‘Twas the Night Before iPad Posted on April 02, 2010 Post a comment

It’s Friday, April 2, and I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. Good things are in store tomorrow, delivered not by Santa in a red suit, but by Bill the delivery guy wearing brown. Tomorrow is iPad release day. And visions of digital sugarplums are dancing in my head.

I recently attended SXSW, and popped in on a panel discussion about the iPad. It was the day after Apple started taking pre-orders for the iPad. We learned that within the first 24 hours, close to 100,000 iPads had been reserved. (That figure is now just shy of a quarter million units, which is on par with pre-orders for the iPhone.) Even so, someone asked the question that was on everyone’s mind—how big will this thing be? Is it just a big-ass iPhone or a category-creating, seminal product?

I was surprised that the panelists didn’t unequivocally say, “It’s gonna be big.” Most of the panelists hedged their bets, saying that we would know after people got it in their hands.

Hmm. Well, I won’t be so shy. I say it’s going to be a game changer.

A month into development for an iPad app we will launch in the coming days, we see its potential and why this product is not going to be just another effin’ device to carry around. What makes this better? Content delivery. A rich, immersive experience is a possibility for all content on the iPad. This device will allow the users to take what they like best about books and magazines and take it up a notch with content they can’t get on a printed page. Imagine reading a recipe with a complicated technique that you find hard to follow. With a touch of the screen you can launch a how-to video right inside the recipe. Imagine reading a book and being able to watch scenes come to life, hear the author read passages, or unlock new story lines as you go along. Imagine browsing through a magazine and seeing a product that strikes a chord. Tap on the image and you can watch a virtual product tour, get all the information you want, and even buy it. All within a rich, consumer-controlled visual experience like you’ve come to know from printed pieces but never really got on the Web.

For many people, e-readers like the Kindle fell short because they haven’t been able to deliver an experience like you get from a book. It didn’t feel the same, smell the same, or reward them in the same way as a book did. The iPad won’t replicate the book experience either, but it will redefine it. It will give us a completely new and rewarding experience that is rich and exciting and deep.

As marketers, the iPad will give us new abilities to engage with people. It will also put new pressures on content creation and the budgets required to develop it. But that’s a blog post for another day. Right now, I have a new toy to dream about. I can’t wait.