iPad vs Netbooks

I've been thinking a lot about what Steve Jobs said during the roll out of the iPad. He said, "Everybody uses a laptop and/or a smart phone. And the question has arisen, lately, is there room for a device in the middle? We've questioned this for years ourselves, but the bar is pretty high. Some thought it would be the netbook. The problem is, netbooks aren't better at anything. They're slow, they're clunky. They're just cheap laptops." He then went on to extol the virtues of the iPad, saying that it is "way better than a laptop, way better than a smart phone".

I must admit that the iPad looks terrific, and I can't wait to get my hands on one, but after listening to Jobs et al for more than an hour, it occurred to me that there is very little that my netbook does that isn't better than the iPad. It's got a faster processor, it displays Flash on websites, it has a real keyboard, it can run any of the thousands of open-source applications available free from the Internet, it can attach to a printer, I can (and have) change the operating system, and so on. In fact, the only things that my netbook can't do as well as the iPad are battery life (Jobs claims ten hours for the iPad, my netbook only gets four), ability to show movies (my Linux netbook doesn't do that very well at all), and its weight (the iPad weighs eight ounces less than my netbook). The iPad can also connect wirelessly using 3G, and while my netbook doesn't do that, many do.

Any talk of the iPad is speculation, of course, since we won't get to try one for another month or two, but it does beg the question, is the iPad worth getting? It is drool-worthy, and very cool, in an Apple sort of way. Time will tell if the iPad is the game changer that Jobs claims it is, or just an iPod that nobody has a pocket big enough to fit it into. We'll know when (if) we see iPads popping out on street corners, in restaurants, on subways, and maybe even in schools.

But what if the iPad was so cool that students would never leave home without it? What if we could put every textbook a student would need in their high school career on it? What if students could use it to communicate with each other, and the teacher? What if it made students work harder, by encouraging them to turn it on and play around with it? What if lunch time found hundreds of students huddled into groups around campus collaborating wirelessly? What if it actually made students want to come to school?

It might be a game changer after all!