All Eyes On The iPad

Though we hesitate to add to the deluge of commentary about Apple’s forthcoming iPad, there are a couple of quick points that feel like they need to be thrown into the mix sooner rather than later. First, we want to gently remind those hyperventilating commentators of the old saying, “anything is possible when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” That is to say, when you’re commenting on a device that’s not yet actually in public hands or fully realized, it’s okay to have fun speculating, but, you know, take a deep breath before drawing those firm conclusions.

So… Yes, we like the look of the thing. A lot. But two immediate concerns trouble our sleep:

1. The Return Of The Walled Garden. The device fairly well screams “paid content” and that’s understandable. But swell as the platform must seem to those with something to sell, walled gardens (AOL, anyone?) require us to give up much of what made us come online in the first place–the open-ended internet with its browser uncontrolled by anyone but the end user. As one of our team members put it, “It’s with a bittersweet sense of awe that I look on the iPad, in the same way one might be impressed with the technology of a Blackhawk helicopter, but terrified of what it means when used as designed.”

2. Flash appears to be MIA. We didn’t get caught up in the Apple-Flash fracas when it was restricted to the iPhone/iPod Touch, since those small screens are ultimately meant for snacking on the web. But when Mr. Jobs calls the iPad “the best way to experience the web” and then shows a demo clearly lacking Flash support, it feels like we’ve dropped into some alternative universe. Whatever your feelings about Flash on the web, the reality of it is that millions of sites, and some 75% of online video, rely on it. No flash = no Disney, Hulu, Farmville, ESPN, etc. And, as our friend Ian Shafer points out, online ads are “almost 100% rendered in Adobe’s Flash.”

Something’s gotta give, right? The idea of going back to the bad old days of having to build out every digital asset six times to get them to work on various and sundry proprietary platforms is in no way appealing, not to the marketers and creators that have to pay for it, the agencies and studios that are always expected to do more for less, or the consumers who expect their goodies to work whenever and wherever.

Okay, deep breath. It’s early days. Much remains to be seen. Perhaps David Pogue said it best in his New York Times blog when he described the iPad as “a 1.5 pound sack of potential.”

We’ll have more on this as the story develops.