The iPad is not an oversized iPhone that you cannot make calls on

Firstly I see an increasingly large number of people using third party VOIP apps to use them to make calls, it may not be as good an experience as the native iOS phone interface but it works.  So that just makes them oversized iPhone, right?

No, there is something intrinsically different about the iPad, just look at how people use them. The only physical difference in terms of things that the iPad has and iPhone does not is screen real estate, yet I am seeing for the typical user that change, and in many cases fundamentally the way the typical users uses the device. This week is CES which is awash with tablet devices and if you get the screen size and resolution right I think what is true for iPad will be true for them.

So what does the bigger screen give you?  Well obviously it gives you space, space where information can be visualised.  I have very good eyesight, the technology on the display on the iPhone 4 is fantastic but give me the same information scaled up on an iPad and it becomes much more accessible to me, especially as the UI is based on my stubby fingers.

Now the screen on an iPad is only a bit smaller than the screen on my workhorse laptop a Lenovo x61 so it would be reasonable to assume that they kinds of information I access on both would be pretty much the same, and it is. Mail, web pages, office documents and presentations are all equally accessible on both.  The difference is with the exception of  web pages is where theses things come from.  On my laptop most of it comes from the hard disk, on the iPad the majority comes from the cloud.  I even use applications on the iPad to render information that I would have previously accessed as HTML is new interactive formats, so to an extent, but I can only see it increasing, the way I access web pages has changed on the device.

The iPad and the tablets that follow it are changing the IT industry and this reliance on the cloud is a key factor in how it is doing it. Be it store and share repositories, thin information visualisation widgets and readers or VDI clients they have all been given a new lease of life by an iPhone with a bigger screen that does not make calls!