More iPad thinkings while Mrs H continues to feed her Brickbreaker habit. (It’s appalling. Her inner geek – who usually gets hung up on obscure passages of international Human Rights law – has found the one game on her ancient Blackberry and suddenly the cries ...]]> Stuff other people are also thinking…

More iPad thinkings while Mrs H continues to feed her Brickbreaker habit. (It’s appalling. Her inner geek – who usually gets hung up on obscure passages of international Human Rights law – has found the one game on her ancient Blackberry and suddenly the cries of fury and alarm are not about the passage of oppressive laws in Germany or actions of the British Government in relation to prisoners in Iraq, they’re about level 13 of son-of-pong… She wants me to tell you that she’s five hundred and ninety five thousandth-ish in the world league table…)

Basically, over the last few days I’ve heard more than a couple of people who simply don’t use computers in the way that I do stop and look at the iPad and say: “oh, I want one of those.” These are people who have never heard of xkcd, and who regard the mobile phone as a handy thing for making calls when they’re out and about, but would never consider getting one with a map function because they basically assume they wouldn’t be able to make it work. Likewise, they’re people who use email quite happily but have absolutely no interest in Twitter, or really in Facebook, and don’t generally buy things from Amazon. They’re not luddites. They’re just not into sailing the digital sea.

And yet the iPad is interesting to them. And the thing is that these are by definition people without laptops. They do not have computers of their own. They have phones because you can’t easily hold down a proper job in our world without one, and they use computers at work. They have enough disposable income to afford a laptop, but they don’t want one.

So while we, who love bits of sparkly kit, were sitting around thinking that the iPad is a bit in-betweenish, and would people really make room for a 3rd Device, and would we want one ourselves? and while Steve Jobs was saying that there is room for a 3rd Device in our lives, we may all have rather missed the point. The iPad doesn’t have to be a 3rd Device. It might be a device for people who don’t even have a smartphone (I know, weird, huh?) or who carry a Blackberry and switch it off when they’re not working.

Two other posts on this sort of topic which I read before writing this: Automatic Transmission (via @kulturhack) and Why The iPad Matters from the Book Oven Blog.

I now return you to your scheduled Sunday evening viewing.