A couple of interesting things occurred to me at work today. I was attending a regular weekly meeting and due to various issues, I had not been able to attend this meeting for one reason or another. That is what made today quite interesting.

You know how you don't see someone for a long time and when you do you notice everything different about them? Kids grow, people lose or gain weight that goes un-noticed if you are around them on a daily basis. Well, today I was in this meeting when I began to notice that I was no longer the odd man out with my iPhone. I began to see a visible change in the mobile devices strewn about the table. Some had only the iPhone and others had both the company issues BlackBerry laying next to their personal iPhone. Of course there were those BlackBerry only owners, but that number appeared to be dramatically declining. The iPhone was slowly creeping its way into the Enterprise one way or another.

Anyhow, I digress. The meeting finished up about 20 minutes early and several of us were killing time until our next meeting at the top of the hour. The topic on the lips of many these days came up. The iPad. It was a discussion around how those who had not seen the point of an iPad or Apple for that matter just weren't buying the hype or the reason for why this "tablet" would be any different than any other "tablet" released over the last 5 years. It was not a heated discussion mind you but it did highlight to me a very important point. No one knows.

I mean really knows. I have written previously on the one major way in which the iPad is different and it is that it is neither an iPhone, iPod touch or a Laptop. No there are no USB ports for transferring of files or anything else that puts it into direct competition with a NetBook or a Laptop. Again, the question was posed "So why is it so special?" Truth be told, there is no clear answer to that question. As a matter of fact, it could be said that no one fully understands the true purpose of the iPad. The only thing that can be clearly supported is its form factor and the value of the eReader functionality. Even that is unproven territory. Traditionalists will still want physical books, semi-techno-heads will still opt for the simplicity of the "one-trick-pony" eBook readers out there today.

I listened for a while before simply saying that anything hardware related will not define the iPad. What will define the iPad's popularity or value will be the simplistic platform Apple has designed, the creativity of development for the iPad and the distribution mechanism that Apple has also developed to deliver those applications to the iPad. Keep in mind that many of the debates between the Apple "Fans" and the Apple "Haters" occur in the Technology realm, I continued. To the average non-technical individual, the iPad will be everything they ever needed and then some.

[to be continued...]