will come

It happens that my laptop carked it this week just as I bought an iPad, so I can give Steve Jobs some feedback about his prediction on Wednesday in which he compared PCs to farm trucks.

In an onstage interview at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference in California, Jobs was asked by WSJ’s Walt Mossberg: “Is the tablet going to replace the laptop? Tell me what you think about where it's going?”

Jobs: “You know... (long pause). I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centres, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

Yes, well, Apple still has some work to do before the iPad can replace a laptop for me, but I can see how it will eventually get there. That work is crucial because I’m not going to carry three devices – iPhone, laptop and iPad.

At least two of these, preferably three, need to merge into one, and if the iPad can’t operate in the same way as a laptop, then it will be the niche product, not the PC. (By the way laptops now represent 80 per cent of all PC sales, with desktops only 20 per cent. In 2003 it was the other way around.)

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (whose market capitalisation was surpassed by Apple for the first time last week) appeared at the same conference yesterday and blithely defined the issue away: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” he boomed.

That is, iPads are PCs too – PCs will come in multiple flavours, some with keyboards, some without; some that fit into your pocket, some you have to carry.

Maybe so, but at this stage they are very different. My immediate problem is I’m forced to use the new iPad as a laptop for a week or two while my beloved Macbook Air is in the hospital having its sick screen seen to. And when it comes home, arms out for a hug, will Air have lost her place to the interloper? Possibly.

I bought a keyboard dock so I wouldn’t have to write by tapping on the screen, but lugging that awkwardly shaped, heavy metal keyboard around with the iPad kind of defeats the portability purpose. So, yes, I will have to get used to typing on a touchscreen, and so will everyone.

But leaving aside keyboard issues, as a laptop the iPad is severely limited – so far. The main problem is that it only opens one application at a time, and for someone used to toggling between Word, PDFs, internet browser and email client while writing articles, that is infuriating.

I guess there will eventually be a bigger range of decent word processing applications available for the iPad, but the ones I can find so far fall short. The biggest problem I’ve found is that you can’t copy and paste between different applications, so long quotes have to be typed out.

I haven’t tried to use it for spreadsheets or PowerPoint, but those who have tell me it’s impossible.

more information :-http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/iPad-Steve-Jobs-Apple-Mac-PC-Microsoft-pd20100604-63T34?OpenDocument&src=sph