After my last post on iPad, Mark Pesce commented that “Seems like you’re saying iPad is now what the TV used to be.” and in so many ways - I think he might be right on the mark.

TV used to be (and still pretty much is) a sit back medium. We throw ourselves on the couch, grab the remote and check out either what is on, or what we have recorded that might be suitable for how we’re feeling. Rarely, these days, is appointment viewing high on our agenda. We are looking to spend some time be talked at, watching, viewing and participating really only by offering our attention, but not our comment, intellect or viewpoint.

The iPad has been picked up by publishers, content producers and advertisers as heralding the ‘new format device’. Given that iPhone really did revolutionise the mobile handset market with a set of concepts and implementations never seen before, we tend to forget that the iPod was a very late entrant to the portable music market. The iPad isn’t the first tablet we’ve seen and I’d also argue that it isn’t necessarily the best, but it is the one from Apple and that logo itself makes it important, as the logo talks to our expectations about what we want, where we will go and what we will do. (For some alternatives, check out the Joo Joo, the WePad and the Courier.)

What seems to be happening in the take up of this device is that applications are being developed which are a throw-back to a Web 1.0 world (ok, maybe 1.5). Specifically, not the 2.0 world that many of us have come to love. It seems that in many ways, the iPad is being embraced as providing a lovely big screen on which we can consumer, but not participate.

Much of this is, admittedly, down the way in which applications are being developed for the device more than the iPad itself. Referenced previously by Jeff Jarvis in his excellent piece, the Time Magazine iPad App seems to be the most extreme version of this. It is essentially an eMagazine (PDF) with some extras like a link here and a video there, but we are not invited to participate in in any meaningful way. Unlike  the web version, we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in; we can blog about it. And for this, we can either pay nothing on the web (attention only) or $4.99 a week for the iPad version. But, as Jarvis says, the pictures are pretty.

Jarvis has gone as far as boxing back up his iPad and shipping it back to Apple (although he admits that he might go out and buy one if the apps become compelling enough), stating “I simply don’t see a good use for the machine and don’t want to spend $500 on something I’m not going to use.”

Cory Doctorow, living advocate of giving away his content online,finding and audience and making money out of being free, is even stronger in his comments. Over on BoingBoing, in a richly empassioned piece, he quotes

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

I have to say, I laughed when earlier in the article he quoted Danny O’Brien calling the iPad “the second coming of the CD-ROM revolution” (fortunately for those lucky enough not to know, O’Brien does go on to explain what the CD-ROM revolution was).

More importantly, we have in the iPad a great interactive device that, once we get over the initial ‘wow’ factor, has many of us scratching their heads about it. Why would we use it? What would we use it for? Where would it fit into our lives? Melissa provided a great link to a tag cloud that might show some intent for more than the couch.

In concluding, I have to acknowledge that Apple may well have a rabbit up their sleeves that I can’t imagine. In the case of iPod, we had music, but no way of managing it easily (until iTunes came along) or buying it with one click (until the iTunes Store arrived). The iPhone was a breathtakingly obvious device that no-one before Apple had really thought about so holistically.

Much of the iPad’s future success is going to be in the hands of developers choosing to find new and clever things to do with this device other than just have beautiful rich images on it.  Maybe the iPad isn’t another G5 Cube….