The revolutionary internet device has been released and the better part of the tech world said “meh”. Unfortunately the hype surrounding the iPad made living up to said hype as improbable as Bigfoot actually speaking the queen’s english and inviting everyone over for scones. The reality is that Apple’s last few revolutionary devices were just that, revolutionary. The iPod was not the first harddrive based MP3 player on the market but the way one could interact with it (click wheel) was revolutionary. The iPhone with its iPod/phone integration was amazing. The apps made it groundbreaking, but even here iPhone wasn’t the first. Windows Mobile has had hundreds of thousands of apps available for its platform BUT it never had an easy way of finding all of them (i.e. App Store).

As for the iPad I am afraid it had some serious competition it had to face, its own family of products. Since the iPad was not on a custom OS and built using the same software as the iPhone/iPod touch it ended up seeming like a very large iPhone (that doesn’t make calls). The iPad offered users the ability to work on iWorks with Keynote and Pages but without the true power of a laptop some of the Keynote presentations could get laggy on the tiny 1 Ghz chip it is running. Even there the hardware though beautiful seems like it missed some key features.

If it was a true “pad” I should be able to just turn it on and just write onto it like a piece of paper and maybe do some handwriting recognition. That would have been revolutionary! Oh wait… no not really… that functionality was in Windows Mobile phones since the days of the HP Jornada and Windows CE. It was also in a previous Apple product, anyone remember the Newton, anyone, anyone? Plus a device like this would be awesome for video webconferencing and “couch computing” since it is more “intimate than a laptop” but Uncle Steve I guess decided he didn’t want to put the camera in. Maybe on version 2.0

I think the problem for the iPad was the enormous amount of speculation. People were researching patents that were submitted from a company called “Fingerworks” which was acquired by Apple. That company had some amazing gesture based patents in their filings, but Apple decided not to use it or decided to shelf it till they could work it in.

Now there are rumors of a second version of the iPad and there is no surprise there. I know that Jobs has a pattern of releasing something awesome and then soon after releasing an update that gives the proverbial kick to those early adopters.

Will I get an iPad… Maybe… Will I get in the boat and buy this 1.0 version? Probably not.